If you work for a PPC agency, you are an expert on making your customers’ businesses stand out. But what about your business?! Are you also investing in promoting your brand and your services?! Many marketing agencies are very focused on providing good marketing services to their customers but fail at marketing themselves.
When it comes to creating a marketing plan for your agency, content marketing should be on the top of your list. Content marketing offers an efficient long-term opportunity for your PPC agency to get your knowledge and services in front of your audience. But to take advantage of it, you will need to build a content marketing strategy for your PPC agency.
What Is Content Marketing And Who Should Use It?
“Content is king”. As a marketer, you have probably heard that already. In today’s digital world, everybody has the opportunity to put content out there. And content is king – since it has already proven its value. But in order to make it work towards your advantage, you will need a good strategy.
But first thing’s first. What is content marketing? Content marketing can be defined as a marketing approach focused on creating and distributing relevant content (blog articles, podcasts, infographics, etc.) in order to attract and educate a defined audience; in the long term, content marketing will lead to customer actions.
Who should use content marketing? The short answer is: everybody. And especially your PPC agency. Your clients are aware of the importance of having an online presence and reaching their audience at the right time. So your customers are online, searching for relevant useful information. That means that your marketing strategy should also focus on you being where your potential customers are.
Why Do You Need a Content Marketing Strategy for Your PPC Agency?
As an agency working in the field of digital marketing, you should “practice what you preach” and establish a good online presence. Perhaps at the moment, you don’t want to invest too much in lead generation or earning new customers, but a content marketing strategy is a very safe long-term investment for you and your PPC agency. Building a content marketing strategy for your PPC agency will help you:
- Help your audience: content marketing gives you the chance to offer value and be helpful towards your customers, without being intrusive; you can give them the information they are looking for, when they are looking for it.
- Position yourself as an expert: having a good content marketing strategy for your PPC agency can help you position yourself as an expert in your niche.
- Build trust: positioning your agency as an expert in your market will also help you build trust and credibility; the sharing of relevant knowledge can prove that you truly understand your market and can consequently provide good services.
- Build brand awareness: last but not least, content marketing can help you create brand awareness. By offering interesting and useful content to your audience, you can contribute to how easily your brand is recognized and what it is associated with. For example, if a user keeps finding your industry blog, at one point he/she will remember your brand and associate it with the useful content you’ve offered.
- BONUS: Encouraging your entire team to participate in the building of a content marketing strategy for your PPC agency will help them cross-train, better understand each other’s jobs, and create a sense of unity among the different teams/ team members of your agency.
8 Steps to Follow When Creating a Content Marketing Strategy For PPC Agencies
With all of the above benefits in mind – let’s say you wish to create a content strategy for your PPC agency. What steps should you follow next? No worries, we are here to help, with a complete step-by-step guide.
Step 1: Define your goal
What do you want to achieve through your content marketing efforts? Would you like to establish yourself as a trustworthy brand? Or would you like to generate new leads? Defining both short-term and long-term objectives will help you shape your content strategy so that your goals are achievable.
Depending on your goal, you should also decide early on what impact you would like your content to have. Should it be informative, entertaining, or educational? What kind of approach do you think would fit your brand best? Defining all these aspects will help you shape an effective and realistic content marketing strategy for your PPC agency.
Step 2: Define your target audience
The services of a PPC agency can be useful for any kind of business. However, as a marketer, you should always narrow it down and understand exactly who YOUR target audience is. Does your agency work better with small clients or would you rather work with big enterprises? Is your agency focused on serving a certain niche? Or do you have a lot of experience with a certain industry? Your target audience will also be narrowed depending on your agency’s workload and experience. You will need to select new projects based on internal capabilities.
Once you have defined your target audience, you can go further and create buyer personas for every kind of decision-maker within that audience.
Step 3: Understand customer pain points
After understanding who your audience is, you should figure out what your audience needs. By understanding your customers’ pain points you will be able to provide them with the information (content) that meets those needs.
This step should be familiar to you, as you are probably already doing this when creating PPC campaigns for your customers. You just have to do similar research based on your audience. The Google search results, Google Trends, or other similar tools are good places to start your research. Once you find out what kind of information your audience is looking for, you can start including those topics in your content plan.
Step 4: Do a content audit
Before jumping on the creative bandwagon and planning new content, you should first do a content audit. Look into your content to see if it is obsolete or still useful. Include all types of content – blog posts, social media posts, collateral marketing materials.
Maybe you have existing content that is already popular and is worth promoting further. Or maybe you can adapt some of your old content to new trends, give it a new form, or adapt it to a new audience. Reusing older content is a very efficient way of keeping your content marketing efforts up-to-date.
Step 5: Choose your channels and formats
Different kinds of content have different creative processes behind them – so deciding on your favorite formats can help you plan accordingly.
Depending on who your audience is, where they can be found, and what resources you have at hand, you can decide what kind of content you would like to create. Maybe you will want to start a blog or a podcast. Maybe you will want to create short blog posts or long-form articles. Make your decision after evaluating all the factors we’ve mentioned above.
Step 6: Brainstorm ideas
Based on your findings from the previous steps, start brainstorming ideas. Create lists of topics that can be useful and relevant for your target audience. Evaluate both the effort and the potential impact of each piece of content before deciding what content to produce.
Step 7: Create your content
Content creation is obviously an essential part of your PPC agency’s content marketing strategy. But how will you go about it? Define who is responsible for content creation, but also for implementing feedback. Define the resources needed and a timeline for production. Make sure your content is aligned with your branding – tone of voice, visual elements, etc. In order for your content marketing to be effective, your story and your voice should be consistent.
Step 8: Promote your content
Ideally, your content will be published on your channel of choice, your audience will find it and enjoy it. But things don’t always happen this easily. You should give your new content an extra nudge to make sure it gets visibility.
Even if you don’t want to invest a lot of budget in promoting your content, you can still expand its reach by sharing it cross-channels. For example, you can share bits of content from your blog post on your social media channels. Or you can blog about your latest webinar. You can encourage your team to share your content further. Any such action can help your new content reach more relevant people.
You don’t have to do content marketing, but we really see no reason not to. Everybody has a story to tell, tips to share and help to offer. Then why not share?! Content marketing is a great long-term investment that can offer many benefits – from brand awareness to direct sales. So don’t hesitate and start planning a content marketing strategy for your PPC agency! It doesn’t have to be a big financial investment – but start investing some time and resources now, for great results in the future.
