Great content is a requirement for your business’ marketing strategy, but creating that content can be a costly and time-consuming. Marketing agencies tend to follow old business practices that aren’t adaptive to your needs. Choosing a tailor-made content creation strategy is the best choice for businesses wishing to remain relevant online.
Digital marketing is more prevalent than ever, and it’s only gaining traction from here on out. In order to drive consumers to your site, blog, product, etc., it’s absolutely essential to have an establish an online presence. More importantly, in a sea of online ads that all competing for consumer attention, your marketing strategy requires excellent content to stand out
Creating unique, eye-catching content is a challenge for adapting businesses. Good content can require teams of graphic designers, writers, strategists, and product specialists, which is why many companies choose to delegate the job to agencies.
Unfortunately, hiring an agency for content can be more work than it’s worth. Creating content that influences an audience toward your services or product is complicated on its own; outsourcing to an agency can worsen the matter by presenting a whole new list of problems.
But if every big business is outsourcing to a marketing agency, how can it be problematic? Surely they know what they’re doing, right? The answer is yes and no. Outsourcing, if done correctly, is a positive move for businesses exploring new-age marketing tactics, pre-existing content teams who need to lighten the workload, and more.
The problem is, businesses are still using archaic content teams, not realizing content creation itself is adapting, too.
Here, we’ll run through the issues traditional marketing agencies present and how they stand in the way of fast, quality content production for your business. (We’ll get to what you can do about it, too!)
Every marketing agency will tell you: they’re the best. They’re better than anyone else, naturally. What else would they say? Their product is marketing, and what they can’t leverage in price in productivity, they’ll “make up” for with a promise that they have quality content that is better than anything anyone else’s.
Researching and debunking their claims takes serious effort. Unless you scour every marketing agency, interview hundreds of content managers, read over each website, and critically assess their clients and campaigns (wasting your time and money on a task meant to save them) you can never know for sure whether or not an agency is a good fit for your business. So basically, hiring an agency is always a risky move.
An even greater risk is losing time and money you’re trying to save. When it comes to marketing agencies, communication tends to be a painstaking task. Suggesting changes and requesting edits should be a quick and smooth process, but that’s rarely the case. The back and forth between an agency and your business is time-consuming, confusing, frustrating, and puts a serious halt on important campaigns and projects.
Every second spent trying to clearly communicate needs, wants, edits, and approvals is typically on your dime, too.
Even if you do decide to shell out the money needed for an agency and the time it takes to communicate content changes, you may not get what you pay for. Marketing strategy works best when you seriously assesses your audience, service, brand, and voice, then create content that aligns as closely specific goals as possible.
Agencies may have dozens of clients with various needs. To be as efficient as possible, agencies tend to apply the same strategy that worked “for someone else” to yours. This is unacceptable. Every business needs a tailor-made strategy to optimize their content. Doing otherwise is a waste of money; this lackluster one-size-fits-all thinking is essentially throwing money into a void, and hoping a few dollars stick somewhere.
What you end up with is, at worst, wasted money on subpar outbound marketing with no deliverables, or at best, an inbound marketing strategy that doesn’t fit your business.
One of the greatest challenges in digital marketing is finding a strategy that earns the highest CTR (Click-Through rate) and requires the lowest PPC (Pay Per Click) cost. The fact of the matter is this: good content is the root of a great CTR-to-PPC ratio, and agencies are not typically interested in making sure that ratio is achieved. An agency’s goal is the deliver content to you, their client, and make money for the time spent creating it. The results of said content after the fact is much more a concern to you than it is to them.
If you don’t have tailored, quality content created with care and understanding of how best to utilize PPC for your company, you’ll end up spending a lot of money for very little results. Then you’re back to square one.
The solution to a complex problem is simpler than you think: hire the right people the first time. And if the first time has passed for you, then learn from your experiences and stop putting your faith in agencies altogether. In order to adapt to a fast-paced, content-driven marketing world, changes must be made to the way you consider things.
One, you need to consider the true cost of ill-prepared, irrelevant content. Bad content is not only not seen, it may be monetarily punished on social media sites or create a serious PR disaster.
The answer is to deeply consider the needs of your company. How much content do you need? What type? Should you outsource at all, or cultivate your own content team in-house? How quickly must your content be produced, edited, and made public? iMediaBay is currently the only streamlined quality content production site available to businesses, meaning we’ve found a way to adapt to current marketing needs through a state-of-the-art content production model, while your typical agency still follows obsolete business practices.
Here’s what you know: your business needs content—exceptional content—to stand out and catch the eye of the right people. To acquire this content, you need to consider your methods of content creation, and stop trusting archaic agency practices to best handle your needs.
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