
Ask the average marketing professional who’s best suited to be creating content for his or her organization and you'd hear, “We are.” After all, a company’s own people know its products and target audiences better than anyone, right?
Right.
But an experienced inbound marketing firm with professional writers, designers and technicians on staff can do a hellavu job creating it, too. Its clients may be the best equipped to discuss its products and customers, but 1) not everyone internally will have the writing, design and production skills necessary, and 2) very few, if any, of them have the time.
We create the content for most of our clients and regularly create content about industries as diverse as commercial whey protein ingredients, consumer and business insurance, employee stock ownership plan consulting, fire and emergency apparatus, industrial blades and components, and supply chain management (to name a few). In our role as an inbound marketing agency, we must be able to write intelligently, providing insights and demonstrating expertise and empathy as near as possible to that of the people on the client team.
Not every inbound agency can act as an extension of the client’s marketing team because many don’t invest the time necessary to fully learn the client’s business. If you’re considering engaging a firm to take on your organization’s content creation, use the guidelines below to make sure you’re hiring people capable of stepping into your shoes and connecting effectively with your prospects.
Insist on experience. This means not only experience writing and creating diverse content, but experience with a number of different industries. An inbound marketing firm that’s written for multiple industry types understands nuances of business models, value propositions, vertical markets, go-to-market strategies, sales processes, customer types, prospect mindsets, etc., and is able to rigorously process and integrate what they learn about your business with relevant experiences that help establish meaningful context for your content.
Make sure they have a process that immerses them fully and quickly into your business. That process should be a formalized and linear approach to learning; ours looks something like this:
Content strategy. Armed with the knowledge gathered in these last steps we’re now able to create a platform from which all our communications and content stem, with specific messages articulated for every prospect target. And of course, everything’s optimized for search, because if it’s not, your target may never find the content prepared so carefully for their consumption.
When it comes to content strategy and execution, qualified inbound marketing agencies should be viewed as tools that can provide the leverage to turn a clients’ knowledge, experience and competitive advantage into powerful business attraction agents. Can you do it yourselves as a client organization? Sure, theoretically you could. But in a world that rewards effective speed, and in an online environment where critical content mass creates exponential visibility improvement, the future belongs to businesses that are most astute about creating business leverage through the tools and partners they deploy. Shouldn’t you be in that camp?
Have more questions about content? We answer those and others in our eBook, "Answers To The Top 15 Questions About Inbound Marketing" - get yours now!
Topics: Content Marketing