You’ve heard it said time and again – content is king – and when it comes to creating a successful agency marketing services strategy, no statement could be more true. In order to support a successful content creation process with your marketing agency, it’s important to know how inbound marketing content is created. Here is the process, distilled into 4 simple steps.
Step 1: Develop a Keyword Strategy
The first thing your marketing agency should do is ask its client company’s owners, sales reps, customer service reps and other appropriate subject matter experts and stakeholders what keyword phrases they believe potential customers and clients search for when looking for their products and services online. Next, the agency marketing services provider will come up with a list of anywhere from 25 to 100 keywords and start testing them against relevance, search frequency and competitiveness.
Once the keyword list has been evaluated, vetted and narrowed down to a handful – and this is a far more complicated process than we’ve encapsulated in the tiny paragraph above – you’ll have a list of the best keywords to help develop a fully–fledged content strategy.
Step 2: Identify The Right Writer(s) For The Job
Whether they’re freelancers, firm hires or in-house at the client’s business, finding the right writer or writer to create high-value content on a consistent basis is no easy task. Vetting writers can take a lot of time and should be something you allow the agency marketing services provider to do.
However, if you’ve identified someone in-house whom you believe would be a great provider of contents or the ideas and materials to fuel great content, by all means share them. Some of the best and most compelling content comes directly from the source – but be prepared to allow your marketing firm a bit of reign over the content, to ensure it aligns with the overall inbound marketing strategy, including SEO.
Depending on the scope of your inbound marketing content strategy, chances are there will be multiple writing specialists working on various components of the campaign – some on blogging and social media, others on white papers and still more dedicated to sales-driven content.
Step 3: Collaborate On Titles and Topics
One of the best things about hiring an agency marketing services provider is that they can help you to find the best title and topic ideas that can drive up clicks and leads. If you’ve supported a two-way collaborative process, brainstorming should be easy and pointed. You could ask for a blog post on a particular topic, and the marketing firm can suggest a title that incorporates winning keywords and tactics for luring in the most interest.
Step 4: Create Optimized Content That Converts
Now that you’ve found the right keywords, the right content creators, and the right topics, it’s time to combine it all. The only things left to focus on is content optimization and publishing once the content is back from the writer.
Your inbound marketing firm will have an entire content optimization process each piece of content has to go through to help ensure it’s going to rank well in search engines for the targeted keywords, drive traffic to your site and, perhaps most importantly, actually provide content that’s easy to read (we’ve all seen SEO content that’s all keywords and no prose).
Now that you know what it takes to create great content that converts, you can better support and contribute to your agency marketing services provider’s process. Once these four steps have been trodden over a few content creation cycles, stellar content and excellent results will begin to flow in a steady and almost predictable inbound stream.