In selecting a content marketing agency, several systems affect the quality of the service your business receives and the ROI you get on your marketing investment.
Content creation, quality controls on your content, expert integrated marketing on multiple sales channels all provide essential parts of the service a content marketing agency provides.
The following questions give you a basis for selecting and reviewing a marketing agency’s content creation and promotion for your business.
Who Does the Content Creation and Marketing?
An agency is always a team. Working with a content marketing agency means you will be working with a team and you need to take time to understand their dynamics. What parts of your marketing will be outsourced to others, if any?
Which member of the team will be creating content for your business? Do they work well with you and understand your business processes and product? If the agency outsources some of the content creation, who controls final decision-making on the outsourcing process?
After asking these questions, you have the resources to make a decision as to whether the individuals and team involved in creating content for your business are experienced, are a good fit for you, and are able to provide excellent and timely service.
What Quality Controls Are There?
No matter the method for creating content, there needs to be quality controls to ensure that you are getting the best quality content. Many people think of quality controls as being editors and publishers but in the modern technological world much of the quality controls actually come from software used.
3rd party tools like Grammarly give writers an instant editor’s view on their writing, while automated notifications of new content give you the ability to instantly assess the quality of a piece and ask for reviews before it goes public.
Remember to take time to understand the quality processes internally among an agency and also ascertain how they will work with you as their customer.
How Does Your Marketing Agency Integrate Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is the ability to put content in a place where potential customers go naturally and use that content to create a sales funnel that brings the customers into your business, pre-qualifies them, and gives them the tools to make the buying decision. Outbound marketing is traditional sales and advertising combined together. You reach out to the market with advertisements and follow up with sales or other marketing.
Did you know that a great content marketing agency is able to work with you to provide content which complements your outbound and sales teams while providing additional lead management through inbound marketing campaigns.
What Is The Agency’s Marketing Experience?
In the world of content creation, website design, and inbound marketing campaigns, experience is measured not in years spent working but in successful products on the market. A content marketing agency should have successful businesses under their portfolio, you are not obligated to try someone out who does not already have a great track record.
If you are preparing for significant content marketing, find out if any of their previous customers are willing to answer a few questions. Ask them about the process of content marketing, the results they got, and how they track them. This will give you the resources to truly understand how you are going to interact with your content marketing team.
As you can see, content marketing is focused on building relationships: the relationships between your business and your leads, the relationships between your team members, and relationships with the general public.
Choosing the right agency that can seamlessly help your organisation is critical for your online success.
Further Reading
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