Most content marketing agencies are doing it wrong. Perceptric is here to fix that.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of content marketing agencies on the market for companies to choose from. If you’re reading this, chances are you’re also looking for one, or at least interested in content marketing in general.
From the outside looking in, content marketing looks like an oversaturated industry. However, for those who have been in the trenches, we know deeply that so many content marketing agencies are not actually creating good content.
And we have good reasons to say that.
The Current Problem With Content Marketing Agencies
To be fair, this is not an agency problem. Rather, it is an industry problem.
1. Many content marketing agencies are chasing vanity metrics
If you hop on a call with a content marketing service provider, it is highly likely that you are offered a package based on number of articles written or word count written. That is the industry benchmark to calculate quote, which is…fair. At Perceptric, we also use the same metric.
The issue is that they are only metrics to calculate quote. They represent the “quantity” side of the provided service, not “quality”.
An article’s quality is best measured by the value it generates for the business. More specifically, an article’s value should be tied to an actual business metric, such as number of leads generated or number of sign-ups or number of calls or number of demos booked. It should be tied to the KPIs you’re chasing after.
Let’s be real. At the end of the day, the metric that actually matter is revenue. Content marketing should be, and can totally be, a good driver of that, but we have seen far too many agencies that don’t see further than the quantity aspect.
On the same note, many writers are also chasing after keyword volume to write their content. The more volume a keyword has, the more “general” and “less specific” it is.
A person searching for the keyword “Software Testing” is probably trying to look up its definition. They don’t want to buy anything related to this concept. Chasing after volume may bring in a huge amount of web visitors, but these people merely visit the website and then leave, never to return. This doesn’t translate into business results.
Instead, a person searching for “software testing tools” are much more likely to take action on the website. This is when you hit the business goals.
2. Many agencies hire the wrong writers
Anyone can write. Not everyone can write good, thoughtful, well-researched content.
Many agencies hire freelance writers to churn out articles after articles. After that, they have an SEO specialist optimize that article to meet a certain keyword density or ensure that the target keyword appears in the meta tags.
For B2C niches, this model works. Freelance writers are more than happy to craft a piece of content on the best cafes in Chicago.
It’s different for B2B.
B2B audience is smart. They don’t consume the average daily life content. They consume technical, highly specialized content, and it takes them less than a few seconds to notice that the person behind this piece of content is not a subject matter expert.
Here’s the Google search result for “latent space optimization”, a term in the Information Retrieval field. The average content writer can do some research to craft an article on this subject, but it won’t be as insightful and detailed as one written by a true expert in the field.
Another issue that we found is the ever-rising flood of AI-generated content. Once again, for B2C industries, where the goal is to produce general, day-to-day information, AI content certainly does it job. However, for advanced, technical, specialized industries, with the target audience being C-level, who wants to read actual insights by experts, we need actual experts to write insightful articles for them.
3. Many agencies exist solely as an “SEO agency”
Running a business entirely on SEO is usually only feasible when that business has reached a high level of maturity. Their brand reputation is so well-established that organic traffic is enough to sustain their growth.
Even then, they also need to continuously run PPC campaigns to maintain competitiveness in the paid ads space.
In both B2C and B2B, content marketing activities should be synced with other channels, most commonly social media. For B2B in particular, where the sales cycle is generally longer, content plays a major role as one of the (many) touchpoints that the user goes through on their buying journey.
How Perceptric does Content Marketing Differently
With those particular challenges in mind, Perceptric was founded to do marketing in a different way, or, as we’d love to put it, in the brave-new-way.
Yes, it’s a reference to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but we’re not attempting to create any dystopia.
1. Perceptric writes content that matters
We don’t hire content writers. We hire experts to write content and then have a team of editors polish it. Our writers come from a wide diversity of backgrounds:
- Software developers
- Industrial engineers
- Doctors
- Therapists
- Business owners
These people bring their life to the writing. What they wrote is what they actually went through. The advice they gave was forged from the countless hours they spent studying and working in the field, not from reading articles on the Internet.
For extra relatability, we even invite real practitioners to join the content creation process. We send out survey to the hundreds and thousands of professionals in the target demographic asking for their opinions/insights in the topic.
After that, we turned what we gathered from the survey into an article.
The ingenuity of this approach is that:
- One single survey can be used for an entire series of articles.
- The survey can be repurposed into many different formats for lead generation activities.
- The data collected from the survey can also provide the business with valuable insights on the current state of the industry.
More importantly, it shows effort. It shows that the article we created is not “just another article written by rehashing dozens of other articles”. This is one crafted with care and respect for the audience.
2. Perceptric cherry-picks topics
TOFU (Top-of-Funnel) content is attractive. They drive a huge amount of traffic, but they don’t guide leads toward conversion. If you want real revenue growth, BOFU (Bottom-of-Funnel) content is where the magic happens.
And not just any kind of BOFU articles. The keywords for these articles should revolve around the pain points your customers are facing. That is why before crafting your content strategy, we try to learn about your products/services and what exactly your customers are looking for when they check your website.
At the end of the day, we want to solve problems for your customers by positioning your products/services as the solution.
3. Perceptric combines SEO with other strategies
We don’t stop once your content is live and published.
- We repurpose that piece of content for several social media posts, depending on which platform is most suitable for your business.
- We run small-scale ad campaign for the article to people who actually need to read it. This boost allows Google to measure the engagement rate on the article faster and rank it faster.
- We perform link-building activities to further secure its rankings.
