Whether you’re a start-up or an established company looking to add experts to your team, there’s a good case for hiring a marketing agency. An external content marketing agency or say, an internet marketing agency similar to Marketing Refresh, for that matter, can provide strategy, specific writing styles, and speedy uninterrupted delivery of work that you may not be able to achieve in-house. Here are 7 reasons to hire a content marketing agency.
#1 Owners are Not All-Rounders
Let’s start with the small and medium-sized tech companies, which are built from the ground up. These owners are responsible for everything, from product design to getting investors and juggling cash flow. Now they need to take care of marketing too? Even superheroes couldn’t do all that. It makes sense to hire a marketing agency, who brings invaluable expertise, resources, and contacts.
So, when you hire a marketing agency like Hooked Marketing, you bring in more collective knowledge than you could ever produce by yourself. The results are magnified, especially if that agency specializes in your industry.
So how can a marketing agency help preserve the sanity of the start-up founder?
- By creating a marketing strategy that guides all future business
- They create publicity for new products and services
- A marketing agency will engage social media audiences with regular interactions
- Your new team will help create your brand identity
- They will provide marketing analytics to estimate the ROI on various campaigns and make budget accordingly.
- Marketing experts can help turn loyal customers into brand evangelists
- Hiring a marketing agency lets the core team concentrate on other important activities, like sales and product development.
#2 Save on Salaries and Training
When you hire the right content marketing agency, you immediately gain access to a competent and professional team, without the need to hire, train or make other investments.
Tech companies can take months or years to develop a product and, in the meantime, you can’t ask your sales department to go out there and sell a non-existent product. So, as soon as your product is ready, you look for experts to take care of the marketing efforts, without wasting any time. This is crucial to maintain your competitive edge.
Also, think about the money you will save. Take a look at the average marketing salary by job seniority in 2019, compiled by MarketingWeek.
So, you see that when you hire a full team of marketers, you could end up paying, on average, 501,886 (~$650,000) per year. Also don’t forget to add on health benefits, paid vacation days, training costs and lost productivity in sick days. Then there’s all the software and tech tools you don’t need to buy!
Hiring a marketing agency could be much cheaper. They can offer flexible prices, based on what services you require. You can also scale up and down, as your needs change.
#3 Establishing Credibility and Social Media Outreach
Business leaders often look towards experts in the industry when evaluating new technologies to purchase and implement. These are known as micro influencers and their powers of persuasion shouldn’t be underestimated. Retail buyers are also much smarter today and are more desensitised to marketing messages than ever before. When influencers, who have huge social media following and credibility talk about your products on their channels, you are able to reach a wider audience. Statistics by Buzzsumo show that 13% of fintech influencers have a reply ratio of over 50% on Twitter, and 29 out of 100 have a re-tweet ratio of more than 40%. Influencers like Simon Taylor and Brett King are driving a large percentage of the Fintech talk on social media channels.
If you can get a content marketing agency to connect you organically with micro influencers like them, then your product could gain huge traction.
Hiring a content marketing agency helps you do that by:
- Understanding your brand voice, brand values and goals to connect you with a market influencer who reflects these values.
- Maintaining positive relationships based on trust, reputation and results, between the brand and the influencer.
- Creating a tailormade marketing plan to reach and engage the target audience on various channels like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and more. These could be in form of sponsored influencer posts to cross-platform campaigns.
- Providing influencers with creative guidance, key talking points and goals for the campaign, so they become a part of the collaborative process.
- Documenting rate negotiations, content review, compliance contracts and legal regulations and campaign reporting. In short, ensuring that all details are recorded and carried out impeccably.
#4 Gaining Access to New Tools and Technology
We talked before about how hiring a content marketing agency can save on human resources costs. And hiring a great content marketing agency can bring you access to premium-level services and tools too. For instance, Agorapulse is the preferred content management tool for our agency.
Apart from acting as a flexible content scheduling tool, companies can track social media mentions, identify potential brand influencers and create a post approval hierarchy.
Other tools may include gif creators, images for social media, reputation monitoring software and agency licenced social media accounts. Marketing agencies are on the leading edge of trends and technology. Performance-driven agencies use analytical reports, data, and software to target the offers to the right customers, at the right time.
#5 Range of Diverse Skills
Agencies have worked with various technologies, clients, and industries. They have the experience and data to prove what campaigns are most effective for your industry. A bolton marketing agency (or any other) can bring with it a range of expertise that is difficult to source from an in-house team. Many talented and experienced individuals will be working cohesively on diverse channels, according to your marketing strategy. This might include:
- Social media managers
- Analysts
- PR experts
- SEO experts
- Bloggers
- Writers
- Content Strategists
- Designers
Full-service content marketing offers everything your business needs for online marketing, campaigns and community management. A marketing agency offers comprehensive strategies and solutions tailored to your business from start to finish. Hiring a content marketing agency doesn’t mean you have to use everything on offer. But choice is good right? Perhaps you start with some regular articles for your blog and expand out to daily analysis, videos or social media management. For most brands, the objective of hiring a content marketing agency is to build brand awareness, increase brand loyalty, and make more sales.
A content marketing agency can help you to:
- Develop a wide range of content including articles, whitepapers, presentations, product tutorials etc.
- Create content in a tone and style that suits your target audience.
- Maintain regulatory standards and compliance in the case of financial services industry or tech articles
- Research and create content on difficult topics through writers that have industry expertise.
- Design elements, like websites, infographics, flow charts that help score in SEO. Use an SEO specialist like this boutique seo agency in Toronto, Rank Simply, to help you to do everything you need to rank higher on online searches.
Let your team handle the projects where they excel and outsource the rest. This division of labour enables your staff to be more efficient and happier in their work.
#6 Event Marketing Needs
Live events can provide you with quick exposure to a large volume of prospects. Business leaders are keen to generate contacts and create brand awareness. But, it isn’t just about having a booth with a few employees at a trade show, giving answers to customer queries. It’s imperative that you create a smart strategy to drive customers to your booth, generate an event buzz and convert those leads.
Here are some important 2019 statistics by EventMB to look at:
- 73% of conferences and 50% of trade shows include a collaborative workshop within their agenda.
- 52.6% of event professionals are more concerned about event tech.
- 83% of event planners consider the content of an event vital to making a live event memorable.
Here, the role of a content marketing agency is more important than you might imagine. A marketing agency can:
- Live record the event and publish across all your social media channels
- Create hype about the event on all marketing channels, providing details about keynote speakers as well
- Monitor your social media channels and create an event buzz around your brand
- Create relevant articles, videos or tools that reflect the theme of the event or the main keynote speeches
- For your presentation, the agency can create the content and speeches you need to win an audience
The idea is to stand out more than the other 200+ booths at the event. And let’s be honest, free pens just don’t cut it anymore do they.
#7 Benefits of an Expert Outside Perspective
When you feel that things are not moving the way you want them to, why not let a team of outside experts provide you with a fresh perspective. Marketing agencies work with many clients, which means they bring a broader perspective than a single company and its internal resources.
Here’s how a content marketing agency can help:
- Content auditing and assessment
- Creating marketing strategies that are aligned to your target audience
- Brainstorming ideas and strategies to strengthen your brand image
- Reputation management to correct or create a reputation
- Rebranding and redesign
- Team training and employee advocacy
Ready to get started? Talk to me now about outsourcing your content marketing. As director of leading content marketing agency Contentworks, I can get you strategised and ready to go.