On-demand media has given consumers control over their marketing experience and avoiding irrelevant and irritating messaging is easier than ever. Marketers trying to reach target audiences need more compelling reasons for consumers to engage with them. As a result, content marketing services are becoming an increasingly important investment for most B2B and B2C companies.
Through quality content development, businesses can apply many of the principles of value-based selling to website marketing strategies. The idea is that you sell your product and your brand by providing immediate and ongoing benefits to your prospects. Content marketing is solutions-oriented, and content marketing managers can utilize product marketing tactics to influence consumers:
- Identify a significant pain point.
- Magnify the pain.
- Provide solutions to the problem.
Content marketing is becoming the face of modern marketing, where customers pursue brands instead of brands pursuing customers. A successful content marketing strategy nurtures more stable followings and customer loyalty by valuing the consumer’s attention.
Due to its growing influence and subsequent complexity, managing a continuous content marketing strategy in-house creates numerous challenges. Working with a B2B content marketing agency has become a popular direction for businesses struggling with implementing their own plan.
Content marketing agencies work to not only create relevant content but also track efforts to continually improve their approach. To understand how content marketing professionals benefit businesses, let’s look at what content marketing is and why it is so essential.
What Is Content Marketing?
What Is Content Marketing?Most marketing efforts are pretty obvious to the average consumer as they usually feature an easily identifiable pitch. Content marketing takes a more restrained approach that focuses on delivering value to attract a target audience. Value, in this case, comes in the form of relevant content supplied on a recurring basis.
Content is commonly written material, such as blogs, but can also include videos and graphics. Any kind of consumable resource that contains important, usable information can be considered content. With this content, businesses seek to build brand awareness, bring traffic to their website and earn customers.
The strategy is a long-term method of building more foundationally sound relationships with customers. There are no hard pitches to buy products. Content marketing focuses on instilling trust, loyalty and deep regard and appreciation for the brand.
Why Content Marketing is Important
Content marketing captures valuable consumers in a way that traditional marketing cannot. If you only have a purchase portal and social media accounts to advertise products, you miss substantial traffic opportunities.
Organic search is not only heavily used but also widely trusted. Consumers believe that Google gives them the most worthwhile results or solutions to their searches. Paid ads may show up first, but users find that organic results truly earn their placement. This is one reason that SEO packages are almost a requirement for a worthy content marketer.
Content can bolster your search and social media presence. You give users a reason to click and engage with your brand. They get immediate value that they do not question because there is no apparent sales pitch. Content subsequently becomes a major lead generation source for your business.
When you create a catalog of content, search engines find you more reputable. Plus, the content continues paying dividends without further effort. It lasts permanently online for new users to happen across as they search for help with their problems.
What Are the Costs of Hiring a Marketing Agency?
What Are the Costs of Hiring a Marketing Agency?Marketing agencies seem like a cost-prohibitive luxury to many small businesses. In truth, most agencies customize their offerings to be more inclusive. Depending on your needs and budget, agencies will tailor their services to make them viable. Many businesses end up finding that the costs of hiring a marketing agency are surprisingly low.
If you want to work with a basic blog marketing agency, you may be able to get monthly costs below $100 for recurring posts. Full-service creative marketing agencies get more expensive, but you will benefit from additional market research and performance tracking.
7 Reasons to use Content Marketing Agencies
Content marketing can be inexpensive, but it is also exhaustive. Maintaining an ongoing schedule of content releases is time-consuming, both when researching and creating content.
Without a dedicated marketing department, you will need to work with a marketing agency to some degree. Even with a marketing department, implementing a content marketing strategy from scratch will still likely require outside assistance. In fact, there are several reasons why even the best marketing teams should leverage content or brand marketing agencies.
Expert Input
Content marketing agencies specialize in identifying content opportunities, content development and execution across strategic channels. When you work with an agency, they have the comprehensive expertise to hit the ground running.
Cost Reductions
Outsourcing may seem expensive, but the time savings alone can amount to substantially higher ROI. Content strategy requires dedicated personnel, and doing so in-house means added salaries, benefits and operating costs. It also means less flexibility if you need to downgrade your content strategy.
Content marketing agencies can adjust offerings on the fly to meet changing needs. Clients also often have additional benefits by getting partner discounts. Agencies may work with leading marketing software providers to get you their tools at a fraction of the cost.
New Ideas
It is easy to get caught in groupthink or narrow views when all the ideas come from within. Content marketing agencies can bring new perspectives on strategy from their various unique experiences finding success with clients. They can help improve on existing ideas or present brand new directions that may have previously been completely unconsidered.
Stay on Top of Marketing Trends
Digital marketing and content advertising evolve at a rapid-fire pace. For the average business leader, keeping up with changing trends can be nearly impossible. Without support, you may be late to emergent opportunities and subsequent chances for lead generation. Content marketing companies keep up with trends and technologies to ensure their clients get the best marketing experience.
Tailored Marketing Strategies
Content marketing is not a one size fits all discipline. Businesses need to apply the same level of market research as they do with any marketing venture. From there, the channels and styles of content the release will be specific to their brand and target audience.
Content marketing agencies take that personal perspective with their clients, creating customized marketing strategies. They take time to understand goals and capabilities, discover possibilities and formulate a fresh plan for every brand.
Time Savings
Content can be done on your own. But, it takes a lot of time to produce content and start seeing returns. It is easy to get burned out devoting hours each day to writing a blog post or producing a video. In a lot of cases, content strategies are scrapped because the return does not seem worth the effort.
Marketing agencies give you that time back. They research, create and publish the content so that you can focus on your business. Over time, you will start to see your brand become more established and authoritative.
Sales Support
Sales enablement is a huge initiative for businesses trying to supply value via their sales team. Having updated, relevant and attractive content helps them do their job in gaining the trust of their clients. Content marketing agencies can work with salespeople to take feedback and provide support, making them more reliable and effective.
What Are the Benefits of Content Marketing?
It can take a while for content marketing strategies to start showing measurable returns. It takes endurance to continuously create the fresh content that search engines need and users demand. However, with a well-researched strategy in place, you can start to see numerous benefits in content marketing.
Broadens Your Reach
Organic search accounts for 53 percent of all website traffic. Building content that shows up in results can give a huge boost to your monthly visitors. With regular content, you create more and more opportunities for search engines to list your website in results.
An excellent feature of organic search is that the results are highly trusted and it is inexpensive. SEO practices are free, and with technical know-how, you can finesse search engines to rank content higher in SERPs.
This can be amazing for your reach. Direct traffic to your website from URL input, social media clicks or paid advertisements that require interaction with your brand. Organic traffic, however, can get users who had no previous knowledge of your business. They may not have shown any prior interest in your industry or had any intention of buying. But you had an answer to their question, and now you can start to build the relationship.
Expands Brand Awareness
Being able to expand your reach through organic search and social media is a major driver of brand awareness. Customers do not have to actively seek you out or be part of your particular network to learn about you. With high-ranking content that users will see and potentially click, you can teach them more about your brand.
Content allows you to pick the audiences efficiently. For example, keywords can be tailored to match particular search terms so that your page ranks higher in SERPs. You can choose your keywords carefully to reach broader audiences and expand your brand awareness. Writing blogs about general topics or subjects important to your values could reach a wider range of consumers.
Develops Customer Trust and Brand Authority
Content is great because all of the value is pointed in one direction — toward the user. There may be a call-to-action, but the point is to provide real value to the consumer. When you make quality content that can be used to accomplish their goals, consumers will trust you. They will become more loyal to your brand because they appreciate your authority.
Authority can be affected by smart marketing as well. Being the best and most knowledgeable comes second to being accessible. By nature, organic search results are trusted by users as the best answer to their query. Advertising content is easily filtered out but top organic results are automatically associated with backed authority. With proper SEO, you can bump your rankings, and subsequently boost your perceived expertise.
Generates Leads at a Low Cost
When you pay for content once, you keep it forever. Ad campaigns may come and go in response to changing markets but quality content remains a timeless resource. Outside of a few updates, the content will continue to draw users without any additional efforts.
Your content can be the key to your social media marketing as well. Generating quality leads may be as simple as dipping into your well of content in a timely post. The possibilities to recycle content for more traffic make it extremely cost-effective over time.
The implications for cost savings extend to how you partner with marketers to accomplish your goals. With content, you may be able to bring that workload in-house or manage it through your content marketing agency.
Improves the Customer Experience
Content is not strictly for lead generation but also for fostering healthy, long-term relationships. By providing more accessible information, you become an intuitive hub to answer questions and resolve problems.
If you have an established blog, you can make it part of an email campaign or newsletter. If you offer a service, you could have sections devoted to DIY information or help with common issues.
Working with a dedicated content advertising team can generate huge long-term successes and advance your brand. The Selling Revolution is a sales and marketing firm dedicated to pursuing your definition of success. We customize strategies to drive immediate results and establish positive practices for ongoing improvement. If you want to boost your business through informed marketing and sales strategies, book a call today.