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More and more companies and brands are betting on content marketing as their strategy to stand out from the competition, attract visitors and help boost sales. Starting a Content Marketing Agency is a unique opportunity to start your own business, which can be satisfying and profitable in many ways.

In addition to gaining economic independence, you also have the opportunity to work in a very promising and above all, innovative sector.

It is important to fully understand the functioning of content marketing to implement the most appropriate tactics according to your objective and your offer of products and or services.

And even if you don’t have that much experience, you should know that content marketing planning is the backbone for your strategy to be successful.

Here are some good tips for you to plan your content marketing agency very well. Use them without moderation!

In summary:

1. Profile of a Content Marketer
2. Why Content Marketing Agency?
3. How to Start
4. Content Marketing Agency Services
5. Success Tips
6. Conclusion

Profile of a Content Marketer

In our opinion, this specialist should possess three professional competencies (knowledge, abilities, and skills). The rest can be developed, completed, compensated for with personal qualities.

1. Basic understanding of content marketing and digital marketing.
   He knows what marketing is, feels the interests of the audience, understands its pain, motives for buying, creates offers for different segments, and sees the customer’s path. He understands the services of the agency not at the level of a specialist, but at the level of a qualified customer. He sees the promotion strategy as a whole (target audience and its segments, portraits of individual characters, how they are written and why to do it). The content marketer is responsible for both form and content. He gives birth to meanings, and not only packs them.
2. Copywriting skill and basic understanding of journalism.
   A content marketer writes and searches like a journalist. He pokes his nose everywhere, does not miss news feeds inside and outside the agency, pulls content from experts, knows how to conduct good interviews and ask the right questions.

Why Content Marketing Agency?

If you are looking for “content marketing strategies” you probably will recognize the importance of a content marketing agency. While a content marketing agency is the roadmap, content marketing strategy is your game plan.

As a reminder, here’s why a content marketing strategy is important:

• It strategizes to achieve your content marketing goals: Without a strategy, your business easily loses track of its content marketing goals. This can lead to poor ROI, as well as a misunderstanding of what content marketing can do.
• This influences the success of your content marketing plan: a strategy can have a huge impact on your success. A study of business-to-business (B2B) companies found that those who implemented a strategy increased the effectiveness of their plan by 25%.
• It adapts your content marketing plan to changes in the industry: In your industry, as well as in digital marketing, staying ahead is essential. With a content marketing strategy, your team can adapt your plan to changes, making your content marketing even more effective.

Are you now ready to build a competitive content marketing agency? 

How to Start Content Marketing Agency

When it comes to developing a content marketing agency, many companies take the right steps. They research their audiences, grow their content calendar, and monitor their content’s performance.

However, their content does not give the expected results. What happens is that these companies often take the right steps but overlook important details. That’s why this how-to start reviews best practice recommendations and highlights the fine details.

With this approach, you will not only learn how to start a content marketing agency, but also how to improve your existing strategy by spotting areas for improvement.

Ready to start your content marketing agency?

Start with these steps:

1. Set Goals

Whether you want to increase your income, increase your lead generation, or improve user engagement, your content agency has a goal. Often, however, companies avoid investing time in developing their goal.

When creating goals for your content marketing agency, set SMART goals.

• Specific: a well-defined objective can answer the questions of what, why, who, where and what questions are related to it. Spend time thinking about what your business wants to accomplish with content marketing, as well as who would need to oversee your content marketing strategy.
• Measurable: Whether you’re overseeing your content marketing plan internally or collaborating with a digital marketing agency, you should have a measurable goal. If you want to increase your lead generation efforts, for example, what increase do you want to see?
• Achievable: While a big goal may push your team forward, it’s important to keep your content marketing goals achievable. Some factors to consider are your company’s marketing budget, as well as time constraints and other responsibilities of your team.
• Realistic: Another factor to consider is whether your goal is realistic. For example, maybe your lead generation aspirations are more achievable over a two-year period rather than over a year.
• Timing:Your content marketing goal should have a deadline. For goals with a long deadline, such as a few years or several months, set checkpoints. If you want to increase your lead generation by 10% in one year, for example, commit to reaching 5% by the sixth month.

With a SMART goal for your content marketing strategy, you lay the foundation for your content marketing plan. Your team knows what and when your business wants to accomplish, which provides them with a foundation to fully develop your content marketing strategy.

2. Target Audience

Your audience is a critical part of content marketing – they read your content, after all. That’s why companies don’t often overlook this step in creating a content strategy. This is one area that businesses can improve upon, however.

In most cases, you probably already know the following information about your audience:

• Age
• Gender
• Income
• Location
• Education

This is their basic demographic information and is invaluable when creating a strategy for your content marketing agency. The best content marketing strategies go beyond demographics, however. They research what target audiences are doing on the internet.

Reach your target audience by answering these questions:

• Where is their internet hangout? If you want to create unique content, you need to know where your target audience is going to look for answers. The questions they ask can serve as the basis for an amazing blog post or a comprehensive guide. Depending on your audience, they might like Quora or an industry-specific forum.
• What is their social media platform? It’s also worth investigating their favorite social media platforms. While your audience’s demographics are likely to influence their preferences, knowing whether they prefer Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat can target your content marketing strategy on the most important platforms.
• What are their pain points? By researching their favorite hangouts on the internet, you will likely uncover your audience’s challenges for your industry. For your content marketing agency, this is invaluable. You can develop content that offers solutions to these problems – you can even highlight how your business solves these problems with your sales oriented content.
• What kind do they like? As you explore your audience’s hangouts, as well as their interactions on social media, note the types of content they respond to. Some may respond well to infographic, while others use videos. These interactions offer insight into your target audience, as well as ideas on how to connect with them.
• Who do they trust? In most industries, there are influencers. These are people your target audience trusts, which means that partnering with this influencers could be invaluable to your content marketing plan and business goals. Browse social media, as well as forums, and you can probably spot a few influencers that your audience trusts.

With a better understanding of your audience’s motivations and habits, you can improve your content marketing strategy. This improved strategy can help improve content, engagement rates, and lead generation.

3. Target Keyword

Once your target audience and your subject have been defined, you must establish a list of keywords to optimize in your content strategy.

Take as a starting point the most obvious words that define the topic that might interest your persona.

To do this, carry out a keyword study to understand the terms most searched by your target, and thus identify opportunities for content creation.

Then, use tools like UberSuggest to identify the potential of each keyword based on search volumes.

4. Write a business plan

A business plan should include:

• Your business objectives
• Cash flow and financial budget
• How to reach your target audience?

Once you have answered all the necessary question, you must start work on the presentation of your business plan.

Read Also: How to Write a Good Business Plan 

5. Content Check

While many content marketing strategy guides recommend a content audit, many content marketing agency skip this step. Some because they have little content and others because they have a ton.

No matter how low or level your business has been with content marketing, do a content audit. This is a crucial step in creating a content marketing agency. The results provide insight into your past approaches and may even suggest ideas for future content.

Perform a content audit by doing the following:

• Create content inventory: A content inventory serves as a directory and includes the content URL. In some cases, you can include the header and sub-headers of the content. You can create a content inventory and then export the data to a spreadsheet.
• Catalog content: Once you have your spreadsheet, classify the content. For best documentation, note the content type and topic, such as a 500-word blog post on “how to XXXX” or an 800-word service page.
• Rate the content: Next, rate each piece of content. Consider the quality of the writing, as well as the relevance and accuracy of the content to the current audience. Also consider the organization, tone, and visuals of the content, as you want them to match your current branding.
• Record content performance: The last detail to include in your spreadsheet is content performance. A few metrics to include are the volume of traffic generated by the webpage, as well as the bounce rate and user engagement, which you can find in Google Analytics.

Use the results of your content audit to develop your content marketing agency strategy. What is your past content doing well that you want to include or avoid in future content? Or, how can you reuse that content to align it with your new content marketing goals?

6. Write down Your Content Guidelines

For agencies new to content marketing, this question doesn’t offer an easy answer. It takes time and preparation, as your team needs to develop guidelines for creating and publishing your business content.

As a result, many content marketing agencies ignore the recommendation to write a set of content guidelines. It is essential that your content marketing agency does not neglect this step. Without guidelines, you can influence the quality of your strategy, as well as its goals.

That’s why you should have a guide that explores the following content characteristics:

• Types of content:The best content marketing strategies focus on more than blog posts – and so do you. Develop a list of content types and list their unique characteristics or requirements. These requirements can include a preferred word count or call to action (CTA).
• Content formats: With different types of content, you will also have different formats. For example, a blog post might have a graphic inviting users to call your company, while a guide might have two or three.
• Content images: Yourcontent guidelines should also consider the use and format of images. If you are creating custom graphics, for example, what fonts or colors should they use? Or, what websites should your team use for images?
• Tone of content: While your company’s branding guidelines may indicate the preferred tone for press releases and other official communications, it may not address more casual types of content, such as blogging. Note these preferences in your guide.

Once you’ve launched your content marketing strategy, expect to change your guidelines. You might find, for example, that your blog posts need to have additional images to provide a better user experience.

7. Brainstorm your Content

When initially browsing the guides on content marketing agency strategies, businesses quickly overlooked the importance of thinking about fresh, original content. While you might have a ton of ideas now that number is decreasing as your content backlog grows.

How can you continue to develop content that your audience loves? With these tips:

• Use content idea tools: Many websites offer idea generation tools, which can help your team brainstorm a new idea. One of which is Blogging Idea Generator, which even suggests a title tag for the recommended idea.
• Read Industry Sites: Another way to generate ideas for your content marketing plan is to follow the major websites in your industry. While you don’t have to cover the exact topic, you can create content that develops the idea mentioned.
• Observe Competitors: You can also monitor content created by your competitors. As with industry websites, don’t copy your competitors’ content marketing strategy. Instead, you want to research the characteristics of the story that are relevant to your audience.

If you partner with a content marketing agency, they will regularly develop new content for you. You even receive a dedicated and experienced account manager who learns about your business. The result is engaging content that’s even more relevant to your audience.

8. Develop your Content Management Process

It’s not uncommon for businesses to overlook the importance of a content management system (CMS), like WordPress. If you’re a small business, for example, you might want to consider planning, producing, and publishing your content manually.

However, as your content marketing agency grows, it becomes unmanageable. That is why you should consider your management processes at an early stage. By taking this proactive step, you reduce stress and workload on your team, while maximizing the success of your content marketing plan.

In some cases, content marketing agencies will offer to use CMS.

Another content process to consider is your content calendar. This timeline is essential for your content marketing plan because it provides details about the content you produce and publish, as well as content deadlines.

If you’re looking for a content calendar, here are some useful online tools:

• Google sheets
• Hubspot
• Trello
• CoSchedule

Note that some of these tools offer free and paid versions.

10. Measure the Success of your Content Strategy

For businesses that don’t set SMART goals measuring the success of their content marketing plan is a challenge. Even though content marketing provides many metrics to track and analyze, you need a SMART goal to measure your success.

That’s why the “M” in SMART focuses on measurement.

Measuring the success of your content marketing strategy also depends on your measurement tools. For example, your business can benchmark data from your web pages in Google Analytics to see if it is contributing to your SMART goals.

This is essential because your strategy must not only achieve your goals, but also generate a remarkable return on investment.

11. Promote your Content Marketing Agency

Promoting a business is essential, but for a Content Marketing Agency, the question becomes even more interesting: how to promote a Content Marketing Agency?

Even if people expect higher standards (this is your business area of ​​expertise, after all), don’t worry – see it as a creative challenge instead. Here are some of the main ways to promote your business:

• Website

First of all, you need to have a professional and well-designed website. This is not negotiable for a Content Marketing Agency – customers and others interested in your business should be able to find your business online and see a site that best reflects what you are doing.

However, it does not have to be expensive. At first, you can use a website builder to quickly and easily create a basic website, without the need for a lot of technical skills.

After a while, you can consider hiring a professional website designer to create a website with custom design and increased functions.

• Social media

In addition to your site, your business will need to be on social media to contribute to your overall online presence. Although there are a number of platforms, focus your efforts on connecting with your target market. It’s about knowing what networks they’re using and sharing their content. You can use social media to promote your business, but also to engage and find customers.

In general, Facebook and Twitter are the main networks to use. If applicable, consider using Instagram, Pinterest and other platforms as well. It’s a way for people to see what’s going on in your business and keep you up to date on what matters most to your customers.

Promotional material

Even if you run a Content Marketing Agency, don’t forget the promotional material on paper. It can be as simple as creating business cards for yourself.

Likewise, you might consider creating brochures and other physical materials to promote your business. You could sample a range of work that you think best represents your business in a brochure to distribute as needed.

12. Build a Team

You already have a defined objective, you already know who you are going to talk to, and what you are going to talk about, now you need to outline “who” is going to speak. For your content marketing agency strategy to be effective, you need a good structure, which means having a good editor, good content producers, people specialized in SEO and analysts that will take care of the distribution and control of the return on investment. See each function:

Read Also: Tips on Staff Hiring Process for Small Business

• Editor or Analyst

Creates the strategy, writes and supervises content projects to ensure brand consistency and alignment with business objectives. He is above all functions.

• Social Media Manager

Distributes content on social channels and engages online communities. He responds to the Editor or Analyst. 

• Designer

Translates textual content into image, creating rich and engaging visual experiences. He responds to the Editor or Analyst, and works closely with the Manager.

• Collaborator

Any content creator – blogger, photographer, designer – who contributes to your project. They are supervised by the Editors.

• SEO / Paid Ad Specialist

Manages the distribution of content on paid media. They work together with the figure of the Editor.

Remembering that this is the ideal team, but you must adapt the demand for your work to the number of professionals you plan to hire.

Content Marketing Agency Services

The following list details the content marketing services you can offer your customers to help them achieve their inbound goals.

1 – Content strategy

While many customers enthusiastically consider diving into content production immediately, it’s important to emphasize the value of a cohesive content marketing strategy.

Developing this strategy will allow you to better understand their current position and what they need to do to achieve their goal.

An essential part of this process is organizing the development of buyer personas. Even if your client has already created them, it’s important to assess their quality and figure out how to refine them. This first step is absolutely crucial, as the personas you create will then be used to guide the creation of new content.

Once you have defined what content you want to publish, you also need to present your customers with a way to organize its production, for example using an editorial calendar. Depending on the amount of content they plan to publish, it is possible to set up separate calendars for blog, social media, emails, etc.

This step is strategic because it allows you and your customers to see progress, frequency, publication patterns, etc.

2 – Content creation

Often times, the concept of content creation seems overwhelming for businesses using traditional marketing methods. By providing content creation services, you will help them understand the value of content and choose the options that will give them optimum performance.

While the mediums you use vary by client or industry, most businesses will still need to combine blogging, email, and social media to create great content. At this point, it is advisable to revisit the brand’s buyer personas in order to define the types of content most suited to the online resources preferred by its customers.

Whether the content is outsourced to an external provider or an in-house team, you need to make sure that the people in charge of the creation are fully conversant with the business and specific needs of the client. Thus, the content will be more authentic and aligned with the objectives.

3 – Content optimization

Today’s consumers no longer hesitate to do their own research.

If your customers want to make sure their content shows up as an answer to an online search, they should know that creating that content is only part of the job. It must indeed be both visible and optimized to have an impact on the company’s turnover.

With a content optimization service, you can help your customers benefit from increased visibility and conversion rates by leveraging keyword research, SEO best practices, customer behavior, users and competitive information that will allow them to adjust their strategy.

However, you and your client should be aware that optimization is not a one-time task that gets crossed off a list when done. Optimizing content as a service marketing should be seen as a long process.

4 – Promotion of content

A content promotion strategy is essential for any business wishing to deliver its content to the right recipient at the most appropriate time.

Knowing that most businesses believe that creating content is all it takes to keep visitors flocking, agencies should absolutely make an effort to help their clients expand their current reach.

With the large number of content distribution tools available, it’s important to identify which ones will perform the best in order to save time and money. It starts with an analysis of the client’s current distribution channels and includes a study of how their competitors are promoting their own content.

In addition to traditional channels like email and social media, you can use buyer personas to spot platforms that may have been overlooked.

Another effective option: help the brand to associate with key players in the sector who will agree to share the content. This will optimize the reach of the company in its industry and ensure instant credibility to the brand.

5 – Content update

Old and outdated content is even more damaging than no content. If your customer posted an article several months, or years ago, and it still receives significant traffic, but it is not updated and is becoming obsolete, visitors who will not get the information they are looking for and will leave the blog feeling dissatisfied.

If the company website has not been updated for several years, you should start by noting which pages to prioritize based on company goals.

If your customer isn’t convinced of the importance of this service, stress the value of updated content to Google.

Sometimes just replace old statistics more recent statistics, delete old screenshots or exchange internal links against other, more relevant content to reinvigorate the brand.

6 – Content report 

This will provide your customers with the numbers they need to adjust their strategy based on initiatives that actually bear fruit.

While most marketing platforms are capable of producing a wide variety of reports, be sure to target your topic to avoid overwhelming your customer with information overload.

To do this, start by determining what the company considers to be successful. Is it about increasing traffic? To strengthen social commitment? To double the number of webinar registrations?

You will thus identify relevant key indicators that will allow you to define precise objectives. Then, when producing a report, you will know exactly what information your customer needs.

Success Tips

If you’re excited to improve content marketing agency strategies with the recommendations above, but are looking for other ways to put your content strategy above the competition, these five tips from content marketing is for you.

1. Prioritize visuals: While your content likely already has visuals, it makes the content marketing strategy easier if you prioritize visuals. Readers not only love the images, but they also appeal to the way users browse content. If you can add visuals that enhance your content, such as screenshots, graphics, GIFs, or videos, then do so.
2. Develop pillar pages: Optimize your content marketing plan by considering the value of pillar page content in your strategy. What is the content of the pillar pages? This is in-depth content, such as guides or eBooks that aims to deliver immense value to users and great leads to your sales team.
3. Optimize content: Content marketing emphasizes high quality original content. Another goal, however, is to optimize this content for search engines. By optimizing your content, from your title tag to your image alt tags, you can increase your ranking in search results. Higher rankings can lead to more visits from your target audience.
4. Target Decision Metrics: While it’s been mentioned before, it’s important to stress the importance of tracking actionable metrics – not vanity metrics – in your content marketing strategy. These are measures that have a direct impact on your business. Some examples include your business’s sales, lead generation rates, etc.
5. Consider Search Trends: A competitive content marketing strategy monitors and adapts to the latest search trends, such as voice search. This trend is worth considering, as 40% of adults use it at least once a day, making voice search content optimization profitable.

Read Also: How to Start a Digital Marketing Business

Conclusion

Content marketing is an important part of your digital marketing strategy. It will help to optimize all aspects of your website, social networks and content production.

With a quality content marketing, it is possible to improve your ranking, increase lead capture, and generate authority and much, much more.

More than a digital marketing strategy, starting a content marketing agency is a necessity in today’s world. Remember that the internet is the main means by which your customers will find the company. Furthermore, it is from there that all communication with your audience will happen!

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