It is hard to overstate the importance of content marketing. B2B customers expect high-quality content as part of your company’s service offering. It’s a key component in lead generation, creates brand awareness, and is crucial for nurturing relationships and building trust and consumer loyalty.

With so many jobs to do, it is no wonder that content marketing can be complex and resource intensive. Dig into any digital marketing strategy and you soon realise there’s more to it than just publishing a few articles on your company blog.

That’s where partnering with a content marketing agency can help. They can assist across a broad range of content services, helping you clarify your strategy, manage the creation process, make sure the right people find your content and that it has impact.

Most people want to dive straight into content production, but you need a content marketing strategy and process first. Without them, you’re likely to struggle.

How many times have you seen the pattern of a promising start stuttering to a halt after a few articles or a couple of weeks of social media post?

This happens for several reasons. You might lack clarity on what you want to say, or your team might lack the skills or resources to fulfil your aims.

Most businesses benefit from a blend of social media marketing, email, and blogging, and your digital strategy needs content that will speak to your customers at every stage of the customer journey. A content marketing agency will help you establish your goals and a strategy for reaching them.

They will find out about your company, research your position within the marketplace, and learn about your customers. Keyword research and competitor analysis will also inform your strategy and ensure the content you post finds and appeals to your target audience.

An agency will also work with you to audit your existing content and identify key marketing messages, topic pillars, content gaps, and content to repurpose. 

Finally, they’ll make sure that their recommended strategy is sustainable for the level of resource you’re able to allocate to your marketing budget.

2. Managing the Content Creation Process

Once you’ve established what you want to publish and why, it's time to organise your content marketing workflow. This step is crucial, especially when internal and external teams need to work together.

Because they will have worked with a range of clients, you can tap into an agency’s experience of workflows that get the job done. They’ll make the effort to understand your needs, make recommendations, and help you to get the content machine humming along efficiently. 

From creative ideation, to briefing effectively to get the best results in the least time possible, to managing the revisions and approvals process, they’ve seen and done it all before. They even have tools to help you visualise publishing patterns, frequency, and progress across multiple channels.

3. Accessing Creative Talent

Content marketing can be demanding, both in terms of the time and the skills needed to produce a constant stream of high-quality, creative content. It can easily overwhelm larger marketing teams, let alone small ones.

A marketing agency can work closely with your existing team or step into a resource or skills gap, creating strategies and content on your behalf.

They’ll have ready access to a pool of creative talent, from content strategists to writers, graphic designers, video production, SEO specialists and more. 

Partnering with an agency not only gives you access to their in-house team. They will also have a network of vetted and trusted contractors at their fingertips, so they can connect you with exactly the right talent to fulfil your vision. 

4. Consistent Content Creation

With a strategy, robust processes and the right talent in place, we turn our attention to creating the content itself. Even when all the pieces of this puzzle fit neatly together, content can still fall short if it is poor produced, off brand or riddled with errors.

Whether you’re interested in producing blog posts, thought leadership, case studies, white papers or infographics, a professional service will be invested in delivering content that hits the mark. They will create, edit, and publish content that both builds your brand and is relevant to your audience.

It's important that you not only create new content regularly, but that you also update that which is already posted. Consider this scenario: you posted a piece a year ago that continues to drive substantial traffic to your website. If you allow this content to become outdated, visitors will dismiss it and may be more likely to bypass your website altogether in favour of one with more relevant content.

5. Ensuring Visibility

Creation is only half the battle. You need the right people to find your content in the first place for it to be effective and it’s not just your human audience your content needs to please.

Search engines and social media algorithms love fresh, great content too. Producing a steady stream of high-quality posts that provide value for your audience is crucial to the way Google ranks your website and platforms like LinkedIn promotes content.

This means optimising your content so your customers can find it in searches and be engaging enough to arrest a scrolling reader when it does.

This is where content marketing services really shine. They have the knowledge and experience to optimise your content. If you tried to do this in-house, you would have to digest and put into practice a great deal of information - a process that requires significant time.

A professional service can help you achieve this by harnessing: 

• Keyword research

• User behaviour analyses

• SEO best practices

• Social media optimisation

In addition, we often think of optimisation as a task that needs attention once and which can then be crossed off the to-do list. But in terms of content marketing, it needs to be viewed as an ongoing process. You can work with a content marketing agency to review and renew your content as needed.

6. Content Automation, Amplification and Promotion

Besides your overarching content strategy, you also need a plan to promote the posts you create. The purpose is to get content in front of the right audience at the right time. A content marketing service eschews the "if we build it, they will come" mentality and understands you can only make progress when you focus on how your content gets distributed.

There's no shortage of online distribution outlets, but an agency will help you identify which channels are most important for your audience.

The most common channels include social media and email, but analysis may uncover alternative platforms like text. This saves both time and money and should start with a review of your current distribution channels. 

It's equally important to understand how your competitors promote their own content. An effective content service provider will also help develop your messages so they resonate with industry influencers. These people and/or brands have large audiences already established and often seek content they can share. Making connections like these can instantly expand your reach and elevate your brand's credibility.

If you partner with an agency that has experience in marketing automation and paid promotion, they will have tools to make your content work harder. They can advise on automated workflows and retargeting that use your existing content to nurture relationships and create a compelling customer experience. You can also harness the power of technology to increase the ROI on each piece of content your produce by using AI powered platforms to create a year’s worth of social content from a single blog post.

7. Measuring Performance

Content is ultimately effective or not, and the only way to know this is with statistical reporting that shows:

1.    How well your content performs

2.    The ways it contributes to customer opportunities, conversions, and sales

To deliver actionable data in a multi-channel marketing environment, reporting will ideally integrate statistics across your online platform, from website to email to social and advertising. With this level of data, you can see what's working and what's not and quickly implement changes.

Content marketing requires a long-term commitment. Posting a blog or two and then throwing in the towel doesn't deliver results. Consistent, strategic and targeted campaigns can completely change your position in the marketplace. To find out how we can help to develop your content marketing strategy, contact 1827 Marketing today.