Everyone at your brand seems to be on board with content marketing. The trouble is, you’ve tried and haven’t had much success with it. Either you’re struggling to create engaging content on a regular basis or, when you do create that content, no one’s looking at it. It might be that you want to get going with content marketing but you have no idea where to get started. What do you need to do to get the ball rolling? Enter content marketing solutions.
One of the more popular content marketing solutions is to outsource some (or all) aspects of your company’s content marketing. 62 percent of B2C content marketers in North America outsource at least one part of their content marketing program to a content marketing solutions provider.
The activity brands most commonly outsourced is content creation. Some also outsource content promotion, content marketing strategy development, and content marketing measurement and analytics.
Is working with a content marketing solutions provider the right choice for you?
Why Do You Need a Content Marketing Solution?
Close your eyes and think of the biggest challenge your brand faces when it comes to content marketing. Is it regularly producing high-quality, relevant content? If so, you’re not alone. According to Econsultancy, creating fresh content was the challenge cited by the majority of content marketers surveyed.
One solution to the problem of struggling to produce relevant, fresh, excellent content is to outsource the creation of that content to a team of professionals. Having to brainstorm ideas and then sit down and produce the content connected to those ideas can be challenging. Instead, you can hire creators who have dedicated their professional lives to producing the best content possible.
Another reason why content marketers and brands seek out content marketing solutions is because they aren’t sure where to start. How can they go around to putting together a content marketing strategy? According to the B2C Content Marketing – 2018 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends – North America report, about 26 percent of content marketers described their efforts as “young”. They had difficulty putting together a cohesive plan and strategy for content marketing.
With a content marketing solution, creating a content marketing strategy isn’t something your brand needs to worry about. A team of professional content strategists can work with you to create a strategy that recognizes your brand’s goals. They can help put together a comprehensive plan to help you reach them.
What Can Content Marketing Solutions Do for You?
Content marketing solutions can do more than take over the production of content and the development of a content marketing strategy. The services offered by content marketing solutions often include:
- Assistance putting together an editorial calendar and creating a schedule for content creation and publication
- Content optimization (for search engines and mobile devices)
- Assistance in content distribution (through social media platforms and influencers)
- Content marketing measurement (identifying key performance indicators, or KPI, that will help you achieve your goals, tracking the performance of each piece of content
- Identifying the best creators to produce your brand’s content
How to Find the Right Solution to Your Content Marketing Concerns
Once you get started looking for content marketing solutions, you’re likely to find there are a lot of options. In some cases, choosing the wrong solution or a content marketing platform that doesn’t meet your needs can only complicate the situation. Here are a few tips to help you choose the best solution to your content marketing concerns.
DIY vs. Hands-on Help
One of the things you need to decide right away is whether you want to take a do-it-yourself approach to your content marketing or completely outsource it to a content marketing platform. If you’re going the DIY route, a software-based solution might be the best option for you. This solution lets you choose creators, negotiate payments and pricing, and oversee the production of content.
If you’re completely new to content marketing and can’t afford to hire a full-time content manager or director, working with a managed services content marketing provider might be the better option. Managed services means you have an actual person to talk with and to discuss your content marketing concerns and challenges.
Scope of services offered
Another thing to consider when choosing a content marketing solution is how much help you need. Do you only need assistance creating content or do you need help developing strategy, promoting content, and measuring its results? Some content marketing platforms offer a very limited set of services. They might let you hire creators to produce content but won’t offer much help when it comes to tracking and measuring the results of that content.
Steps to Working With a Content Marketing Solutions Provider
When you’ve found a content marketing platform that seems it will solve many of your content creation, promotion, and measurement problems, what should you do next?
First, dig deeper to learn more about the provider or platform. There might be reviews online that give you a better idea of the scope of services offered. You may run into a better idea of what it’s like to work with the company.
If after reading reviews and learning more about the company you still like what you see, get in touch with the provider or platform. Ask for even more details about what it offers and how it will help solve the challenges you face with content marketing. It’s a good idea to ask for a demonstration of its services, whether it’s a software platform or a managed service provider. You want to get the gist of what you’ll get before you invest.
Finally, if all seems well, go ahead and give that solution a try. Ask the provider if it offers a trial or if it is willing to work with you on a trial basis so you can determine whether or not its offerings will really help you. You’ll want to be able to back away and find a new solution, rather than being contractually bound to stick with a program that’s not cutting it for your brand.
Content marketing can be difficult. Working with a solutions provider that has years of experience with content marketing and a proven track record of producing content for some of today’s biggest brands can be just what your company needs to get its content marketing off to an excellent start.
