How to select the right Content Marketing Agency for your business

Content Marketing has been around for years, but previously, the types of businesses that implemented it tended to be large businesses with vast in-house content creation and marketing resources.  The internet, like so many other things, has changed this and today, businesses of all shapes and sizes can take advantage of the opportunities that content marketing provide.

So, what are the opportunities and how does a business select the best content marketing agency for them?  Let's start with the opportunities.  What are the benefits of content marketing for businesses:

• Thought leadership articles can be created directly from your brand.
• Brands can create rich, engaging content for both existing customers and new prospects
• Create content that can be utilized and shared on social media platforms
• Drive new business leads from building relationships with new prospects

Should businesses manage their content marketing strategies themselves?

This is a question that businesses often ask.  Many businesses have the ability to create on-going content, usually driven by their marketing and PR teams.  In addition, some businesses have vast pools of pre-written content that may already be used in offline marketing.  These include sales brochures, how to guides, manuals and promotional videos.  

While having the availability of content is a big head start, the marketing of this content - or the distribution of this content is what really makes the difference between businesses having either a 'Content" strategy or a 'Content Marketing' strategy.  There's clearly a big difference between the two!  The marketing and distribution of a business' content can be defined as the process that makes content created for a specific target audience or persona, visible to that audience.

This is where a Content Marketing Agency can help.  A good Content Marketing Agency in today's digital marketing world, will have its roots within digital marketing in order to be able to leverage technology to target and distribute the content effectively.  

So how do businesses select the right content marketing agency:

• Does the Agency have a content team that have the ability to source new content or curate or re-purpose existing content?
• Does the Agency have skilled and experienced social media professionals?  We're not talking about those who can make Facebook posts pr the occasional tweet, but those who are skilled and highly proficient with analysing the effectiveness of each social media post and those highly experienced in prospect targeting via social networks and search engines.
• Does the Agency have experienced SEOs or a full SEO team?  A huge by-product of an effective content marketing strategy is the visibility that businesses will receive on search engines such as Google.  A well thought-out piece of content will include SEO research before a word is even written so that the agency can predict the potential effectiveness of the content on search engines.
• Does the Agency have the technical skills available to publish your content in the best way?  Good content needs a good home!  Therefore, always ensure that your content marketing agency has the ability to create landing pages, microsites or whatever else is required to create a great home for your business' content
• Does the Agency have affiliations with inbound marketing platforms such as Hubspot, Eloqua or Marketo?  For content marketing to be effective, it's absolutely vital that your business uses platforms such as these to track and manage content, track contacts and website visitors that interact with your business in order to drive the lead generation process.
• Does the Agency have a real understanding of the sales process and how to generate leads through content marketing?  This is vital for most B2B businesses that have longer sales cycles than B2C businesses.

While this list is by no means definitive, it will help most businesses make the right choice when embarking on a content marketing process.

CONCLUSION:

Choosing a Content Marketing Agency for your business is an important process.  Make sure you understand (a) the benefits of content marketing for your business and (b) the outcomes that you expect from adopting this strategy for your business.  Also ensure that your shortlist of agencies have the creative, technical and content distribution capabilities required to make this a successful exercise for your business.

About Nexa

Established in 2005, Nexa is a digitally driven Content Marketing Agency based in Dubai, UAE.  With 50 in-house digital marketing specialialists, we provide Content Creation, Content Distribution, SEO and Web Services from Blog Creation to Landing Page Development.  Nexa is a Hubspot Partner.