Choosing the Best Content Marketing Agency: Tips for Startups and Small Businesses

Marketing can be a changeable world, as the trends to keep up with,analytics to track, reports to create, consumers to reach, distribution channels to optimize, emails to send, and a ton of other things fighting for your attention.

Startup marketing is a unique challenge often times because of the limited resources, whether it’s time, money or talent. The key role content marketing plays in driving leads and delivering results is something most businesses are aware of.

Content marketing has become an integral part for businesses, whether it is a start-up or small business.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing can be defined as “ A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

If you are not familiar with content creation or marketing, it is better to outsource the task to any professional content marketing agency.

A reliable agency can help you to focus on your target market. Here are certain tips for businesses to consider when choosing the best content marketing agency.

1. Flexible with Diverse Forms of Content: It is important that the agency of your choice should understand where and how your potential customers spend their time online. From landing pages and white papers to eBooks and news articles, it is important to make sure that content marketing efforts are in such a way to attract your targeted audience.

2. Look for the Quality of Previous Works: By reviewing marketing agency’s previous and current customer references and piece of content, campaigns and work, start-ups or small businesses could evaluate their capability before hiring.

3. Content Marketing Success and Latest Technology: It’s important to know that your agency is using the latest technology. Make sure that you ask questions, research technologies and tools they are using to improve content writing skills and understand how your agency will use the data to optimize performance.

4. Checkout their work and its quality: Make sure to have a clear idea about their current as well as previous work. Read out their content marketing case studies and how they assisted their clients, how skilled their content writers are. If possible, get a phone interview with those clients.

5. Check whether they are trustworthy, transparent, and credible: Trust is the vital part of any business; you should have a clear view about the agency, meaning, you should make sure that the agency is good for its word and they can work in line with your business goals.

Take the time and study your needs and options available. People buy from business they trust and you can build their trust by utilizing high-quality, intended, and properly optimized content that your target market actually wants to read and is likely to share.

You may find many agencies, where each agency is different and every provider carries unique specifications. All you have to follow is to partner with the best content marketing agency, who can assure you quality services with consistency.

Why Hire a Content Marketing Agency for Startups and Small Businesses

Needless to mention, any business thrives only when it has a solid customer base. With so many startups and businesses targeting the same consumer segment, it is your prerogative as an entrepreneur to do everything that is within your reach to differentiate yourself from your competitors.

In what way is my product or service meeting the needs of my customer?

In how many ways is my product different from others?

These are the two questions of introspection that should drive you to take certain measures in line with your marketing strategy. All for the sake of generating leads which will ultimately become your brand loyalists, thereby increasing your sales, your marketing strategy should be your prime instrument for change.

It is a thing of the past when customers were influenced to buy certain products that flashed on their TVs or in their morning newspapers. Billboards and hoardings too became promising advertising tools promising a greater reach. But this is not the scene anymore. With technology penetrating into every sphere of human life, the World Wide Web is the pivotal marketplace to checkout and order stuff.

Just signup with your chosen e-commerce website, select a product of your choice, order it online and receive the delivery at your doorstep without any fuss. Doing away the strain of physically knocking on the doors of a showroom, shoppers can shop for their needs from the comfort of their living rooms.

Offering a great deal of freedom and convenience to the shopping fraternity, online shopping has revolutionized the way in which people pick up and use stuff. And what makes this type of business proposition click?

Content – The Magic Wand of Words and Pictures

Primarily focused on customer engagement, it is only through good website content that you can attract the attention of potential customers. It can be a social media update or a compelling blog post. Both these are the techniques that will engage your customers while paving way for a stronger brand positioning.

Genuine content tagged with images and videos is what drives your customers to pause for a second to understand what you are conveying. And if they like it, they will go a step further by sharing it within their contacts.

Commenting about your offering is another way in which online shoppers influence each other. Basically adding value to your service or product, it is only through effective content that you can increase traffic to your website; eventually leading to good sale figures.

The Need to Hire a Content Marketing Agency

Notwithstanding the fact that a professional setup can handhold your business on to the right path, the same belief holds good when it concerns hiring the services of a content marketing agency. Signing up the dotted line with such agencies will deliver you the following advantages.

1. The team of content marketing executives will help you organize, implement and test your content marketing strategy. Along with this, the added advantage comes in the form of tracking the progress of your strategy.

2. The agency can step in to give your current content marketing activities a facelift.

3. When you compare the cost v/s the numerous benefits that an agency has in store for you, allocation of a certain budget will lower your expenditure when you do not have to hire a full-time content strategist or a graphic designer. The team will step in to take care of all your content requirements at a much lower cost.

The Job Description of a Content Marketing Company

Having identified the functional and financial advantages of hiring a content marketing agency, now is the time to discuss about the different ways in which such companies help boost your sale figures.

1. A single-window service that will take care of all your content marketing needs including web content writing, SEO initiatives and all the aspects of your content marketing that will impact your supply chain.

2. The agency helps you gain a comprehensive idea of your business goals looking through the lens of your online presence. Recommending changes to the content alongside fixing content deficiencies will hence be the responsibility of the team.

3. As an outside agency, the team of content marketers will be able to offer you objective suggestions to build your brand. Tagged as a reliable source of marketing information, it is through their years of marketing experience that you will be able to create your market niche.

4. A consolidated report from the professional agency will help you assess whether the current situation is in sync with what was agreed upon earlier as part of the agency contract requirements.

5. Teaming up with a content marketing agency is a purse-friendly decision when you will be spared of incurring employee training costs.

6. Helping you realize your short terms goals, a content marketing agency can be of utmost help when you are hard pressed to deliver an urgent project. While your workforce is getting tuned to the upcoming project, you can be at peace to work around a complete marketing plan offered by the agency. The prompt implementation of your marketing plan does wonders to your bottom line, allowing you to make the most of an unexpected opportunity.

Conclusion

Mindful of the advantages of hiring a content marketing agency for your small entrepreneurial venture, it comes as a wise move to hand over the reins of your content requirements to professionals. Bringing to the fore the cost-benefit analysis, it is evident that the benefits outweigh the costing factor of availing professional content marketing services.

Allowing your business to thrive with unique and high quality content, you will able to differentiate yourself from your competitors by signing up with professionals who can bring in informative and engaging text, videos, webinars, podcasts and infographics. All these enhancements to your website will make you stand apart in your business circles, not only through a better online presence but also in terms of long-standing profitability.

9 Smart Tips to Choose the Best Content Marketing Agency

Content marketing is a solid way to enhance your brand. So, you would naturally be interested in jumping the content marketing bandwagon for your brand. But content marketing is not an easy job. You have two options – either build an in-house team or hire an agency.

Building an in-house content team is not an easy job. It requires patience, proper vision a talented bunch of people and proper budget. But on the other hand, a content marketing agency provides you a readymade team of experts.

Read Also: How Can Content Marketing Make Your Presence Felt in the Internet?

But not all content marketing agencies are genuinely dependable. The main reason is simple. Most of them were originally SEO, Social Media Marketing agencies. On seeing the possibilities of Content Marketing, they reinvented themselves as Content Marketing agencies.

Here are a few smart tips to choose a Content Marketing agency that suits your business best:

Domain Expertise: No two businesses function the same way. Each is unique in its own way. Its not easy to have expertise over every domain. That said, if your content marketing agency has previous experience working with your domain, or if they are a team that is comfortable with your domain, the chances of success is high.

Because, in content marketing, quality is everything. If they have great domain knowledge, it will provide you massive advantage.

Success Stories: Do they have past success stories to share? If they have, it means they do know their stuff. If they don’t, be very careful. They might have the potential, but at the same time would have the disadvantage of being newbies. You would have to take a gamble if you plan on continuing with them.

Look for Social Media Presence: Do they have good social media presence? Good rankings alone is not enough for businesses to grow online. Social media presence is vital as well. Check if they are actively engaged with their social media audience, and has some viral posts. Also, do they have experience generating leads from social media? These are vital points you shouldn’t miss out on.

Check their Website & Blog – Do they have a decently designed website which is navigable and user-friendly? Any good content marketing agency would have a variety of content displayed on their website. Look out for videos, infographics, slideshare presentations, ebooks, etc.

Also, pay close attention to their blog. See if they have the latest updates, both from industry and from the company.

Takes time to learn the way you worked so far– Any good content marketing team would look for the work you have done so far. Because generating quality content is no simple task, and they have to lookfor every bit of information available to them. And if you have an existing style of working which could be tweaked for better results, then nothing like it.

Provides you a fresh perspective – Do they provide a fresh perspective to your business? An angle you yourself might not have noticed, or did not think mattered much, but now that they talk about it, you realize its importance and the scope it offers. There might be new techniques your competitors might not be using, and gives you lots of opportunities to grow. Such people would also be able to predict future trends that your business would be able to make the best of.

Produces a variety of content – No matter how great the content, if its the same kind, success will not be sustainable. Your audience would get bored of the same form and style. There should be variety to keep their interest high. Include a variety of videos (Read:Online Video: The Future of Content Marketing), blogs, images, infographics, slideshare presentations and more to make it interesting.

Knows Content Marketing is not just producing content – There aren’t a lot of people who understand the concept of content marketing (Read: Content Marketing: What is it all about?). Due to this, a lot of agencies and people think that content marketing is nothing more than just producing content.

But it is not so. Content marketing involves marketing of the created content as well. How do you do that? Well, that’s a question your content marketing agency needs to answer.

If possible, reach out to ex-employees of the company – To know how a company is, there is no better way than to talk to ex-employees. Their views might be biased, but talking to them can give you valuable insights about the company. You would be able to know their workflow, capability, past clients, culture and a lot more.

So, there you have it.

If you think there are other valuable tips, please share with us in the comment section.

What are the Common Services Provided by a Digital Marketing Agency?

As everyone knows, today, businesses sell more products via online. For effective online marketing, businesses need to hire a Digital Marketing Agency. They can help you with their effective online strategies and amazing services.

If you are doing any online business you should know more about the Digital Marketing agencies. Do you have any idea about the services provided by these agencies?

Having an idea about the services offered by marketing agencies helps you to choose the right agency for your business purpose. We are trying to give you an idea about the basic services provided by a Digital Marketing Agency.

Read Also: 7 Reasons Why You Should Hire a Digital Marketing Agency in India

Here are some of the popular services provided by them.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

“Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.” – Wendy Piersall

The above quote tells you how important is SEO for your business.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the popular services offered by all digital marketing agencies. SEO decides the popularity of your website. As you might know, SEO is a technique to improve the visibility of a website in search engines. It will drive more visitors to your website from search engines. SEO can play an important role in bringing potential leads to your site by making your site visible in search engine’s top organic results.

Usually, a digital marketing agency use top softwares available in the market to create relevant strategic keywords. Right keywords will help to build your campaign on.

A recent study by MediaPost reveals that 51% of people visit a business website via organic search, while paid and social search drives only 10% and 5% respectively. These figures will give you enough proof why SEO is important to begin a winning digital campaign.

Blogging Service

It’s clear that selecting the right keywords is the first step to drive visitors to your site. But, at the same time you’ve to generate blogs based on these keywords to attract the right customers to your website.

Blogs can speak about the nature of your business and industry. Blogs are very useful to build a strong relationship with your customers.

According to various research on blogs, approximately there are 329 million blog readers in the world.

Many Digital Marketing Agencies use blogs as an effective tool for online marketing. In fact, blogging is the best form of content marketing. Many successful brands reveal that if you can create 15 blogs per month, there is nothing more to do to generate more leads to your brand.

Social Media Marketing

We have just discussed the importance of blogging. But blogging will give you leads only if right users read your blog. So, how will you promote your content? Here comes the relevance of Social Media Marketing.

Social media sites can act as an effective vehicle to carry your blogs to the right online business spots. That’s why digital marketing agencies offer marketing via social media in their marketing services list.

According to a recent study, 80% of business professionals get quality leads via social media sites. Another report says “Spending six hours per week on social media sites helped 66 % of marketers to increase leads to their sites”.

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Content Offer Creation

Now, you know about the relevance of Social Media Marketing services. But, remember you need to convert your readers into leads for better results. Content Offer Creation service will help you to do so.

Digital Marketing Services create a call-to-action at the end of each blog post. Readers have to furnish their e-mail id in order to download their free valuable content offers such as infographics, white papers, E- books, etc.

At the end of each blog post, we feature a call-to-action that invites the reader to download a free gift, in exchange for their personal information.

Lead Generation Service

Finally, marketing services utilize all the above mentioned services to change your leads into customers. For instance, after collecting email id via content offer creation service, they contact the users via deliberate emails, telemarketing calls to convert them to customers.

It’s seen that these inbound marketing tools have helped many successful brands to gain the right customers.

Hope you get an idea about the common services offered by a digital marketing agency. So, keep in mind all these facts when you hire a Digital Marketing Agency for your business growth. Good luck!

7 Tips to Choose a Great Digital Marketing Agency

A digital marketing agency works with a lot of businesses today to help them reach the right audience. It helps businesses increase brand awareness and customer base. If you are in any business, you’d surely want to find a reputable company to help you market your brand. Since digital marketing agencies can provide great impact for your business, it’s crucial that you choose the right one.

Read Also: 7 Reasons Why You Should Hire a Digital Marketing Agency in India

  • Goals– As with any marketing campaign or business idea, you must have clear goals and objectives. And you must make sure your agency is aware of them before you begin. By doing this, you will be able to find out whether your chosen agency can offer the expertise you need and deliver what you want.

  • Go traditional– One way to find a good company is to ask for recommendations. Find out what agency has been working for a friend or a colleague. Ask about their experiences with the agency. Learn how the agency has helped them and if the results were satisfactory.

  • Check out for awards– One way to find out if an agency is good is to check for industry awards. Good companies have been awarded with certifications for their astonishing works.

  • Reliable contact– As online marketing can be long-lasting and difficult, you should hire an agency which can provide you a consonant project manager. Several agencies will provide you upper-level managers to give pitch, so just ask them that who will work for you and when you can meet them.

  • Best technology– Always select a digital agency which can provide you the best technology so that you can maintain competing advantage and adhere to security standards. For a single project, there are many solutions available, so it is better to ask your agency about what technology they are going to use for your project and why they are using that particular one among others. If they fail to give proper answer then choose another agency.

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  • Expertise– Digital marketing has a lot of aspects, and different agencies can provide several services for you. Some services are inbound marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, etc. So when you are aiming for inbound marketing, find the digital marketing agency that specializes in it; the same goes for the other services.

  • Results– This is one factor that you need to focus on. You need to find out if the agency has provided good results for other businesses. You need to make sure that they were able to help businesses achieve their goals in terms of marketing. If your research shows that the agency was able to help the business increase its sales, its customer base, and its market share, then you’ve got a winner.

With these above few tips, you can choose the digital marketing agency meeting your needs.

Why Businesses Should Hire a Content Marketing Agency in India

Gone are the days when people used to buy things based on TV advertisements. Despite the fact that your business gets the greater part of its clients through verbal referrals and recommendations, the customers will undoubtedly go online to know about your company and products before purchasing your products.

Hiring a Content Marketing Agency in India will help your brand, products and services to get noticed. Today, people go online in order to find out products that they require, and they research, analyze and shortlist. If you want to attract potential buyers, you need to have an effective Content Marketing strategy for your products and services.

Read Also: List Some Successful Brands Which Make Use of Content Marketing Services

Why Hire a Content Marketing Agency in India

Relevant and high quality content is necessary to keep your website lively. This is important to stay focused in the competitive market. In any case, what about the time it takes to develop a solid Content Marketing strategy? Majority of the entrepreneurs are tied up with their most important and limited resource – their time. In addition, their lack of expertise on Content Marketing.

However, there are businesses that attempt and do it independently without understanding the result they are getting. Truth to be told, you are losing potential buyers by experimenting with your content. It may even contrarily affect the trust of the existing customers in your company.

No need to worry, hiring a best Content Marketing Agency in India can solve your content related issues. They are fully equipped with a team of business analysts and content strategists. You will get expected responses from your targeted audience owing to their professional guidance on developing a content strategy.

As per a survey conducted by Roper Public Affairs, 80% of business decision – makers depend on blogs to get details of a company. 70% said better content make them closer to business firm, while sixty percent revealed that owing to the content provided by entrepreneurs enable them make smarter purchasing decisions.

Role of a Content Marketing Agency

A Content Marketing Agency can help you by providing with better content strategy, web content writing, SEO and social media marketing. These aspects will definitely boost your business in the competitive market.

Here are some of the aspects that Content Marketing Agency does for their customers:

  • They will analyze whether your current online presence is set up in such a way to meet your business goals

  • Examine if your brand’s messaging is working well with your business goals from an outsider viewpoint

  • They will put forward suggestions on content and websites issues

  • A baseline report provided by the agency will help you ensure that if you are moving in the right direction or not when the contract is near completion.

Pick the right Content Marketing Agency in India

An expert Content Marketing Agency is skilful in analyzing the content related trends for businesses. Seeking the help of such an agency will give you results.

A top Content Marketing Agency in India is Devak Infomark. They are popular for providing quality services in content management system, web design, brand development, web application, web hosting and software development.

Interior Selection, Nano Jobs, Tech2Serve, MMB Tours, CompuSouk, Freight Reach Services are the popular clients of this agency.

Devak is famous for providing essential marketing elements like E- Commerce, Facebook Application Development, Mobile Website Development, Social media Marketing, SEO etc. This will help you to improve your online presence and boost your business.

You May Also Like: Why Outsource Content Marketing Services?

For content related needs, Deuce Technologies, Content Axis, Esmee Network are some of the best Content Marketing Agencies in India you can rely on. Esmee Network can help you in SEO content, content vamping, blog content, blog management, email marketing, website audit, etc.

Choosing Good Content: Criteria by Google

 

Google is a God among search engines. It is the most-used search engine world wide. Google handles more than three billion searches per day.

Having a website in the first page of Google is not at all easy. But what makes a page relevant enough to be placed at the top of search results? The answer is simple, it’s the CONTENT and how you promote it.

“Content isn’t King, it’s the Kingdom.” Lee Odden

Google has introduced numerous filtering procedures that reject low-quality content from search results. For increasing the traffic of a page, stuffing the keywords and building thousands of links were previous methods of content marketing.

New and fresh technologies are introduced by Google day by day which resulted in drastic changes. It was after the introduction of the new technology that search engine optimization has undergone radical development and these two methods of stuffing and building yields no results at all. Pages consisting of original and quality content gain the very best ranks in Google search results.

Read Also: What Is Content Curation? How Is It Relevant To Digital Marketing

The new technology made it possible for Google to exclude all those pages with low-quality write ups and no information. Users can easily get access to high-quality materials without wasting time on useless materials.  Few strategies help good content to stay in their position for a long time

 “Content is the reason search begun, in the first place.”  Lee Odden

Follow these steps to help your content retain its position:

Updating your content:

  • Update at least once a week
  • Quicker the content is updated, higher the chances of people visiting the page
  • Frequent updating keeps the page active and content can retain good position

Construction of content:

  • The content must be organized attractively
  • Spelling mistakes should as less as possible
  • Grammar errors are prohibited in good content
  • A good content have less than three spelling mistakes and four grammatical errors
  • Google uses check feature in Microsoft Word in order to check the grammatical errors and spelling mistakes in contents
  • Proper nouns, new words or words from other languages are not included in the list of probable errors
  • Short sentences always win the game: a good write-up has short but to the point sentences
  • A paragraph must contain only 3-4 sentences with each sentence consisting of 10-12 words
  • Bullet points can make things more clear and make a write-up interesting. People usually concentrate more on points to paragraphs

For the popularity of a page, good content is absolutely necessary. A writer’s skill plays an important part in deciding how Google views a web page. Gone are the days of stuffing keywords and link building. Now, quality speaks.

Quality content is the backbone of any website. Google’s algorithms have now evolved to detect duplicate content. They also take into consideration a lot of other factors such as user engagement, links, image optimization, page load time and other 200 plus factors.

Recommended Read: Importance of Strategy in Content Marketing

Tips for Creating Good Content:

  1. Original Content Always
  2. Create Strong Headlines
  3. Your Content Should be Actionable
  4. Provide Answers in the Content
  5. Always be Accurate about the Reports
  6. Be double sure about the source of information
  7. Content must be Thought-Provoking
  8. Communicate with the audience through the content by Adding Images and Video

Keep your sentences short and to the point