Why You Need to Hire a Content Marketing Consultant Now

If you’ve wanted to use content to educate and engage your target audience, you’ve thought about content marketing. You may never have gotten around to implementing a campaign because you were unsure of how to proceed or didn’t have the time to do it yourself. In both of these situations, hiring a content marketing consultant can be the answer to your content pain points.

Working with a consultant identifies all the opportunities across your brand touchpoints and marketing channels where you can make content have the greatest impact for your brand. Ideally, you want to raise awareness about your brand, engage leads with your content, and use that content to move them down your sales funnel to conversion.

Partnering with a content marketing consultant can make this happen for you.

What Is a Content Marketing Consultant?

A content marketing consultant is either a freelancer or an entire team that’s part of a content marketing agency. Consultants take the guesswork out of content production, guiding you with their expert knowledge about where and how to use content, so your customers can engage with it in their buyer’s journey.

A team of content marketing consultants at work.

According to the Content Marketing Institute’s and MarketingProfs’ 2023 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends Report, 71% of marketers over the last year indicated that content marketing became more important to their organizations. However, just 40% of respondents admitted that they had a content marketing strategy that’s actually documented. In other words, most businesses are still failing to implement a content marketing plan, even if they recognize its importance to their business operations.

Partnering with a content marketing consultant can transform your business from just realizing the value of content marketing but having no plan to implement it—to establishing a sound, tangible strategy that your organization can implement with ease and effectiveness.

10 Benefits of Working With a Content Marketing Consultant

There are plenty of advantages when you team up with a consulting professional who’ll put together a roadmap, so your content marketing can get the most bang for your buck. Whether you choose to onboard the marketing consultant to your organization or implement their guidance yourself, these benefits are enduring.

1. Understand How Your Content Can Build Relationships With Your Audience

The number one goal of content on the web is to build relationships with your target audience by giving them informational content at each stage of their buyer’s journey. Doing so ensures that your leads are appropriately nudged down your sales funnel, starting from top-of-the-funnel organic search all the way down to the bottom of the sales funnel, where they’ll make a purchase.

Consulting specialists will be able to identify what content works best at each stage. For example, blog posts that answer frequently asked questions and pain points your customers have are ideal for organic search campaigns.

2. Improve SEO for Your Website

SEO, or search engine optimization, is a series of strategies you implement around specific keywords and keyword phrases to increase the visibility of your website in organic search. A content marketing consultant will be able to determine what keywords your website is ranking for and what additional keyword opportunities you need to create content around, so to bring even more organic traffic to your website.

An expert consulting team will have access to industry-leading tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, Mangools, or SE Ranking—all of which provide insight into the all-important understanding of what keywords your website ranks for and needs to rank for.

3. Bring More Organic Traffic to Your Website

Even if your organization understands the need and value of traffic to your blog, landing pages, and homepage, chances are that you don’t have a plan in place to make this happen. You may not have the expertise in-house, nor the time to put a plan into action.

Content marketing consulting can turn this around for your organization. A specialist or agency you partner with will create a content strategy, complete with a content calendar, so you can rest assured that your organization will produce and publish high-quality content at a regular pace. The more content you publish, the more keywords you rank for and the more eyeballs will view your content and be likelier to follow you to your website.

4. Set up Sales Funnels for Your Content

For content marketing to work, your content needs to be planned to support your website’s sales funnel. There are three parts of the traditional sales funnel:

Top of the Funnel — This is the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey. It includes organic search and SEO, where your leads find you by typing queries into search engines like Google.
Middle of the Funnel — This is the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey. It includes more in-depth content, when your leads engage with your content because they understand that your brand can solve their pain points. This includes longer tutorials, how-to blog posts, webinars, and email newsletters.
Bottom of the Funnel — This is the decision stage of the buyer’s journey. The content here is designed to make your leads convert into full-fledged customers. It includes case studies, use cases, testimonials, service and pricing pages, ebooks, and white papers.

A good content marketing consultant will guide you on what content is most effective at each, crucial stage.

5. Create Content for All Stages of Your Sales Funnel

Even if you have a solid grasp of the stages of the sales funnel, other issues may be preventing you from crafting the right type of content for each stage. Enter your content marketing consultant: They’ll provide you with insight into what works at each stage, drawing from their experience of using content to optimize the sales funnels of their clients.

Each stage needs content uniquely tailored to the level of familiarity with your brand, which your buyer demonstrates.

For instance, at the top of the funnel, writing many articles and blog posts to capture leads landing on your website from search engines is a good strategy.

As your buyer moves down the funnel and becomes more piqued by your brand’s solutions, more detailed content like product-led content and tutorials become necessary.

By the time your buyer is at the bottom of the funnel, you need content like product comparisons, sales pages, and case studies to seal the deal.

A good consultant will be able to recommend what content your business should create for each stage.

6. Create Content That Engages

Now, here’s the harder part: Crafting content that prompts your customers to reach out to you, share your content, leave comments, and even become evangelists for your brand. A marketing consulting team should have the experience to tell you what that content looks like or outright create it for your organization.

A woman laughing as she interacts with content on her phone, content created by content marketing consultants.

For example, on your blog, long-form content that addresses your audience’s pain points and answers your questions is a winner. In another example, ebooks—which you give away for free—that go even deeper into a topic relevant to your customers and industry build authority for your business. On social platforms, you need to be aware of the differences in how consumers consume content. To wit, content on Instagram needs to be highly visual while content on X needs to be more straight to the point and punchy.

A content marketing consulting team will know the ins and outs of these different use cases for content, ensuring your engagement skyrockets.

7. Create Content That Converts

So we’ve talked about content that engages, but the next step is to get that content to convert. A conversion is something as small as a signup to your email newsletter, contacting you on a web form, or all the way up to a purchase of your product or service.

For content to be conversion-rich, it needs to:

Speak to your audience’s pain points
Be engrossing
Have strong CTAs
Be highly ranked on Google
Have data or research
Be easy to read
Show your audience how to do something

Working with a consultant ensures that the content you put on your blog, social media, email, or video will satisfy many or all of these main points.

8. Become More Productive

As you work with a content marketing consultant, you’ll have more time to run your business. One of the main benefits of partnering with these specialists or agencies is that you can delegate the content strategy entirely to them. Depending on your contract, they may also create the content for your brand and implement it across your various marketing channels.

The end result is that you’ll be free from having to actively deal with the day-to-day of your content marketing campaigns. As a result, you can shift your focus to other business areas like customer service, logistics, streamlining your operations, or improving your website build, all because you delegated to a consultant.

9. Become an Authority in Your Niche

When your consulting team produces content for your website, they’ll make it a point to create content that stands out from your competitors in your industry. They’ll do this by:

Including more data and research (which may be funded by your organization)
Using FAQs that address common questions your customers have
Including quotes from experts
Including listicles
Adding more how-to sections and actionable tutorials
Making the content more jam-packed with information and education

All of these tactics, when repeated over and over again in much of the content you publish, will build your reputation for expertise in your niche. In time, you’ll be viewed as an authority and thought leader because of these approaches.

10. Learn to Use More Acquisition Channels

An acquisition channel is where your customers find you or where your content engages your customers. Chances are that you haven’t been maximizing the use of all the channels available to your brand, whether that’s organic search, social media, email, or video.

The content marketing consultant you end up partnering with has the skills it takes to devise a content strategy that makes use of multiple channels to increase your acquisition rate. Instead of focusing on only one or two, a knowledgeable consulting firm will realize that there are different audiences on organic compared to social compared to email. They’ll make the most of distributing your content across numerous channels, so your brand awareness grows.

Questions to Ask a Content Marketing Consultant Before You Hire Them

It’s always a good idea to make a due diligence report before you work with a new consultant. You have a right to know how successful they’ve been for their clients as well as how they operate when they start advising your marketing operations. Here are some of the most urgent questions to ask a consultant you’re evaluating before you begin working together in earnest.

Who Are Their Clients?

One of the most fundamental questions, getting to know which clients they have worked with will give you an idea of their scope and specialty. For instance, if your organization is a SaaS and they’ve partnered with many SaaS companies in the past, then you know it’s likely going to be a good cultural fit, with the consultant understanding your business model well.

If, however, you’re a large corporation, and they’ve partnered with mostly small businesses in different industries from yours, then maybe that’s a red flag that you should reconsider.

Where Are Samples of Their Work?

When looking for a content marketing consultant, one important aspect to consider is the samples of their work. You want to ensure that they have experience and expertise in creating the high-quality content that aligns with your business goals.

A reputable consultant should be able to provide you with samples of their previous work. These samples can give you a glimpse into their writing style, planning for content strategy, creativity, and overall approach to content creation.

A laptop showing the portfolio of a content marketing consultant.

Ask for samples of blog articles, social media posts, email newsletters, website content, or any other type of content they have produced for their clients.

By reviewing these samples, you can assess the consultant's ability to create engaging and persuasive content that resonates with your target audience. You can also evaluate their understanding and implementation of SEO strategies, as well as their proficiency in using visual content to enhance the user experience. Moreover, the samples can give you an idea of the consultant's ability to consistently produce high-quality content across various channels.

Do They Have Any Client Reviews?

Client reviews provide valuable insight into the effectiveness and satisfactoriness of a consultant's services. By reading through these reviews, you can get a sense of the consultant's approach, communication style, and ability to deliver results.

Look for positive testimonials that highlight the consultant's ability to meet business goals, improve online presence, and increase conversion rates. Pay attention to specific details mentioned by clients, such as their experience working with the consultant, the impact on their content strategies, and the overall satisfaction with the consultant's services.

If a content marketing team or agency doesn’t have any client reviews or testimonials readily available, it may raise some doubts about their experience or the quality of their work. In this case, it's recommended to request references or reach out to the consultant directly to inquire about their past client experiences.

By ensuring that a content marketing consultant has positive client reviews, you can have more confidence in their ability to meet your content goals and deliver successful strategies tailored to your business needs.

What’s Included in Their Service Packages?

Content marketing consultants usually have a slew of services they include in their offerings, and they come in various tiers. For example, a consulting team will be happy to simply provide you with an action plan for content that they’ve ideated, but they can also go farther than that and take care of the actual content production themselves.

These two different services will naturally have varying price points and are an example of different types of packages that an agency or freelancer will put together for your business.

Evaluate if you really need everything that a consultant’s package involves: If you already have a marketing operations team, then maybe you simply need a content roadmap. On the other hand, even if you have a team, but they’re more focused on demand generation and go-to-market strategies, then maybe having a bespoke, white-label content marketing agency partnering with you to create content across your multiple channels is just what you need.

In any case, always understand what you’re getting in each package. Consultants can charge hourly—it’s not uncommon to have them charge up to hundreds of dollars per hour—just as they can charge a monthly rate or a one-time fee. If you go with a monthly retainer, you can expect to pay up to thousands of dollars per month, especially if you’re partnering with an agency and they also create content for your brand.

Do They Monitor Results and Provide Reporting?

It’s going to be chaos for your organization if you have a content strategy and a content calendar that ensures a regular publishing schedule across your various marketing channels, but then you lack a way of measuring the performance of the content you put out there. Any expert content marketing consultant worth their salt needs to be able to quantify to you how the content they are advising you to create or that they are building themselves is actually performing in the field.

Consultants need to have a basic understanding of website analytics tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4. These performance-measuring tools are likely already activated and installed at your organization.

Beyond that, consulting teams that are specialists at data mining will have access to their own analytics tools like:

Make sure that you get a consultant to tell you how they monitor statistics that show performance of your published content and make it a stipulation in your contact that they will report results to you each week or month during your engagement.

How Does a Content Marketing Consultant Work With You?

The first objective is for the consultant to get a solid grasp of the current state of your business, as well as your goals going forward. They’ll ask you about:

What your current website traffic is
How your lead generation is doing
What your buyer personas look like
What your conversion rate on your website is
What your monthly and annual recurring revenue is
What channels you’re already using for marketing
Where you want to see improvement (ie, lead generation, sales, revenue, content engagement in specific marketing channels)

Once they have this information, they’ll have a much better sense of what to recommend.

A content marketing consultant pointing to the screen of a laptop to show the client measurable results.

They’ll likely also have a look at your Google Search Console to see what keywords are already bringing in organic traffic to your site, as well as see what webpages are performing the best. The same goes for Google Analytics 4. They may also use third-party tools like aforementioned Semrush to get a further, detailed look at your site’s bounce rate, what countries are bringing in the most traffic, and what keywords your competitors are ranking for that you don’t currently rank for.

Once they have this data, your content marketing consultant should be able to put together a plan that details step-by-step improvements to your issues. This can include recommending what new (if any) channels to attract demand (social, email, etc.), changes to webpages like landing pages to improve their copywriting and CRO, a content strategy for your blog, case studies, and ebooks, and how to use project-management tools at your organization to improve your overall content production efficiency.

If you’re hiring your content marketing consultant just for the strategic roadmap, then your own team should be able to implement it internally. If you’re getting more comprehensive services from them, then you’ll usually onboard your consulting agency at this point and allow them to implement their own strategy you signed off on. Whichever route you take, consultants should create baseline reports of where you’re at with your content marketing before they begin, so they can track and analyze progress with metrics as the content marketing plan takes shape.

You can always extend your contract with them, which will influence if they decide to double down on a strategy or make changes early on to experiment with bringing at least some results early on.

Understand What You’re Getting Into With Content Marketing Consultants

Content marketing consultants are a tremendous advantage to any organization that’s serious about using content marketing to advance their relationships with their target audience and increase their revenues from inbound leads and customers. Though content marketing consulting specialists are worth their weight in gold, not each one is going to be a perfect fit with your organization, so we recommend that you do your due diligence before onboarding anyone.

Check their reviews, see what clients they’ve worked with, and understand how they work with their partners before you sign with them or bring them aboard. You want a good, cultural fit with a freelancer or agency that has a track record of success in your industry or niche, so you can reap the benefits of what high-quality content will do for your customer engagement and conversions.

If you’re interested in partnering with a high-performance content marketing agency to grow your business and revenue, then reach out to us now. Contact The Glorious Company today for a no-obligation consultation and estimate.

Have any questions? Keep the conversation going by leaving a comment below.

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