What is a B2B Content Marketing Agency? The Good and The Bad

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When you go to a clinic, your desired result is to get treated and recover. That usually happens, but sometimes you don’t see any improvements even after time has passed.

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Just like clinics, there are good marketing agencies that get you the results you want and those that don’t. 

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But when it comes to B2B marketing agencies, good results and bad results take more time to tell apart. The best thing to do is to find and work with a good agency to begin with, and that requires knowing how to spot what makes an agency good or bad. 

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So what should you look out for in a B2B content marketing agency to make sure that you get the return on your hard earned money? 

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To answer this, let's first look at what a B2B content marketing agency is supposed to do.

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What is a B2B Content Marketing Agency?

A B2B content marketing agency uses content marketing, like B2B blogging, to help your business grow. One of content marketing’s goals is to enable and assist in closing sales for your business. The content the agency produces should also help with:

• Increasing organic website traffic
• Building brand awareness
• Establishing your brand as a trusted and reputable voice in your industry

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Most agencies in this space can help out in the following ways:

Production 

‍They’ll help you create written content, videos, podcasts, infographics, or other types of relevant media. Many agencies and freelancers specialise in only content production.

Strategy 

Some agencies go further and help you plan a suitable content strategy for your company which they may then go on to execute. We’ll dive deeper into what makes a good strategy later in the article.

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Separating the good agencies from the bad ones

We’ve compiled a list of red flags to look out for when screening a B2B content agency:

• Focuses on low-difficulty keywords that may or may not have relevance or traffic, without plans for ranking for high difficulty keywords
  
  
• Using SEO tools or 'AI' to determine keyword strategy ONLY
  
  
• Generic content that any competitor can swap your logo with theirs and nobody would know better
  
  
• Content that only serves the purpose of ranking for search keywords
  
  
• Rephrasing of content that is already out there
  
  
• Reporting metrics that don't tie in to business goals

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On the flip side, here’s our list of what makes a good B2B content agency:

• Focuses on keywords that matters to your audience, with a clear approach to ranking for high difficulty keywords over time
  
  
• Utilises a mix of methods including drawing real customer insights, extracting product data, published research reports AND using SEO tools
  
  
• Content is well positioned, localised to market, and uniquely yours
  
  
• Content that ranks for search keywords, helps to drive lead conversions, actually teaches the audience something new, and can be used by sales team for outreach
  
  
• Shares unique insights or presents ideas in innovative ways
  
  
• Business outcomes are factored into reporting
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1. Keyword Strategy

Issue: Focus on low-difficulty keywords that may or may not have relevance or traffic, without plans for ranking for high difficulty keywords 

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There are many agencies that focus on mass producing SEO content quickly without focusing on quality. They use a list of keywords planned either by you or recommended by themselves and then produce the content via outsourced writers with little to no business experience or produced by AI.

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What results is that an impressive amount of content is created but most of it is a rehash of other businesses' content (likely by your competitors) or as we’ve seen, “AI generated content” that sounds strange or is even factually wrong. 

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This type of content could help to move your search rankings up for a while when there’s no other content competing for the same keywords, but engagement will be low since people can see the quality isn’t worth sticking around for. 

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Over time, this could lower your rankings as users return back to the search engine page to look for better content, signalling to search algorithms that what was published on your site is not worth pushing up search rankings.

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If your business exists in a completely unique space where no other business is publishing content, this approach may work, but for most B2B contexts we do not recommend this.

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Solution: Focus on keywords that matters to your audience, with a clear approach to ranking for high difficulty keywords over time

Some B2B content marketing agencies are run by people who have experience in building businesses. Having experienced how marketing or sales teams work, these true content marketers are able to speak with your commercial or product teams to know what pain points your customers face and plan for content that covers first engagement with new leads through to closing the sale.

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Planning the content strategy begins with discussions with your marketing and sales teams to gain understanding of who your customers are. The research process involves running through sales processes and even reviewing sales correspondence or call recordings, with your permission of course. 

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They’ll then create a buyer’s persona from the research and pain points that they have gathered. These customer insights form the basis of the content plan.

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Good content needs to work for humans and search engines, not search engines only. The planned topics should factor in a mix of buying intent keyword volume, keyword difficulty, company positioning and value proposition. 

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Keywords that have a higher chance to result in a purchase have high competition. One of the ways of targeting keywords that are tougher to rank for is by building valuable, high quality content around them first before we move on to lower difficulty keywords. That way, we can give our content targeting high difficulty keywords more time to rank.

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This type of content strategy gets your company the search traffic, visibility, and sales conversions that you need.

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2. Research Process

Issue: Using SEO tools or 'AI' to determine keyword strategy ONLY

A few of the issues that bad agencies have are related to giving too little attention to what your company does and your position in your industry.

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We’ve seen a few agencies whose research just involves looking through your company website and service pages only. They’ll then plug some of those themes and keywords into their SEO tools or AI software like ChatGPT to get a list of keywords and call it a day.

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The result is that some of the topics they recommend to you will be very far removed from the service and value your company really offers. One example is recommending a theme like ‘all things related to restaurants’ for a HR software company that focuses on small restaurants.

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With so little care given to understanding what you do, it’s no wonder that even if the content they produce ranks it doesn’t do much to drive business outcomes.

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Solution: Utilises a mix of methods including drawing real customer insights, extracting product data, published research reports AND using SEO tools

On our end we’ve seen that great marketing, content marketing included, stems from understanding as much as we can.

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One mark of a good agency that we’ve found is checking how much effort they put into understanding your customer and their pain points before they begin ideating topics.

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Good agencies will have multiple different ways of finding more about your customer. All this work is to get as clear an idea of your target persona and their pain points.

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• Interviewing your sales teams, managers, and clients with your permission
• Going through published research reports
• Analysing data that you are willing to provide them about your clients. 

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To ensure that your products and services are properly positioned throughout your content, good agencies will request for as much information about your products and services as they can get. 

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This way, the agencies can position their recommended content themes to only what works for your business and your unique value proposition.

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With your buyer’s pain points and your company’s positioning in mind, they’ll then produce content themes relevant to your business and your target audience. Then and only then will they run these themes through the SEO tools to get you keywords and topics that can fit your business well.

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3. Uniqueness of Content

Issue: Generic content that any competitor can swap your logo with theirs and nobody can tell

If the agency you’re working with doesn’t really care about your target audience or your positioning, it means that any content that they produce will end up being generic.

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If they don’t know who your target audience is and what their pain points are, the content cannot be personalised to anyone. If they don’t understand your business, they can’t point to your services or your brand in any meaningful way. 

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So the content that you get has neither direction nor identity. It cannot speak to your audience’s wants and needs. The content can be easily used by anyone just by swapping your logo and colours with theirs. The article becomes another forgettable statistic in an ocean of blog posts on the internet.

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Solution: Content is well positioned, localised to market and uniquely yours

Good agencies by this point would have understood your audience, your company’s position and unique value proposition and what key messages they need to communicate as best as they can.

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With your target audience clearly in mind, the content they produce can speak to their pain points uncovered in their research. 

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From the knowledge they gained by speaking to your sales team and going through your client data the content can be written with the same style and language that your clients find relatable. 

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The cherry on top is that any content they produce can point back to your company’s branding, key message and unique value proposition.

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4. Usefulness of Content

Issue: Content only serves the purpose of ranking for search keywords

One of the marks of a bad agency is that instead of focusing on metrics that your business needs, they focus on large numbers for the sake of large numbers. This results in misunderstanding the purpose behind ranking for high volume keywords.

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They may mistakenly write content for the sole purpose of just ranking for the keyword just to get you web traffic. The content will be well-optimised for the search engines, but the content is likely going to be thin, contain nothing valuable to your readers, and cannot help you build authority with your audience. 

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Even if the content ranks, it won’t be able to provide your business with much more than that.

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Solution: Content that ranks for search keywords, helps to drive lead conversions, actually teaches the audience something new, and can be used by sales team for outreach

Great content’s value doesn’t solely lie in generating web traffic alone.

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Since good content is built to answer your target audience’s real pain points and questions, it can draw people in and keep them engaged with fresh and useful insights. 

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When planned for the whole buyer’s journey, great content from your company can follow and nudge your potential buyer from the first online search all the way to a closed sale.

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Great content can help out other marketing channels and teams. Good content can be repurposed to be used in social media, events, brochures and fliers. These can then be shared by the sales team to build rapport with potential clients which can enable them to close more sales.

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5. Depth of Content

Issue: Rephrasing of content that is already out there 

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As a consequence of not understanding who your customers are and what you do, some agencies can only rely on your competitors or other industry players for content ideas.

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Since they don’t know what problems need to be solved and what solutions to highlight, the most they can do is rephrase content that already exists to try and rank for the same keywords. Since they lack an industry insider’s perspective of what’s truly valuable and insightful, they can’t be expected to add more value than that.

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Worse still is if they generate the article purely from an AI prompt or just ask their AI tool to rephrase the article for them, by which point they aren’t worth the money you pay them.

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When you’re shopping around for an agency, we recommend asking them if their writers or editors have experience in your industry or if they have methods of finding out what your industry does. Don’t let your content suffer due to a lack of understanding.

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Solution: Interviewing Subject Matter Experts in Your Industry Before Writing

Good agencies never misrepresent the actual level of expertise that your company has by providing work that shows little to no understanding of your industry. They know the difference that speaking to experts can bring to any piece of content.

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If you’re working with us, our team members will also interview experts in your company to understand how your industry works, the jargon used and how to incorporate your brand’s expertise into the content that we’ll produce for you. 

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Finally, our editing process will incorporate feedback from you to ensure the accuracy of any information in the article or how it’s explained.

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6. Performance Reporting

Issue: Reporting metrics that don't tie in to business goals

One of key differences between a writing agency and a content marketing agency is that writing agencies just need to deliver their work on time, while content marketing agencies need to drive business value.

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Bad agencies will try to limit the key metrics they are responsible for, with the worst offenders stopping at just delivering content on time or the number of words written. Some may go with web traffic in general but won’t go near metrics like how well the content is driving sign ups. 

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They won’t share the responsibility of helping your company succeed.

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Solution: Business outcomes are factored into reporting

Good content marketing agencies understand that their job extends beyond just on-time content and needs to drive business goals such as brand awareness and enabling the sales team to close sales. They’ll use their reported data to find out how to further optimise the strategy and they’ll keep you in the loop while they do so.

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For brand awareness, they will report on leading metrics such as keyword rankings and website visitors to check on the content’s impact on attracting traffic. 

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For engagement, they’ll check time on page to ensure that visitors are staying to read the content they’ve produced for you. 

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When organic leads contact you online for your service, they can trace which content contributed to their buyer’s journey and how these can be optimised further.

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Ultimately, a bad content agency is, at best, a group of people who try to write about business. A good content agency is one with business people who write. Difficult to spot from the outside, but easier to identify once you peel through the external layers.

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At Nila Studios, we pride ourselves on providing high quality work that drives results for your business. From content strategy to content creation, we’ve got all the important bases covered. 

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Speak to us and see for yourself if we fit the bill of a good agency!

https://www.nilastudios.com/contact-us  

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