What is a Content Marketing Agency?
You know what content marketing is, right? If you do, that’s awesome. Go ahead and skip this intro. If you’re not quite sure, let’s first just quickly cover that off to make sure we’re on the same page.
So, content marketing is when you create content (shocker!) and distribute it to your ideal clients, for free. The idea behind it is that by offering value and answering questions for your target audience, they’ll start to see you as an authority.
They’ll start to trust you. And that means they’ll be more likely to buy from you.
Over time, when they need some specific help or they’re looking to hire someone that does what you do, you’ll be the first person, or company, that comes to mind.
Content marketing is everywhere. These days, most of the content that you see is part of a content marketing strategy.
It used to be that creators would make YouTube videos, blog posts and instagram accounts just for fun. Not so much now.
That doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. It is. If it wasn’t, then it wouldn’t be real content marketing. But there’s almost always a detailed strategy behind content creation that aims to help you with your problems, offer various different ways to access the content, build trust and eventually, sell something.
A content marketing agency helps businesses with this process.
How does a content marketing agency work?
Content marketing is pretty complex these days. It’s not about taking a selfie every day on Insta and whackin’ down a few hashtags.
There’s a ton of research that goes into putting together a proper content marketing strategy. This starts from putting together what’s an ICP, or Ideal Customer Profile, sometimes also called a Target Persona.
This ICP outlines exactly who your company is targeting. Their age, what they do for work, where they spend their time and money and their values and beliefs. Why is this important? Because when you know this stuff, you can work out where they spend their time online and where you should channel your content marketing efforts.
A content marketing agency starts by getting this part of the process nailed down. They work with you to find out who your ideal client is, and where they hang out online.
The next step is to put together the content marketing strategy. Where you’re going to post, what you’re going to post and how to distribute and repurpose the content to as many different platforms as possible.
With the strategy in place, a content marketing then gets to work putting it into practice.
They’ll have a team of content marketers and writers, and depending on the agency, potentially also audio and video editors as well. Every week, they’ll make sure your content is going out where it needs to be.
That’s important, because if there’s one thing that's more important than anything else when it comes to content marketing, it’s consistency.
So essentially, a content marketing agency builds the strategy for your business, and then implements it for you.
The Services Offered by a Content Marketing Agency
Right, so the marketing industry can be a bit confusing here, because every marketing agency is different. So while some digital marketing agencies will do everything, including content marketing, paid advertising and everything in between, others will niche down significantly.
For example, some content agencies offer help with every platform there is. Others specialise on just one, like TikTok or podcasting.
Some work with any type of business in any industry, and some specialise in a specific niche.
The point is that no content marketing agency is alike. To give you an idea of what it can look like, here’s a few examples of some of the services that a content marketing agency might offer.
Overall Strategy
Creating the overall content marketing strategy is super important. Honestly, every decent content marketing agency should do this, because otherwise you’re just throwing shit against the wall and hoping something sticks.
This usually involves work around your ICP, advice on what your content pillars should be and where and how often to distribute your content.
SEO Blog/Article Writing
This is the fundamental basis of a content marketing strategy. Every company needs a blog, and some of those blog posts and articles need to be search engine optimised (SEO). This makes sure that when your ideal client Googles a question, they end up on your website.
If you’re curious about the kind of ROI you can get on a regular blog, we built a calculator that estimates it. You might be shocked at the results.
Not all articles have to be SEO focused. There’s plenty of room for ‘thought leadership,’ which is a wanky term for articles that express an opinion on something that’s happening in your industry.
Social Media
Sometimes this is broken into written platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter, and video platforms like TikTok and Instagram (it’s not a photo platform anymore).
Social media is where you find the most differences between agencies. Some will cover all the social platforms, others will only offer a couple, and specliased agencies can niche down to only one platform that they know really well.
YouTube
This is a huge platform and takes quite a lot of investment to get right. Again, some agencies include YouTube as a standard part of the overall content marketing strategy, while others will specialise only in video editing and YouTube as the central part of that.
Nowadays, most long form YouTube video content is repurposed into shorter clips for TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram and Facebook Reels.
Podcasting
This is an underdog when it comes to content marketing, but seriously, don’t sleep on podcasting. It doesn’t tend to be something that is offered by many content marketing agencies, apart from those that specialise in it (other than us of course).
The cool thing about podcasts is that they are awesome for repurposing. If you record video of your interviews, you can split up the content to just about every other platform there is.
Think about how often you see a clip from Joe Rogan, Steven Bartlett or other podcasts on your TikTok feed.
Email Newsletter
Email has the highest ROI of any other marketing channel. By a long way. If you start building a list, you can provide value over and over again, without relying on an algorithm showing your content to your audience.
There’s a reason why every single website on earth tries so hard to get your email address.
How a Content Marketing Agency Can Help Your Business Grow
It’s pretty simple really. A content marketing agency formalizes your content strategy and systemises your creation process.
Target Audience
You already know your target audience. A content marketing agency just helps get this really clear and specific, to make sure that everyone is on the same page when it comes to the content you’re going to make.
But when it comes to where your target audience spends their time, and the strategy for the types of content you’re going to create, an agency makes sure you’re not wasting your time (and money obviously) on content channels that don’t make sense.
If your ICP is a 56 year old CFO, TikTok probably isn’t the best place to be.
Efficiency
Not only will they help with which channels to be on, they’ll help with how to tackle them. If you’re creating SEO content, you don’t want to go after super competitive search terms (called keywords) for your first articles. You’re never going to outrank Goldman Sachs or the Bank of England if you’re in the finance vertical.
So, efficiency with your efforts is one big way a content marketing agency can help.
Consistency
The second is consistency. And this is massively underrated, because it’s the number one way you’re going to be successful with content marketing. It’s not instant. You can’t drop 2 blog posts and a LinkedIn carousel and expect the leads to come flying in.
But if you create content every week, for months and years, you’ll build an inbound lead generating machine for your business.
These leads will not only be self selected as part of your target audience, they’ll already know who you are, what you do and how you can help. By the time they’ve reached out to you, they’re warm and ready to engage.
That is a powerful tool to grow your business.
Scale
But there’s one last aspect of content marketing that helps your business grow, and that’s scale. Over a long period of time, your content marketing strategy scales by default. If you create one blog post a week, in 6 weeks you’ll have six posts that will eventually start generating some traffic.
In a year you’ll have 52. In five years you’ll have 260.
You don’t lose a blog post when you create a new one. You just add to your bank. It scales for as long as you keep creating content.
Not only that but the cost stays consistent.
Compare that to paid ads, which are much more difficult to scale. Generally, the more you spend, the higher your customer acquisition cost (CAC) gets. And when you stop paying, all your leads stop.
It doesn’t matter if you’ve spent $10 million on Facebook or Google Ads, if you stop paying, that’s it.
Choosing the Right Content Marketing Agency for Your Business Needs
Right, so now you know what a content marketing agency does, the last step is to find one that is going to work best for your business.
If you’ve got an in-house content marketer, you might already have detailed your ICP and know which platforms you’re going for. It’s now just down to finding an agency who can fulfill the content needs you’ve got.
If that’s blogs, you need a content writing agency. If it’s TikTok, get a TikTok agency. You get the idea.
Another option is to find a content agency that specializes in your business vertical. For us at Hedge, that’s the finance niche. We work exclusively with fintechs, wealth management firms, venture funds, banks and financial services firms, because we know the type of content marketing that works best for them.
At the end of the day, it’s just like doing business with any other company in your business or personal life. You want to pick someone who you think understands you, has done it before and, most importantly, who you get along with and work well with.
