Content Marketing Agency: Complete Checklist To Hire The Best In 2021

upqode | Jul 19th, 2021

If you’ve noted that your online marketing strategy isn’t bringing results, it’s time to consider hiring an agency. However, choosing the right B2B content marketing agency for your business is difficult. This is because there are many agencies with differing approaches to marketing.

Establishing what you expect the marketing agency to do for you is equally tricky. It’s, therefore, a decision that needs investing a lot of time and research.

A digital marketing agency is an all-in-one solution as it takes care of everything from strategy to implementation. It gives your business an edge over others. Here’s everything you need to know about hiring a content marketing agency in 2021.

Features Of A Perfect Marketing Agency

The truth is that not all marketing agencies perform a good job. You need to know what to look for in a marketing agency to tell whether they will help you meet your business goals.

So what is a reliable marketing agency made of?

  • It knows your business details and its specific needs
  • It’s ready to discuss with you tons of things about your business
  • It’s ready to share with you its plans, strategies, and approaches. They are also ready to listen to your views on the same.

Having understood this, here are 13 things to consider before hiring a content marketing agency.

Clearly Define The Goals You Want To Achieve

The first step in hiring a content marketing agency for your business is coming up with a list of your needs. You should always set smart goals for your company before hiring an agency.

Doing so lets you establish what you want help with right from the start and whether a given agency suits your needs. Additionally, setting the right goals makes it easy to achieve the desired results quickly.

content marketing agency

Some of your digital marketing goals could be for your business to increase sales, sign-ups, lead magnet downloads, or backlinks. Defining these goals should never be underestimated before proceeding to the next marketing step.

Understand The Client Services The Agency Offers

Understanding what services your preferred agency offers goes a long way in growing your business. It’s important to be wise when selecting the right agency so that all the services you’re looking for are available. Some of these services include SEO, CRM, content marketing, web design, and email marketing.

As a rule of thumb, it’s advisable to see to it that the agency can manage your SEO and content marketing. In this context, a bigger agency has the resources and personnel to perform these functions. Take care when choosing a smaller agency as it may have limited resources for these services.

Also, check the portfolio to ensure that the agency has worked with all sizes of companies. A mix of small, medium, and large companies means that your brand has chances of future 

In most cases, you’ll find those good marketing agencies are on the pricey side. But with a predetermined budget, you can get good digital marketing services. Usually, your budget and growth.

The Budget You’ve Set Aside Matters the agency’s budget should be on the same page.

Most importantly, evaluate that your budget gives the perceived value. If not, it’s always great to go for a better offer. You should primarily choose an agency that focuses on the value they offer before the budget. That is an indicator of quality over everything else.

To better understand this, start by requesting the agency to explain how they price their offerings. Doing so lets you analyze the agency’s priority and establish your financial capability. Keep in mind that your budget should be within your expectations and financial plans.

Since an agency helps you meet more goals than doing digital marketing on your own, investing in it is valuable. Research, product ideas, and new knowledge are some of the benefits of hiring an agency.

The Digital Marketing Expertise Portrayed

The sole reason for hiring a content marketing agency is because your basic online marketing never yielded results. Therefore, you need tons of digital marketing expertise to stand out from the crowd.

You’ll require a mobile site, a website, email marketing, advertising, among other aspects to have a successful marketing campaign.

 Ensure that your agency of choice has the digital technology needed to offer the services you want. If it’s for hosting, outbound and inbound marketing, SEO, PPC, business listings, and social media, ensure that the agency has the appropriate expertise and technology for that.

Research on the level of expertise your agency portrays to make an informed decision. An agency that combines traditional marketing and digital marketing scores top for your content marketing needs.

The Agency’s Industry Experience

It doesn’t make sense to hire a content marketing agency in a different niche from your business. It takes time teaching the agency about your line of business and this is not what you want.

Choosing an agency with a better industry experience goes a long way in meeting your content marketing goals. The more experienced the agency is, the better it understands the industry processes. It understands barriers to entry, supplier and buyer behaviors, and customer details.

In addition to this, an agency with your industry experience positions your brand well in the digital space. This way, you meet your target audience effectively. 

google ads

As a rule of thumb, you should research the past experiences of other business owners in your niche. You can do this by checking what they are saying about the agency on Yelp, Google, and LinkedIn

yelp

Getting this feedback makes it easy to gauge the agency’s experience in the industry in question.

Which Strategy Will The Agency Apply

Hiring a content marketing agency can benefit your business. Even then, it’s wise to understand the strategies the agency plans on improving your business. 

Before forging ahead, ask the agency what strategy they want to apply for the project. Don’t forget to put your goals into the picture as it helps establish the best strategic plan for the agency to use.

The first thing the agency will do when coming up with the right strategy for your business is to learn the ins and outs of your business. After understanding the current performance, environment, and goals, the agency can assess how to stay ahead of the competition through online marketing.

Also, understand whether the agency ever applied the same strategy for another company and what the results were.

Analyze The Marketing Tactics To Be Used

To hire a resourceful content marketing agency, it’s of utmost importance to analyze the kind of marketing to be used.

For instance, they could use content marketing, which includes creating and sharing online content such as downloads, blogs, videos, and infographics. Make sure that the agency has the capacity and the resources to do this.

The other option to consider is video marketing. Of course, an agency will uphold this task if you’re going out of your way to pay top dollar for it. Video marketing is powerful as it exposes your brand to wider audiences hence increasing your conversion rates.

Last but not least, you should assess the type of PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising your agency will use. Pay per click is a type of advertising involving paying for every click on your ad.

databox

Web traffic analytics courtesy databox

The results depend on the type that your agency decides to use. You can either choose Google AdWords, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, to name a few.

Remember, PPC is more complex and hence expensive than SEO. Therefore, you should seek professional advice on the best type to use for your business.

Check The Agency’s Testimonials

Working with an agency with a proven track record clears all the doubts for you. But is it easy to tell whether a certain agency is good at its work?

You can always ask for proof of what the agency promises to deliver. You could even reach out to past clients and get their experience with the agency.

Furthermore, you can ask for past samples to confirm their legitimacy. Go ahead and peruse their portfolio to see if it matches what they are promising.

digital marketing agency

Such approaches help you to look at how the agency approaches its content marketing. This way, you can make the best decision on what it is that you want to settle with.

Check Whether The Agency Uses Social Media

One of the major components of a business is its social media presence. Remember, this is where current and potential customers hang out, and leveraging its use could mean more business for you.

With that in mind, your brand should maintain an active SMM engagement if you want to obtain social media benefits.

But how best can you do this? Have your content marketing agency do the social media management for you. However, before that, you need to ask how their social media approach is and how they plan to engage your audience.

Remember, it’s not all about posting but knowing what to post. A good agency should provide a solution for keeping your social media profiles active and results-driven. This way, more customers will come your way. Of course, this equals more business for you.

Consider What The Agency Thinks About The User Experience

Your business’s website should portray a high user experience for your customers to navigate easily. This is one of the things you want your content marketing agency to prioritize. But how do they do this?

First off, they should portray an impressive user experience from their end. Establish that they have a great website that’s optimized for mobile screens.

The SEO and the blog section should assure you that you’re making a fantastic choice in investing in the agency.

Remember, if their site is easy to navigate, you can be sure it’s a reliable agency as it will also apply the same features successfully on your site.

Establish The SEO Approach The Agency Uses

Your primary goal is to be found by as many customers as possible. As a result, your SEO approach matters a lot.

Always settle for an agency that does the right SEO services and approaches to rank you higher in search engines. This way, you expose your company to organic rankings without applying dodgy strategies.

If you want faster growth, always keep off an agency that applies black hat strategies for SEO ranking. These include keyword overstuffing, spammy guest posts, spun content, and fake business listings.

When you keep away from these unethical SEO practices, you avoid stalling your search ranks. You also get rid of the Google penalty and zero organic rankings.

So, before kickstarting digital marketing, ensure that you discuss the SEO practices the agency will use to improve your business visibility on search engines.

Analyze them to ensure that they won’t land you in trouble. They should otherwise yield you the desired results in the long run.

Check that the Agency Performs Reporting And Analysis For You

The aim of seeking help with your content marketing is to see whether the reports and analytics show any business growth. Usually, a digital marketing agency that reports and analyzes the results regularly is your best bet.

You need to understand the tools the agency uses to track, measure, and analyze results for your company. Consequently, you can understand whether their marketing approach is in line with your vision.

Of course, you’re dedicated to marketing that yields results to beat your competition. So, your agency should give your competition analysis so that you can come up with tricks to outshine the competition.

Usually, a competition analysis exposes your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. It also portrays direct and indirect competitors and their marketing models so that you can imitate them to perform even better.

Also, it’s in the best interest to negotiate with the agency what happens if the data doesn’t portray what you targeted. If they make adjustments to the campaign in expectation of better results, the better for you.

Ultimately, the agency’s analysis helps with modifying the strategy if you don’t meet the target. This way, you can easily increase your business’s ROI by adjusting the marketing approaches to result-driven ones.

Apply Straightforward KPIs

A perfect content marketing agency should apply the right KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that lead to real money conversions.

They should reliably analyze post views, on-page conversion rates, the quality of leads, and the referral traffic based on your goals. This makes it easy to analyze the ROI and the overall business performance.

Here’s a brief description of each of the metrics your agency should focus on;

  • Users: This is the total number of visitors who visited your website looking for something. An increasing number of users is a positive metric for your business.
  • Pageviews: These are the overall pages your visitors viewed on your website.
  • Average Session Duration: These metrics measure the average time visitors spent on your site in terms of hours, minutes, and seconds.
  • Bounce rate: This is the rate at which visitors clicked on just a single page on your website and then left. A high bounce rate is detrimental to the growth of your business whereas a low bounce rate portrays good business.
  • New sessions: This metric means the total number of new visitors who identified you but have never heard about you before. A high percentage of new sessions shows that your business is on an upward trajectory.

It’s important that you understand each metric so that you can explain them to your agency to ensure that they are in line with your goals. Letting your agency know the desired metrics makes it easy to meet the goals and avoid irrelevant reports.

A good agency measures whether you achieve the desired metrics or not. In case the former happens, it means that the goals are vague and should be reworked.

Why Is Content Marketing Important To Your Business?

In today’s busy digital marketplace, your small business must differentiate itself from competitors.

And with content marketing, you can build your online business reputation. You’ll be able to serve viewers with a range of content in forms like videos, blog posts, infographics, social media posts, and presentations.

By offering your audience value in these forms, you’ll not only draw in the viewer, but you’ll start to build brand trust.

When strategized and executed properly, content can pull in the audience to your company’s website. This is where they’ll convert into leads and sales.

Content marketing makes an effective approach that allows small businesses to set themselves apart from competitors in the industry.

And to help you reach more people and build brand trust, it’s important that you find a reliable content marketing agency

Once you’ve ticked the checklist of your requirements, that’s not all. You’ll also need to perform your research to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Also, come up with a list of the agencies you’d want to work with then proceed to narrow down the candidates.

You can then interview each of them and note down what they offer. After evaluating the offerings in each, you can comfortably make the final decision depending on the factors you’re looking for. 

Filed under: Marketing

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