Beware of these 3 Content Marketing Agencies...

Content isn’t just king - it’s also the blacksmith, farmer and frontline scout. To this day, the best way to ensure that organic traffic to your website becomes a primary source of revenue is producing helpful SEO content that converts.

For most companies, especially younger companies - there seems to be an aversion to deploying resources to focus on bleeding-edge SEO when you could instead focus on quicker wins like for example increasing cold-calling/prospecting. Many business leaders think that the SEO returns don’t justify the costs.

This blog aims to clarify why in fact, in many cases, the returns don’t justify the costs! But at the same time, refusing to invest in making sure your company is found when people are looking for relevant solutions would be corporate suicide. 

Let’s talk about all the helpful insights surrounding certain content marketing agencies you should avoid…

1. Content Marketing Agencies Without Advanced SEO Skills

Content takes time, money and dedication. It's a very competitive landscape out there and unfortunately, SEO is not a ‘quick win’, but thankfully it’s a really big win when you get it right. 

I mean, wouldn’t it be a shame if you pour your creative energy into creating helpful, engaging content only to find that nobody finds it?

Sidenote: This is a tough one to write about, because every digital agency under the sun will claim to be an SEO expert. But what we’ve seen from looking at SEO audits, which many other large agencies have conjured up for our clients in the past - hardly any of them actually know what they’re doing and ended up wasting precious time and budget.

So what could we say in a blog to really separate ourselves?

In a nutshell, the critical first step here is identifying the target keywords with the best balance of 3 key factors:

• Monthly search traffic
• Relevance to your value proposition
• Keyword difficulty/organic competition

That last bullet point is key and requires the most specialist skills and third-party tools to truly understand. Essentially, we find the golden nugget keywords, and shape your content strategy with the most valuable ingredients.

There really is a lot more to this, and if we’ve piqued your curiosity, we highly recommend going through the SEO section in our latest downloadable piece: 5 Bleeding-Edge Growth Strategies.

2. Content Marketing Agencies Using AI Excessively

Let’s be honest, it’s getting easier and easier to spot the AI generated fluff pieces out there as we get used to wading through piles of predicted 1’s and 0’s coming at us in the form of (what looks like) content written from genuine experience and expertise. But it’s not. There’s a certain tone, and a certain style that is just so generic, it has to be a computer. There’s no grasping how the writer felt when they wrote the piece, and there’s generally a lack of real life examples. In the purest sense of the word, AI can’t create, it can only rearrange.

Once readers pick up on this type of content, the risk is that your company will forever be labelled as an AI-abuser or time-waster in their minds. Additionally, once someone gives your content a chance and isn’t entertained - there’s really no coming back. “Entertain” is the key word there, because go do yourself a disservice and go ask Chat GPT to make a joke. 

This is what I got with the prompt “tell me your funniest one-liner joke”
Chat GPT: “I told my computer I needed a break, and now it won’t stop sending me Kit-Kats!”

What the heck? That’s profoundly bad. Plus I now need to take a break from writing and get a chocolate - thanks so much AI - really helping my productivity here.

Jokes aside though - there’s really no ignoring the power of generative AI when it comes to helping you research topics much faster, generating social posts about your content, or listing potential ideas you’d like to explore in your next blog (to serve as inspiration).

The problem with how a lot of companies use AI lies in the fact that they clearly just come up with a heading and tell the AI to go! Most of the time what you’ll get is content the reader wished they never clicked on.

So remember: Right now, AI is an assistant, not the creative force or editing aficionado you’ll need to captivate (and not a remarkably bright assistant at that - yet).

3. Content Marketing Agencies Without a Broader Strategic Approach to Growth

It’s easy to get caught up in something you specialise in, without considering that the budget being used on your skills could have in fact gone into a plethora of different initiatives instead. We need specialists, but more and more companies need really good generalists - open-minded, ‘swiss army knife’ type folks to put together growth strategies alongside the specialists.

One of the big differences between  growth agencies and typical digital marketing agencies is that an outstanding growth agency is able to say things like: “Hold on. Firstly, your pricing strategy needs to be looked at in relation to our research. Next, the messaging and emotive triggers you’ll need in your sales calls and demos can be measurably improved by doing x, y and z.” 

A good strategist is a sponge within a robust discovery process, and an absolute weapon when it comes to putting together a Pathway to success - the most efficient routes to value.

For more insight into what we really mean by “a broader strategic approach”, you’ll love our latest (very revealing) download: 5 Bleeding-Edge Growth Strategies.

Final words

Now that you have an overview of the importance of choosing the right content marketing agency -  we’re curious about whether you’d like a quick free consult on how we can help you achieve your ambitions?

Dive a lot deeper into the strategies we're implementing to fantastic effect by downloading the eBook 👉