There are over 100,000 content marketing agencies just in the United States. Add freelancers to the mix, and you now have over a million competitors in the content marketing agency business across the world.
Surviving and growing under these circumstances is not just hard; it is brutal.
But let these numbers not overwhelm you. The good thing about content marketing is that everyone needs it - be it a one person eCommerce store selling on Facebook, or a NASDAQ listed rocket manufacturer - every business needs content in one form or another.
Finding your niche, marking your presence, and building a reputation is all there is to thrive.
Know your customer
The content marketing business is bi-elemental. It includes content production and distribution. Get one of them wrong and your campaigns fail.
The first step in launching a successful content marketing business is to know your place in the vast marketing ecosystem.
The job of a content marketing team is to assist a business in amplifying its overall marketing goals through content. It is not wrong to then say that the Head of Marketing in an organization is your customer.
The key to finding success and growing your content marketing agency business is to identify what the customer wants, exceed their expectations, and thus make them happy.
But here is the cold truth - you cannot make everyone happy.
Each business is different, and the needs and expectations of a marketing team are inevitably unique as well.
Finding your niche is incredibly important to building and growing your content marketing brand.
Picking your niche
When you are just starting out, it may be tempting to take on every job that comes your way. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this.
However, growth happens when you go deep into a specific niche.
There are three popular ways to go about this.
- Niching down by industry: You could find a specific industry that you are passionate about and work exclusively with these clients. This could be travel, SaaS, eCommerce, etc.
- Niching down by location: You could work exclusively with clients from a specific city or state. To an extent, this also depends on your marketing channels. We will discuss this in greater detail subsequently.
- Niching down by content format: This is particularly common among video or audio marketers since these are relatively less common skills to find.
So, the logical next question here is to know which of these options should you be going for? There is really no right answer to this. Success in content marketing can come regardless of how you choose to specialize.
In fact, you could be a successful content marketer being a Jack of all trades too. It’s just relatively easier to find success when you dig into a specific niche.
5 Steps to Establishing a Growth Strategy
If you are reading this article, you already know that content marketing can be an effective source of long-term sustainable traffic.
But the challenge is this - content marketing costs time and money to deliver results. This is something you cannot afford in the early days of running a business.
One way to grow your content marketing agency business is by deploying a multi-layered approach.
- Establish an operational plan for the short-term, and
- Work on strategic initiatives for the long-term
The operational short-term plan focuses on securing new clients quick and fast. However, this could involve growth strategies that are not scalable.
The long-term plan could focus on strategies that can bring in a steady stream of new customers to your business.
Step 1: Mark your presence
The first step in launching and growing a content marketing agency business is to build a presence online.
Potential customers want to know who you are, and what kind of work you have done even, before they interact with your marketing outreach.
As a first step, you may want to launch a website and a LinkedIn profile for your business. These pages should highlight the services you offer, the industries you work with, a list of your past clients, as well as a detailed writeup of the people behind the scenes.
It is also important that you have a portfolio of work you have done in the past. Many content marketing agencies tend to avoid having a portfolio online since this can act as a filter. Clients could potentially decide against hiring you even before the first interaction.
However, having an updated portfolio of your best work helps establish your authority in the industry. The pros more than outweigh the cons.
In addition to a website and a LinkedIn profile, content marketing agencies may also build a presence on other platforms like Google My Business, Clutch, Trustpilot, and Sortlist.
These platforms could potentially drive organic traffic to your business in the long-term. It is important that you build a presence here soon after you launch your business.
Step 2: Initiate cold outreach
It is a fair assumption to make that when you are just starting out, potential clients do not know you exist. Cold outreach is one of the most effective ways to initiate conversation with your prospective customers.
Email and calls are perhaps the two most common ways to reach prospective customers. Tools like Apollo and Clay help you build a database of potential prospects to reach out to while agencies like LeadJoint and Belkins can help you build your email sequences, and set up your cold email campaign.
In addition to this, there are other platforms like LinkedIn that you can leverage to connect with decision makers and initiate a conversation with them about working on the content marketing part of their business.
Setting up for success
Cold email works well when you scale up. In a highly saturated industry like content marketing, it is common to see response rates of under 0.25%.
That is, for every 1000 decision makers you reach out to, you could book a meeting with 2-3 people.
Be mindful of this while launching your campaign since you may not see many responses at lower volumes.
Step 3: Invest in paid ads
Like cold outreach, paid ads help initiate conversations with potential customers who may not know you otherwise. But unlike cold outreach, paid ads - especially search ads - help you reach customers when they are in the market to hire an agency.
There are a number of different channels to choose from for your paid ad campaign. This includes Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn to mention a few. Not all channels may work for your specific ad campaign strategy.
You may also consider investing in sponsored listings on platforms like Clutch and Sortlist since they specifically cater to this industry. However, it is also worth noting that services like these get a large chunk of traffic from search engines. So, if advertising on Google is cheaper than Clutch, you can choose to stick with just the former.
Setting up for success
Paid ad campaigns have a number of moving parts. This includes your ad copy, the landing page, the ad budget you set, and the platform you choose. You need to get alignment across all these elements to convert customers.
Also, ad networks need to test your campaigns across several audiences to see what converts best. All this means is that the first month of your paid campaign could be spent in simply gathering data to understand what works and what doesn’t.
Once you (and the ad networks) know what works, it gets easier to optimize your campaigns for higher success.
For this reason, it is ideal to start your paid ad campaigns after you see initial traction with your cold outreach.
Also, capturing leads is just the first part. Success with paid ads comes from properly nurturing these leads through other channels like email or phone calls. For example, Facebook has a Leads Center that helps advertisers to organize, label, message, and follow-up with their leads all natively.
Step 4: Invest in SEO & content marketing
Cold email and paid ad campaigns help you set the ball rolling in the short-term. For long-term success, it is important to invest in marketing channels that can bring a steady stream of inbound traffic.
As a content marketing agency business, it is prudent to leverage your knowledge in this industry to grow your business.
Having said that, your efforts need to stay limited to the content formats you serve. For instance, a video marketing agency can still work on blog content to enhance visibility on search engines. Similarly, a blog marketing agency can explore podcasts and videos to drive visibility to their business.
Setting up for success
Tracking performance of your keywords is critical in SEO. Search engines like Google and modern AI search tools like ChatGPT make use of the user’s location to deliver relevant results. Oftentimes, a website that ranks in the first page of Google in one location may fail to make it to the top 100 in another.
To track your results accurately, you could consider buying a proxy server that can help you simulate search results from different geographies. Popular keyword trackers like Ahrefs and SEMRush are good alternatives as well.
Step 5: Build your online brand
This step typically starts four to five months after you launch your content marketing agency business. At this point, you have a handful of clients and have also started delivering results.
Now is the time to leverage this to grow your online brand.
It is a good practice to include a link to an NPS survey with each of your invoices. NPS, or Net Promoter Score, measures client satisfaction and gives you a fair idea of the value you are delivering your clients.
A high NPS score indicates a happy clientele while a low NPS is a measure of client dissatisfaction.
Do note however that review-gating is illegal, and also against the terms and conditions of most platforms. That is, you are not allowed to filter out happy clients and seek reviews from only them. Be mindful of this when seeking reviews from your clients.
Setting up for success
Ideally pick only one platform to build a brand. This could be your Google My Business profile, or your listing on Clutch, Sortlist, or Trustpilot.
By investing solely on one platform, you will be able to maximize your mileage in terms of visibility, and thus drive more leads from these platforms.
Amplifying your content marketing business growth
Securing the first five clients can be the hardest part of launching a content marketing business. Once you have a recurring clientele in place, things can get easier in terms of scaling up.
However, there are certain things that can help you amplify this growth further.
Invest in AI
When it comes to running a content marketing business, the use of AI is paramount. According to a recent ZenBusiness survey, over 90% of small business owners today view AI as an essential part of running a business.
Sure, there are certain areas where AI is a no-go. This includes the use of GenAI tools to produce the content for you. Not only can this break your client’s trust in your service, this also commoditizes your outputs and makes you easily replaceable.
Build a referral marketing strategy
As we established earlier in this article, every business needs content marketing in some form to grow their business. Investing in a referral marketing program enables your happy clients to reward your work with references from other businesses in their network.
Setting up a referral marketing campaign is easy with tools like ReferralCandy and Growsurf.
Streamline your business processes
A content marketing agency business has multiple stakeholders, and growing your agency is not possible without properly streamlining your different processes.
With a tool like StoryChief, you can seamlessly create a content calendar for each client, centralize your content creation process, streamline the collaboration workflows, maximize reach, and manage multiple clients from the same dashboard.
StoryChief now offers a 7-day free trial to its customers where you get access to all of the add-ons and features. Explore your workspace by clicking on this sign up link.
