The Value of Working with a Content Agency to Support Your Marketing Initiatives
Brought to you by WBR Insights
While content marketing is still very much king of the castle when it comes to promoting your brand online, it does come with a range of challenges. Creating content isn't easy and you'll often find yourself needing a dedicated team of professionals to do it for you.
An effective content strategy requires you to have a constant and regular stream of material which you can post on your website and share with your audience. Content seeks to establish your brand as a leading voice in your industry and one which can be relied on for factual and informative material which is also engaging and interesting to consume. Whether your content takes the form of written materials, videos, images, or some combination of all, you need a team that understands both your industry and the world of marketing simultaneously.
The question then becomes - do you keep your content marketing in house, or outsource to a dedicated content agency?
Content Marketing
While multimedia and interactive content are certainly on the rise in terms of popularity, high-quality written content is still very much the bedrock of the format. Well structured, deeply researched and engaging articles keep your website updated with fresh material - something Google's algorithms love - and give your audience a reason to keep coming back to your brand time and time again.
However, while many of your colleagues may have considered themselves bloggers back in the early days of the internet, writing content for professional applications is a very different beast and requires a set of specific skills - just like any other job.
Content marketers obviously need writing skills which - and as someone who has attempted to train many a wannabe writer, you can take my word for this - is not as easy as it looks. You can understand all the rules and guidelines of syntax and grammar, but if you lack a certain natural flair and love for language, your writing is never going to be as interesting and engaging as someone who possesses those qualities.
Not only does a content creator need to be able to write well, but they're also required to be well versed in a range of other forms of media creation as well. Modern content marketing involves the creation of video, infographics, images, and many other types of media, meaning that your content team needs to be a variety act of creatives. Not only this, but they need to be well versed in a range of social media platforms and understand which are best for sharing various forms of content. At the very least, they need to make sure the material they create is formatted correctly.
And we're not finished yet.
Content teams need to have superior research skills on top of their creative ability. Much contemporary content contains facts and statistics. These need to be sourced from reliable and recent sources. Of course, a portion of content - this very article for example - is written purely from the experience of the author, but they tend to be the exception rather than the rule. Think if you will of the proportion of a newspaper which is taken up by opinion pieces compared to journalistic reporting.
In this age of information, the ability to separate good sources from bad and genuine from fake is a skill all of itself and one which any content creator worth their salt should possess. Thankfully the ability to critically assess information forms a key part of most college degrees today, so anyone with that level of education should possess those skills.
The Moral of the Story
The reason we're telling you all this is because it demonstrates quite elegantly the benefits of working with a content marketing agency to support your organization's marketing initiatives. A professional marketing agency will come complete with all the skills and knowledge we've discussed in this article and will be ready to put those abilities to work for your brand.
This means you don't have to spend time and resources assembling a complete internal team with all the relevant skills. Instead, it will empower you to focus on the other concerns within your organization. Having a dedicated third-party content creation team on board will save you time, money, and is easily scalable to your business needs.
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