5 Proven Tips to Select Content Agency for Your Brand

Today’s advertising landscape is overcrowded with numerous marketers clamouring to get the attention of consumers. Attention. It is the one of the most valuable commodities of 21^st century; more valuable than crude oil and gold. From brands and celebrities to politicians and events, everyone and everything is jostling for the share of consumers’ attention span. Interestingly, according to a research, attention span of humans has drastically narrowed; it has come down to less than that of a gold fish!

These contrasting scenarios underpin the importance of role content agency plays for your brand. A content agency’s primary job is to bring your brand into limelight, to leverage their creative and technical prowess to generate attention for your products and services. A combination of impactful content and effective content strategy will help your brand get maximum attention in a competitive and substitutive market. This will in turn help in generating lead, creating traffic and converting the potential customers into loyal customers. So, hiring the most suitable content agency with acuteness and aligned vision is essential and the key factor which will can make or break your brand.

This blog is a guide for what should be looked for while hiring a content agency for your brand.

1. What is their market position?

Wanting the best for your brand is the least selfish thing because building a brand requires huge amount of time, dedication and most importantly money. For some brands the status of the content agency in the market acts as an incentive to seal the deal. But for some brands learning methodology of how content agency works in the context of their own objective is a more fitting approach. Is the brand-agency relation more important or the agency-product/service? It is for the entrepreneurs and brand managers to decide.  

• Are they the right people for you?

It is important to find the perfect content agency that has the ideal content, market related knowledge, innovative ideas and motivation to work as per brand’s goals. Try to gauge their promise-to-performance ratio by checking out their portfolio or by assigning them small tasks of content writing. The second strategy will particularly help you in understanding their expertise in your industry. It is important to evaluate and select a suitable agency, rather than taking hire-and-fire approach. Because changing your content partner continuously can prove expensive as well as tedious, and the inconsistencies arising from it can affect reputation of the brand.

• How much value do they add?

There can be many content agencies which will have good ideas, which is great! But their own perspective can hamper the vision and mission of the brand. Flashy ideas, strong presentations and pushy offers can become blinders to the main goal. And so, while selecting content agency you should make sure that the agency pays attention towards delivering the best for the brand rather than their own proficiency.  In other words, the agency’s responsibility should be not to sell ideas that make them look great, but to sell ideas that make your brand look great.

Also, the content agency should be able to map out the future of the product/service and continuously work to solve every marketing problem that it might face. Well-organized and timely content is relevant, for sure. But making sure that this content is circulated enough can give brand edge over the competition. The agency must act like a doctor for product/service and suggest best treatment which can help the brand achieve success.

• What is their methodology?

Agreed that all agencies work differently, and they have their own functionalities and creative processes.  Every agency has different teams with different expertise and different experience. Though this adds to the creativity, this can also lead to inconsistency. All the content should have the same tone, theme and approach even if it has been written by various people. The brand manager should keep an eye out for such margins of errors or duplication of ideas.

There should be, indisputably, scheduled delivery of the content. Content must be calendared and managed within timeline to maintain constant market presence. Not just that, agency should be able to revert back and report the buzz the content generates to the brand in order to decide on further actions to be taken.

• What variety of services can they provide?

Generating best content is not enough to accomplish the whole process of the marketing funnel. The content agency should be proficient to deliver different types of content formats like campaigns, social media, blogs, videos, brochures, presentations etc. All these things will help to engage and acquire customers from various platforms. Apart from having a good knack over all these formats, they should have a sense of judgement to decide which of these should be used at what stage and with what consistency. Selection of content agency is an important process. A detailed background research must be done on potential agencies before locking the deal. Don’t be hesitant in asking questions.  If you want to learn more about how content agency can contribute to the growth of your brand, we invite you to get in touch with Content Kafe team. We will be more than happy to help you.