Why your Business Needs Content Marketing Services

There’s a reason why 90% of organisations use content marketing - it’s because when it works, it works.

And the reason why? It's simple: it’s what consumers want. Customers in 2021 don’t like being inundated with intrusive ads and banners. They want useful, engaging content.

As a result, the benefits of powerful content marketing are enormous - it's one of the best ways to drive website traffic, grow your audience and drive sales in 2021. It generates 3x as many leads as traditional marketing tactics and costs 62% less.

There’s just one problem: producing great content marketing campaigns at scale isn’t exactly a walk in the park.

As a busy marketing manager, you might feel you just don’t have the time or the in-house resources to craft and oversee a lucrative content strategy.

So huzzah! That's where we come in!

In this article, we’re going to be explaining how a content marketing agency (like ours) can help you take a load off and reach more customers, one piece of content at a time. 

Types of content marketing services (& why you need them)

Businesses like ours offer a range of content marketing services, ranging from campaign ideation all the way through to execution and reporting.

Depending on where you’re already at, you might want to outsource specific content marketing tasks or let someone else sweat the small stuff entirely and take care of the whole campaign for you from start to finish, so you can get back to creating long-standing relationships at each stage of the customer journey.

Here are some of the different types of content marketing services available and when you might want to use them as part of your marketing efforts.

Content marketing strategy development

Content marketing strategy development lays the foundation for the whole process, so it’s paramount that you get it right. Because, without it you’re going in blind with your arms tied behind your back.

Content marketing strategists formulate strategies that will deliver results based on your marketing goals and past efforts. 

The first step is determining what those goals are. Are you hoping to boost brand awareness? Drive traffic? Generate more sales?

Once you know where you’re heading, the next step is figuring out how to get there. An agency can work with you to help you to piece together a content marketing plan to figure out the best type of content and distribution channels to meet your goals to take the overall guesswork out of the equation. 

Other tasks involved in content marketing strategy development might include developing or evaluating your buyer personas and target audiences, auditing existing content, setting KPIs, and coming up with an editorial calendar to guide your publishing schedule of various content marketing assets. The world's your oyster when it comes to strategy! 

Content creation services

Wondering where most of your time will potentially be taken up to deliver effective content marketing? If you guessed content creation; gold stars for you. As a result, it is usually the main element of content that many businesses choose to outsource to a content marketing team. 

Depending on the type of content you plan on producing, this might involve writing company blog posts, creating infographics, social media posts, Ebooks, shooting videos, or something else entirely.

While you might prefer to be more hands-on with your own work, there are a number of reasons why outsourcing to a content creation team might make more business sense than taking care of it yourself, such as:

• Higher-quality content. Agencies usually work with professional writers who are experts in their field, which means better-quality content. By outsourcing, you can free up your team’s time so they can spend more time on the activities that matter to you and your business.
• It’s scalable/flexible. Throughout the year, you might need to change up your publishing schedule. Outsourcing means you only pay for content as and when you need it. As such, it’s a more flexible and scalable option compared to handling it in-house.
• Cost-effective. The costs of hiring, onboarding, and training a professional in-house writer will take a huge chunk out of your budget. And that’s not even considering equipment and all the other overheads that come with a new employee. Outsourcing your content creation efforts to agencies tends to be much more affordable. 
  
  
  

Content optimisation service

If you’re using content as part of a search engine optimisation campaign to drive organic traffic to your website, an important part of the process is making sure your content has the best possible chance of ranking for your target keywords.

You can outsource this part of the job to a content marketing service provider, who can use SEO best practices to ensure your content is optimised around your target keywords and ensure maximum visibility.

There’s a lot that goes into content optimisation, and it’s not something you can just tick off your list willy nilly. It’s an ongoing process that starts with solid keyword research and competitor analysis to select search queries worth targeting.

Next, there’s both on-page and off-page SEO to think about. This might involve ensuring all published content follows SEO best practices, looking at page experience metrics like site speed, and improving off-page ranking signals like domain authority by building backlinks.

And it doesn’t stop there. After that, you’ll want to constantly monitor your content performance and gather insights to inform the direction of future content and keep up the momentum! 

As you can see, it’s a fair lot of work. So you can see why some business choose to pass the baton. 

Content promotion services

There's no point producing great content if nobody ever sees it. That’s why a solid content promotion strategy is essential. Promoting your content is how you ensure maximum reach and amplification of the content you spent time and money producing.

There are lots of different outlets where you might want to distribute your content to so taking the time to identify the ones that offer the best return on investment is crucial. A good content marketing agency will look carefully at all the available distribution channels and consider factors like how your competitors are promoting their content and your current distribution channels to inform their promotional strategy.

You might want to promote your content through social media marketing, leverage influencer campaigns, or push it via email marketing - and there may be other distribution channels and platforms that you haven’t even considered.

Content maintenance services

Much like diamonds - content is forever. As such, ensuring the content you publish stays relevant is essential, because certain types of content can quickly become outdated.

For example, let’s imagine you run a hair and beauty company and you publish a blog post about ‘the trendiest hairstyles this winter’. It might perform super well and drive you a heap of traffic at first - but what happens next season? The second Spring is here, your traffic'll fall flat, and all the time you spent producing that blog post will go to waste.

Content maintenance involves updating posts like this to keep them fresh. And it isn’t just your customers that will appreciate fresh content - Google will too.

If your website content hasn’t been updated in a few years, now might be the time to take a look over it with data-driven action plans. You might benefit from reinvigorating the content by updating any outdated articles, removing old screenshots, or swapping out internal links to new business pages.

A content marketing service provider can take care of all of this for you - how good?

Content reporting services

The final step in any content marketing campaign is to measure the results.

Agencies that offer content reporting services will be your dream team for this part of the process by providing you with the numbers you need to analyse your content performance against your business goals, figure out what’s working and what isn’t, and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Content reporting is something you need to think about at the very start of your campaign. Before you even begin publishing content, you should have already set well-defined goals, determined what KPIs you’ll use as markers of success, and set up relevant tracking links to aid with reporting so that you'll be publishing results-driven, engaging content at each push of the publish button.

If you haven’t already got these things in place, content marketing service providers may be able to help. Gee, what can't they do, huh? 

Final thoughts

As you can see, executing a successful content marketing campaign takes the biscuit on the time, effort and expense front ... but don’t worry, that's what we're here for! 

If you’d like to find out more about how Neighbourhood can take some of the load off your shoulders, don’t hesitate to get in touch.