Content marketing services around the world are on the rise. Everyone is a content creator these days.
But content marketing is one of the many things we do well here at Canny. It’s how we grew our business from nothing to something.
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Content marketing and SEO can be a complex beast (or should that be monster? 👀) to get your head around when it’s not your area of expertise.
This is where working with an agency can be helpful. A good content marketing agency can take care of the research, strategy, creation, and SEO behind your content, while keeping up with the ever-changing search landscape (a full time job in itself these days!).
They can deliver a complete end-to-end content marketing service, helping you build a sustainable source of organic traffic over time.
So if you choose to work with an agency, what services and deliverables can you expect from them?
That’s what we’re here to answer.
What are Content Marketing Services?
Exactly what’s included in any given content marketing package will depend on your goals, audience, and the resources you already have in place. But broadly, content marketing services can include:
- Content research – understanding your audience, competitors, industry and search opportunities.
- Content strategy – deciding what to create, who it’s for, where it should appear and what it needs to achieve.
- Content creation – producing blogs, guides, ebooks, whitepapers, video, infographics and other content assets.
- Content marketing – distributing and promoting content across the channels where your audience spends time.
- SEO – optimising content and your wider website to improve organic visibility and attract relevant search traffic.
- Content audits – assessing existing content for gaps and making improvements and updates as necessary to improve results.
Some businesses bring in an agency to manage the entire process, while others use external support for specific parts of it. At Canny, we can work with your existing marketing team or take care of the process from research and strategy through to creation, promotion, and reporting.
Below, we’ll break downeach of these content marketing services, why they are important, and how best to execute them.
Let’s go!
Content Research
Research is often talked about as step 0 of content marketing.
Before you start creating content, you need to know what you’re creating, who it’s for, and where the opportunities are.
At Canny, we start with three key areas of research: your competitors, your industry, and the search terms your audience is actually looking at.
Competitor Research
Competitor research is a great starting point for content marketing.
It can show you what’s working (or not) in your field, giving you the opportunity to emulate successes, avoid mistakes, and benchmark your own progress against competitors.
The content gaps left by your competitors can be a place where you carve a niche selling point as specialists in a certain area or sector.
At Canny, we start by identifying your key competitors, focusing on businesses that operate in a similar market and target a similar audience.
At Canny, we use a multitude of tools to examine competitors for content opportunities.
We look at:
- Which pages and blog posts are performing well
- Which keywords competitors are ranking for
- How much organic traffic they’re attracting
- Where their content gaps lie
- Which opportunities could be worth pursuing
As a general benchmark, we would look at around 3 to 12 competitors, depending on the industry and level of competition.
This gives us a strong understanding of the type of traffic you could expect from blog posts, the level of competition out there, and the sort of thing that we should be including in your content strategy.
It also helps us identify content gaps and keywords to use when developing the content marketing strategy.
Industry Research
Where competitor research gives us an understanding of what individual businesses are doing, industry research gives us the bigger picture.
We look at the topics, trends, terminology, and types of content that are gaining traction within your industry. This helps us understand what your audience is interested in and where there may be opportunities to create something genuinely useful.
It also gives us valuable context for the content strategy, helping us decide which subjects, themes, and formats are worth prioritising.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is the cornerstone of any SEO based content strategy.
From ideation to targeted keyword examinations and latent semantic analysis, which keywords you want Google (and other search engines) to find you for is vital.
At Canny, we would typically start our keyword research by working in collaboration with the client to ideate a list of key terms related to the industry that they’d like to rank for.
Once we have a longlist of keywords, we then check the viability of those keywords and look for the best opportunities among that list. We do this by looking at factors including:
- Keyword difficulty
- Search volume density
- Click through rate
- The stability of the search engine result page overall
We also check terms similar to the suggested keywords, and related searches, as well as identifying long tail keywords with strong search intent to maximise exposure.
This, combined with our competitor and industry research, forms the base of the content strategy to ensure you create competitive, profitable, and engaging content that serves consumer needs.
Content Strategy
Once you know what your audience is searching for and where the opportunities are, you can start turning that research into a content strategy.
A good content strategy connects your business goals with the topics, audiences, channels and content formats that can help you achieve them.
You also need to build in room to be flexible, so that if something comes in and changes the game in your industry (for content marketers it tends to be those pesky Google algorithm updates…), you have space to adjust your plan.
At Canny, we generally use a simple 5WsH framework to shape our content strategies:
What, When, How, Who, Where and Why
WHAT are We Trying to Achieve With Our Content Marketing?
Thinking about what you are trying to achieve is really important when considering a content strategy, and often shapes everything else around it.
It’s easy to assume that traffic is the number one priority, but that won’t always be the case. Think about:
- Would you rather have more leads than just more visits?
- Would content be more valuable if it was used to reposition your brand’s voice?
- Would you be better off promoting your business by educating your existing audience?
The important thing is to clearly define a goal. Then everything that follows can work towards it.
WHEN are We Looking to Achieve Our Content Marketing Goal?
After deciding on the true ‘what’ of it all, the next stage is to pick when you’d like to have achieved your goal.
If your goal is to use content to take over the world, that’s great, and we’re with it.
But give yourself a realistic time scale, rather than expecting results overnight.
At Canny, we typically work in six-month planning cycles. This gives enough time to build a body of content and start seeing how it performs, while leaving room to be reactive to major industry changes if needed.
HOW are We Going to Achieve Our Content Marketing Goal?
This section takes a little bit more thinking.
The HOW asks you to refine your single overarching goal into the tactics, content themes, formats, and activities that will help you achieve it.
If your goal is, for example, to ‘grow more useful leads’, the ‘how’ of it all might look something like this:
- Tailor content to appeal to [insert industry professional buyer persona here]
- Create content that stresses our value proposition/ unique selling points
- Publish content that encourages people to consider their specific needs in regards our services, and include strong call to action points throughout the copy
- Manage expectations and educate potential clients, so that leads that come through are wholly in the know as to what they expect and want.
WHO Do We Need to Engage With Our Content to Achieve Our Goals?
To achieve your goal, your content needs to speak to the right people… not just as many people as possible.
For example, if we want to increase brand reputation via content, we would need to be engaging with industry leaders and the wider community.
Or, if we are looking to increase leads, we need to be engaging with key buyer personas and speaking in language suitable to them.
For the “who” of it all, it’s no use going off of guesswork. A successful strategy will examine demographic metrics pulled from Google Analytics or look at case studies into industry segmentation.
The ‘who’ means that your tone of voice will be suitable. Defining your audience as clearly as possible gives you the best chance for success.
WHERE Do We Need Our Content to be Seen to Effectively Reach Our Target Audiences?
- Your own website
- Newsletters
Realistically, there are hundreds of places your content should be appearing to maximise audience capture.
Deciding what the most suitable channel is can be challenging.
Your website may often be the central hub for content, with other channels used to distribute and promote content depending on where your audience are most engaged.
Some campaigns may also have non-digital spaces that need to be considered as well, and timing digital campaigns with real world campaigns is vital.
The core to the ‘where’ section is finding out where your core audiences exist, and existing in those spaces naturally.
WHY…?
I was a deeply annoying 6 year old.
I rarely did what I was told, always asking ‘why?’ ‘why?’ ‘why?’
But in my professional life, but ‘why?’ is the most valuable question when it comes to content strategy.
Why will this method of content delivery work?
Why are we choosing one method of delivery over another?
Why are we going with this tone of voice?
Why are we even creating this content?
Why do I keep writing rhetorical questions in lists?
If you’ve answered the other questions in the 5WsH process a lot of these answers should hopefully be pretty self-explanatory, but it’s always worth checking your logic at every step before publication.
The annoying inner 6 year old that questions everything sometimes has a point, and making sure the WHY of the content plan is locked down helps you keep everything as targeted and focused as possible.
‘Why?’ ties everything together – it tells us why we’re doing what we intend to do, and why we think it’s the right thing to do.
Accountability is cool. Never stop asking why.
6 Month Content Marketing Strategy Plan
Now that these questions have been answered, a practical content plan can be created.
All agencies will work differently, but at Canny, we typically break longer-term goals down into monthly themes, then into individual content pieces and weekly deliverables. This gives the strategy enough structure to keep content moving while still leaving room to react to new opportunities.
The result will be a clear roadmap for what you’re creating, who you’re creating for, where it will be published and what it needs to achieve.
Content Creation
Content creation is easier to do badly than to do well.
That’s the top and bottom of it.
Especially when it comes to search engine optimised content, there are ways of writing that just don’t occur to anyone who isn’t well versed in all of the nuances of content creation.
That’s exactly why it’s one of the deliverables that agencies offer. Arguably, one of the most notable content marketing deliverables.
Blogs
Blogs are a fundamental in the world of content marketing. So how do they work as a deliverable?
At Canny, to ensure consistency in the way blogs are delivered and to focus on our chosen keywords, we first framework out the blogs.
This involves deciding on key paragraph titles and bullet pointing out the key points we want to make under each heading.
Then, we can draft everything up in more detail, before marking it up, adding imagery, and of course, hitting publish!
Once a blog is published, we go back through older blog posts and find places to organically link to the new blog from the old blogs, making sure our internal linking is on point, for SEO purposes and user experience best practice.
Infographics
Custom infographics are a great way to support blog content. Infographics take many forms, including;
- Statistics and figures
- A flowchart
- Data visualisation
- Charts and graphs
- Illustrations
Infographics help support the marketing angle of content marketing too.
They’re shareable, digestible, and easily linkable – which makes for a great content asset to have on your own website.
Ebooks and Whitepapers
This is hands down my favourite content marketing play.
You attract a whole load of organic traffic to your website with blog posts and interesting content. And then, you offer them a content upgrade.
A content upgrade is a free piece of valuable and useful content that you offer your visitor in return for their email address.
For example:
People interested in a blog post about eating a healthy diet are likely to want to download sample diet and exercise plans.
You offer up something valuable; they agree to give you their email address in exchange for the content. And then, the relationship building sequence can begin!
Remember:
With this tactic, you should always be as helpful as possible for your audience. It’s not an opportunity to go storming in with your sales team!
Video
Video content marketing is valuable as a deliverable, because it is the sort of content that breeds more content.
From one piece of video content you can get:
- An extra video (behind the scenes footage!)
- A blog post- transcribe your audio from the video
- A video published on TikTok to drive traffic (a snippet of a longer video)
- A video on YouTube
- A week’s worth of Instagram stories
- A year’s worth of original images
By shooting video and taking photos, even if you spend a couple of days doing it, you can generate an incredible amount of useable content.
Content Distribution & Promotion
Great content is only part of the job. Once it’s published, you still need to get it in front of the right people.
You thought we were done, didn’t you?
Nope!
Content is never done.
A strong content marketing strategy includes a plan for how each piece of content will be distributed, promoted and repurposed. The channels you use will depend on where your audience spends time, but they might include:
- Sharing it on LinkedIn
- Sharing it on the company Facebook page
- Adding it to the newsletter, or email it out directly to the mailing list
- Checking the web for places where your blog would make a perfect link fit (using tools, not just manually reading every web page… obviously)
- Add it to niche industry specific forums, Subreddits, or message boards
The trick to successful content marketing is to share content in places where it actually adds value and reaches people who are likely to find it useful. There is strategy involved in when to share your content too. Instinct says you should post when there is the most traffic on these sorts of sites- say 10am.
And then you and everyone else in your niche flood their socials with content at 10 am, and you get buried in the slurry.
If your busiest time is 10am, try posting at 10:13.
You’ll soar above the slush pile, you’ll appear higher up on feeds, and you’ll avoid everyone who has scheduled their social posts and content to go out, because who in their right mind schedules something to go out at 13 minutes past the hour?
Understanding the social media recency algorithms is cool, kids.
Reporting
The way you want to measure success should factor into all of your plans, really.
For content marketing, reporting is a bit of a strange beast, as a post you publish on your site today may not begin to affect organic traffic on your site until Google recrawl the site and indexes your new content.
This can take as long as 3 months to happen, so all of your reporting and measuring of the success of your content campaign might be delayed as Google catches up with the new stuff you’re doing.
Always worth bearing in mind if ever you feel like what you’re doing isn’t working.
A a content marketing service, an agency (like Canny!) can set up and customise analytics and reporting for you, whether that’s on Google Analytics, Search Console, Ahrefs, or all of the above.
The key things to look at from a content perspective are:
- Page Views – This is your traffic. How many people are looking at your site. It’s super important, and shows how successful your pages are.
- Average time on page – This is how long visitors are spending on your site. Pretty self-explanatory, but it’s a really good measure of how well engaged your audience is.
- Exit rate – This is the percentage of visitors who leave your site completely from a particular page. It’s useful for measuring (or at least estimating) click through and conversion rate optimisation. A high exit rate from a non-exit page is typically an indicator of bad conversion rate optimisation. Unusually high exit rates tend to point towards a problem with the content.
Other core metrics that we look at are things like backlink profiles, traffic sources, and how the posts are ranking for our targeted keywords (and often ones we didn’t target!).
Content Audits and Revitalisation
Not every content marketing problem needs a brand new blog post.
Sometimes, the best opportunities are hiding in the content you already have.
A content audit looks at your existing content to identify what’s working, what’s outdated, where there are gaps, and where there are opportunities to improve.
This might involve:
- Refreshing outdated material
- Improving content that’s already ranking
- Identifying content gaps
- Consolidating or removing underperforming pages
These content refresh strategies can often be more effective than creating something completely new, particularly when you already have content with a strong foundation.
The aim is simple: keep your existing content relevant, valuable and useful for both your audience and search engines.
And the findings from a content audit can then feed straight back into your wider content strategy.
SEO For Your Site
There is no such thing as entry level SEO anymore.
With Google recently implementing UX as one of their core web vitals, and the ever evolving (and growing) algorithm combined with recent developments in AI, you can’t just be ‘an SEO specialist’ straight out of the gate.
You need an understanding of technical aspects and site speeds, and how to build sites with low CLS and FCP and all manner of crazy three letter abbreviations.
You need well written, engaging copy, tactically deployed to engage core keywords.
You need great user experience design, serving results in a consistent, predictable and experientially enjoyable way.
SEO isn’t a one man band anymore, and anyone who says they understand 100% of what it takes to create a flawlessly optimised post is either a snake oil salesman or John Mueller.
It’s one reason why working with an expert team can add huge amounts of value to your content strategy.
Content Marketing Services and Deliverables FAQs
We’re winding down now, but before we get to the end, let’s make sure that you’re fully up to speed with content marketing-based services and deliverables.
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What Are Content Marketing Services?
Content marketing services range from content research, to content reporting, to the delivery of the content itself (i.e. blogs, whitepapers, etc).
Creative content marketing agencies typically offer the best content marketing services in terms of offering something complete that will bring you closer to your content goals.
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How Can I Develop a Content Marketing Strategy?
To develop a content marketing strategy you need to have a full understanding of your market, your competitors, and any notable trends.
From there, you can either develop the strategy even further, or you can seek the help of a creative content marketing agency that will take your wants/needs and run with them.
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People Also Ask: Why is SEO for Websites Difficult?
Website SEO is difficult because there are so many moving parts to keep track of, be it html markup, to alt tags across all images.
There’s also a technical side that not a lot of marketers feel comfortable with controlling/monitoring that may require the help of a web developer.
The Complete List of Content Marketing Services and Deliverables
And there you have it; that was the complete list of content marketing services and deliverables.
We hope we’ve given you some level of clarity and that you feel comfortable with approaching an agency knowing exactly what you need as far as our services go.
Of course, we can always provide additional context and clarity should you need it. You don’t need to be an expert on this stuff; it’s why you come to an agency like us to handle your content marketing.
We offer a complete end-to-end service that covers you at every point of the process – from research all the way through to reporting. And that’s without mentioning what we can do website-wise to ensure that our efforts get the best push possible.
If you want your website to perform to the best of its ability, and you want content to be a major part of your strategy going forward, let’s have a chat.
