Customers make decisions about your brand based on your content. Aside from your website, the content you create and put into the market is how they learn about you. If you’re creating content whimsically, not putting a professional brand-driven experience at the forefront, then you’re doing yourself a disservice.
Below are five reasons to strongly consider outsourcing your brand’s content development to a top content marketing agency.
1. The difference is evident: The first bullet here is a bit subjective, but from my POV consumers can simply tell the difference between agency created content and something made in-house by a generalist. There are exceptions of course, but there’s no getting around the professionalism in terms of creativity, copy and graphic design that a good agency brings to the table. Seriously, this by itself is worth forking out some budget. Remember – content is your brand. It’s not a place to skimp.
2. Top content agencies bring fresh ideas: An agency that’s worth its salt wont take your exact direction. If you’re coming to the table with all the ideas, that’s a problem. The right agency will take your ideas and direction and expand upon them. They’ll make your idea look childish (which is what you want).
3. Up-Scale Volume and Production: Proper content strategy requires your company to essentially become a publishing house. That means that in order to execute and win at the content game, your organization really needs to be regularly pumping out high quality content. The best economic option to accomplish this is by scaling through agency resources.
4. Price per piece: It may seem counterintuitive, but if you break it down, agencies often cost less per piece than trying to hire a full-time staff of content creators. Headcount is expensive, and in today’s corporate world, headcount is constantly under attack. Outsourcing the content creation allows you to clearly break down the cost into tangible outcomes (hint, your exec team likes this).
5. Higher accountability: Agencies are contractually obligated to create your content. They can’t get distracted by the infamous internal fire-drill. They are only paid if they produce. This creates accountability that you simply can’t get with an in-house resource.
So do I outsource all content development to an agency?
In my experience, I would say no. You will need someone (or a few people depending upon your size) focused on content on your internal team. There is an enormous amount of work required to keep the content factory running. Your internal content expert will work with your agency (or agencies) as the conduit between them and internal subject matter experts. They’ll also coordinate with field marketing and campaign development teams to deploy and execute the content in market.
Ok, so now it’s time to explore some of the agencies that focus on content. Visit our list of vetted and reviewed content marketing agencies.