These days, most advertising and marketing agencies claim to have Content Marketing expertise, but many aren’t able to deliver. If you are outsourcing content creation to an external marketing team, here are a few things you’ll want to know:
Does the agency use Content Marketing to promote itself?
You won’t even have to ask this question directly. Simply log on to an agency’s
blog or website to decide for yourself. Things to look for would be a relevant keyword strategy (i.e. do they use key words over and over to maximize search?), blogposts that provide expertise, not just a glimpse at their agency’s internal culture, and social engagement on networking sites like Twitter.
Does the agency have Content Marketing success stories to share?
Creating content is one thing. Creating content that gets results is another. Ask to see live sites that the agency has worked on, and find out how that content drove business results.
Does the agency have a Content Marketing strategy?
If the agency is focused on campaigns and not on long-term content marketing tactics, you can be pretty sure they don’t get it. Effective content creation is done to support an overall strategy, and that strategy takes time to develop.
Does the agency supply keywords or will they expect those from you?
Keywords aren’t considered to be as critical as they once were. These days the quality of your content and how it engages customers and potential customers is much more important. That said, keywords still matter, and deciding which keywords to use is never a simple process. Unless you have plenty of input from a keyword tracker like Google Analytics, you should expect help from your agency support partner. Keywords can and should be tweaked as you gather information about what is working and what is not, and a good content marketing agency should be able to help you with that, too.
Does your agency know how to maximize content engagement?
An outsourced marketing agency that specializes in Content Creation should also know how to push that content out through the right channels in order to reach your target audience(s). One of the best ways to do this is through a marketing blog. You can learn more about that by reading our post, Should you create your own inbound marketing blog or outsource to a support agency?
Now that you know how to choose a marketing support agency that has Content Creation experience, you may be wondering: Should you outsource the creation of your inbound marketing blog? Get the answers by reading our next blog post.
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