Selecting the Content Marketing Agency is a difficult choice to make as it involves cost, time, and efforts to find out the best content marketing agency that can do justice with upscaling the brand image of your products and services. If statistics are to be believed, about 73% of the organizations have adopted content marketing strategies for their brand promotion that are either handled in-house or managed by hiring a content marketing agency that provides quality, quantifying and higher returns. You may not find every content marketing agency to provide you the exact result that you want instantly, but finding the perfect match is not difficult too.
Here, we are listing a few questions that will help you to evaluate any content marketing agency before hiring them.
1) What is the experience of your agency in our industry?
The content marketing agency must be having previous clients in various industries, including the industry in which you are operating. If the content marketing agency has worked in your industry then definitely they will offer some ideas, tools, and strategies that they have often used for promoting the products and services of your industry. Also, the content marketing agency can suggest the best platform to promote your brand against competitors. It is absolutely fine to ask for samples of their previous work and check out the kind of content they have posted on various online platforms.
2) What are the latest tools you use for content strategy plans?
Most of the agencies nowadays use management tools to handle the data as well as the content. Either they have their own in-house software applications or use the online tools that are available for systematically managing the projects. Enquire and take a look at the tools that the content marketing agency uses to get a first-hand experience of the tools that they will use.
3) What is your research process?
If the content is the king, then research behind the quality content is the queen. Every successful marketing campaign is based on the content and the research done. Guesswork does not work here. It is the well-researched content, based on facts and statistics that help in structuring the marketing campaign..
4) What format do you use for reporting?
Reporting means measuring the success of the content marketing campaigns. It is not necessary that every agency follows a strict format of reporting. Some stick to the detailed PPT while others prefer Excel sheets as more precise. Google Data Studio dashboard is an interactive option that you may use for measuring the results. Generally, the content marketing agency provides details related to:
● Organic and non-organic traffic driven towards the webpages.
● Increase in engagement and flow of traffic through social media promotions
● Ranking of the keywords
● The future course of action or strategies to be adopted
5) How my brand is going to benefit from your efforts?
Ask for the benefits or the features that you are going to drive from the services of the content marketing agency. In short, you need to talk about the Return on Investment (ROI). Find out what results will be achieved once you hire the content marketing agency and the expected results in terms of better sales and brand promotion of your business. An easy formula to measure ROI in percentage is:
ROI % = (Conversion value – Spend) x 100/ Spend
6) How are you going to charge?
This should be the last question that you must ask the content marketing company. Definitely, the calculations must be going on in your mind and you must be having an approx budget for marketing your brand. If you find that the content marketing agency satisfies your requirement then give it a green light, even if the charges are a little above the margins of your budget. Do not fall under the fake promises of the agency that appears cheap and the result will not be up to the mark. It is better to invest in an agency that fulfills your requirements and can enhance the ROI instead of wasting your money on a failed marketing campaign.
Conclusion
When you hand over the content marketing task to any agency, ensure that your project goes in the safe hands where you can expect quality results while gaining positive results. The selection of the content marketing agency based on the answers that you gather from the various agencies. The one that fits better on the budget as well as provides satisfying answers to the above questions must be your final pick.