How to Truly Partner with Your Content Marketing Agency

The client/agency partnership can be like a marriage. Success in both takes open, honest communication, trust, and hard work. And like a marriage, both parties must be active participants to ensure a happy and fruitful union. When it works, it can be bliss. But when it doesn’t, the relationship can end in acrimony, bad blood, and hurt feelings.

This is also true of the relationship between a business and their content marketing agency. Strong content across all channels is crucial to how a business presents itself to the public. It is a powerful tool in building trust and strong relationships with your audience. 

Why Businesses Need To Partner With A Content Agency

However, businesses often don’t have the time and resources to develop content on their own. So they need to partner with an experienced content marketing agency that can help them achieve their long-term business and marketing goals.

Freelancers can be fine for individual projects, but freelancers do not invest themselves in your business like an agency will. Plus, an agency has a team of experienced marketing experts who can help with strategy, provide industry insight, streamline content workflows, and manage the marketing funnel.  

In short, partnering with a content agency is a faster, smarter, and more cost-effective way to manage content development and distribution.

The importance of a strong client/content marketing agency relationship cannot be overstated. A successful relationship can be a win-win for both parties, but as mentioned, it takes work, collaboration, trust, and mutual respect. Let’s take a look at how businesses and their content marketing agency can work together to form a perfect union.

What Does A Content Marketing Agency Do?

As the name suggests, content marketing agencies create and distribute a company’s written, video, and graphical content.  “Content” can include blogs and social media posts and updates, videos, infographics, white papers, case studies, email campaigns, and more. The primary objective of content marketing is to reach, engage, and inspire customers to act, generate leads and sales, and build, maintain, and elevate brand awareness. 

How To Build A Successful Relationship With Your Content Marketing Agency

For starters, your agency should not be seen as just another service provider but an extension of your own marketing team. To achieve success, your business and your agency must work together as a unified team. While you probably did your research in the vetting and interview processes, do a deeper dive into their past, their culture, and their philosophies on what success looks like. You know they’re doing the same about your business. Ultimately, to achieve success, both parties need to approach the work with a sense of teamwork, respect, and professionalism. 

Set Clear and Realistic Goals and Expectations

Clear and reasonable expectations on both sides should start early and extend through the length of the relationship. Knowing up front about what’s expected is important for setting guidelines and gauging progress. Being open and honest about expectations regarding ROI, deliverables, ownership, and what’s possible within your budget can set both parties up for success. Again, relationships go both ways, so expect your agency to have their own list of what they expect from you. Getting in sync with expectations will go a long way to fostering a healthy working relationship.

Be Transparent

Just like any relationship, respect, trust, and transparency are keys to success. So be open with your agency about your strategy and goals and the scope of the work. Be clear about any other traditional or digital marketing strategies that you may currently be involved in. Letting them know about negative experiences with other agencies (if any) could help avoid mistakes made in the past. Of course, relationships are two-way, so expect your agency to be as open and honest with you as you are with them.

Establish Regular Lines of Communication

It’s vitally important for both clients and agencies to have up-front communications to keep the relationship moving along. To that end, set up a regular meeting schedule to discuss what’s working (or what’s not), status updates, changes or adjustments in overall business strategy, and what’s going on within your company. While face-to-face meetings may not yet be possible, leveraging communication tools like Zoom, Google Meet, and Slack can help everyone stay connected. Regular meetings will help build rapport and ensure everyone is on the same page.

Listen To (And Act On) Their Feedback

Believe it or not, your content marketing agency might just teach you a thing or two about your own business or industry. The more experienced agencies have probably seen it all and their perspective and feedback can be invaluable in helping you develop (or change) your marketing strategy. So be receptive to feedback and advice; you never know what you might learn from it. On the flip side, don’t be afraid to serve up regular feedback on your agency’s performance. Constructive feedback will be a boon for everyone involved.

Celebrate Success Together

In a true partnership, when one party wins, everyone wins. So celebrate all the little victories with your agency, whether that be the completion of a project, improved sales numbers, hitting annual goals, industry awards or recognition, or positive feedback from your happy customers. Always make sure they’re included in your celebrations because they were instrumental in your successes.

The Bottom Line

Find the right agency and you can expect something that approaches a best of both worlds solution – giving you access to the expertise of an agency while maintaining the feel and creative cohesiveness of an internal team. It’s important that both parties stay committed to constant improvement, but when all the pieces fall into place, it can be a match made in heaven.

Thinking about hiring a content agency but don’t know where to start? Comma Copywriters offers a variety of wordsmithing services for your business, everything from content marketing strategy to copywriting and editing. Schedule your free consultation today.