Everyone’s business is different so everyone’s marketing strategy needs to be positioned differently. Enter a marketing agency. While marketing agencies know how to market, they may not know how to do it for your company specifically. Enter the doubts. To a business, this may not make sense- how can an outside agency understand what we need? Hence the reason why most companies do marketing in-house, this option feels safe and secure. Enter the secrets. Marketing agencies have a few tricks up their sleeve to create marketing plans that are specific for your business. After all, marketing is their expertise so they know how to get it done ;)
The 4 Secrets to creating content for a variety of industries:
1. Competitor Research
The business environment is competitive, always has been. A marketing agency worth it’s weight will use this to their advantage.
To get a handle on the pieces of content relative to your business they will look at what your competitors are doing and how they are positioning themselves on the web. With the right tools at their side an agency can essentially reverse engineer a competitor’s website. We have the ability to see how they rank, what gets clicked on their websites and many other fancy spy tools but those are REAL secrets!
Moving on from the behind the scenes spying tools, you can understand the basics just by looking. They read their mission statement, understand their pitch and look at the online marketing they currently have live on their website. By looking at competitor’s content- ebooks, landing pages, blogs, webinars, pdfs, pages- a marketing agency is able to derive conclusions to content that will best suite your business.
2. The Marketing Persona
Another popular term for this is buyer persona. Marketing agencies will do research into your ideal customer and compile a persona for how best to target them. This is done with some outside industry research but the bulk of it comes from the horses mouth- you the business owner. No one knows your customers better than you.
Together you and your marketing agency can dive deep into the relationships you have with current consumers, pushbacks you receive during your sales process and the problems potential consumers are experiencing that make a need for your product or service.
All of this makes up the Marketing Persona which is broken down into a couple of sections:
- Who your ideal prospect is (i.e. Mother of the household)
- Where they can be found online (facebook, pinterest, cooking sites)
- Solutions they are looking for (What brings them to you in the first place)
- Reasons why they would back out of a sale (too expensive)
- Communication Guidelines (what style do they respond to)
- Motivation Guidelines (what motivates them)
A marketing agency will then use this information to create compelling content that appeals to your specific marketing persona.
3. Keyword Research
I use this term lightly. Google is putting more of emphasis on content as a whole than keywords and SEO these days.
BUT, once the marketing persona is in place, your marketing agency brainstorms phrases that your ideal prospect may type into search engines when looking for your business solutions. The agency then takes those keywords and places them into a keyword tool that will tell them how many searches that keyword phrase gets a month and how difficult it is to be found for that phrase.
Together this information makes up ‘Keyword Research’. It gives your marketing agency an idea of what kind of searches are being done and we can also see which of your competitors are being found on the first pages of Google for those searches.
This goes into your content strategy. They know what your audience is searching for and they now know the keyword phrases you need to use in your content to get on the first pages of Google. A blogging strategy will usually come from this.
4. Past Marketing Tactics
I’m sure your business has done some marketing campaigns in the past. Well what worked and what didn’t work so well?
A marketing agency will look at these past marketing efforts and dissect them. Why did this have such a high response? Why did this engagement fail? They will ask the hard questions and consider the derived conclusions for your future content strategy.
The Bottom Line
A marketing agency understands that your business is a different animal and they approach it as such. They take the time to gather the research and get to know your industry. Our processes for approaching it may differ from agency to agency but at the end of the day it is about marketing to your IDEAL prospect and that’s what the content created will target.
