When choosing to hire a content marketing agency, you’ll come across many, many awesome high tech agencies. There are lots of inbound agencies who understand how SEO, social media marketing, lead generation, forms, email marketing, local SEO and blogging work together to create a high ranking site that consistently increases revenue. However, there are even more people who don’t understand how to do this, but want to, so they ‘fake it til they make it’.

Oh you have a college student running your Facebook page… How’s that working out for you?

Lot’s of leads, revenue generation and traffic back to your site, I’m sure. ;) That’s fine if you aren’t paying them. It’s healthy to allow people to experiment as they learn, and if you don’t actually need more revenue immediately,it can be a great learning experience to let your nephew run your facebook, or your sister build your website. If you need revenue, though, that’s a terrible strategy.

Here’s how an inexperienced content marketer can fail you:

Not going to happen...

1. Know Thy Keywords

Any blogging is better than nothing, in most cases, but if you aren’t trying to rank for keywords that are beneficial to you, what’s the point? Are the keywords you’re writing for, commonly searched? I know you think people in your area search for you under those words, but have you checked the monthly search data to see if you are right? Do you know how difficult they are to rank for? Do you know your own current rank to see if there is a ranking opportunity at all?

An inexperienced content marketer doesn’t know how to find this data, and will be unable to achieve rankings.

2. One Form to Rule Them All

You must use a different landing page and form for each offer you post. Each of the potential lead gen opportunities are directed at a different type of customer, and are aligned to a specific segment of the buying cycle: a person researching your product will be looking for something different than someone who is ready to buy.

A great content strategy, one that takes into account that you have multiple customer personas, a buying cycle with several steps and more than one product, will employ dozens, if not hundreds of forms and landing pages, over time. Reusing the same ‘contact us’ landing page and the same 4-field form across all pages is the move of an amatuer.

3. Wrapping Up the Overall Marketing Strategy

The worst thing I see on a very regular basis, is lots of effort, lots of money, but no overall content marketing strategy that supports the common goal. And, this is really the most understandable of the problems. You know how to do what you do very, very well. You trust that the professionals that you hire also know how to their job, so vetting them isn’t high up on a busy business owner’s To Do list.

Have a cohesive content strategy so that you know whether or not what you are doing is helping the goal or having no effect.

4. Get Rid of the Scams

Unfortunately, cookie cutter marketing is common, and some marketing newbies can’t help you know what to say when a sleazy lead gen company or SEO scam artists come a calling. Here’s what I tell my clients to do: Give whoever is calling my phone number.

You shouldn’t have to worry about telemarketers. I can shut them down quickly, just by asking one question… Will I be able to confirm that the revenue generated by your services correlates to at least 3x the cost of your services? Or, in layman’s terms:

Hiring a content marketing agency doesn’t have to be hard, and it doesn’t have to be expensive. You can see our content marketing prices and retainer plans, and if they are outside of your budget, we have options including partial deferred payments for startups in active fundraising mode, strategy-only plans (you execute to save money) and smaller retainers for small businesses.

The first consultation is always free, and that includes a free web assessment. Click here to learn more about our content marketing options.

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