Content Is a Seed: Start Planting

Once you’ve found that perfect content partnership, what the hell do you do with it!? Kidding. The best thing to do is open your coffers and wait for all the leads to pour in. The initial process after finding your content team always leads into that initial period of “Next Steps.” Meetings about topic ideation, the drafting process, how content will be delivered, and what the revision process looks like are all par for the course.

When 78% of consumers believe that companies creating custom content want to develop a lasting relationship with them, trust in your content team’s ability to build a long-term, effective strategy is going to be top of mind at the beginning, middle, and even at the end of a content partnership.

Here are the top tips and tricks for building, maintaining, and even ending a successful content partnership.

Establishing Clear Expectations

To ensure a successful partnership, it's crucial to establish clear expectations about project timelines, communication channels, and key performance indicators (KPIs). Both you and your content marketing partner should be on the same page about what success looks like and how it will be measured.?

If your partner is not delivering on a given objective, this isn’t always the best point to discontinue the relationship. How do they respond? Are there explanations or insights into why a certain strategy or campaign hasn’t performed? Look to see if they can pivot to a different strategy based on what they’ve learned. If that new campaign doesn’t work, then it’s probably time to consider looking for another partner.?

Content Is Never Wasted

Even a failed campaign or content that doesn’t quite live up to your expectations isn’t a wasted effort. Any Content Marketing Company worth its salt is creating content that works on multiple levels: SEO, brand development, building a content library, and, depending on the project, developing Thought Leadership and industry authority on given topics.?

A poorly written blog can still win on Keywords and SEO for a website’s domain rating. A Thought Leadership blog with no SEO can still provide ranking if it’s written well about industry topics (there are a lot of natural KWs in well-written content because of language specificity around subjects and how people search for content). Even if you have to end a relationship, you take the content with you that you can build on, rewrite, use for the basis of new directions, and many other things. When it comes to building your company, 80% of people appreciate learning about you through blogs, social media, podcasts, and other personalized and unique content. Start building your media library now, and even if you have to stop or change companies, you're always starting from a better position.

Don’t Be Afraid to Change the Package

If you’re seeing success in a campaign, consider increasing your package to build a more extensive content ecosystem. If you’re on a tight budget with 2 blogs a month for a year and are only seeing minor growth in your domain rating, ask your company to change the package to a social media campaign to boost interaction with that database of blog content.?

Content marketing is all about pivoting, trying new angles, all while building that media library so you have more stuff to do more with! If you can afford a full upfront SEO audit of your website with brand and persona development and a long-term keyword strategy, plus a monthly package of a full content ecosystem (blogs, email newsletters, social media across channels, some form of PR or guest posting, web copy updating, a regular lead magnet [case study, white paper, eBook]) Great! But if you can only afford to do one of these, that’s also great. It all builds on itself, and you can leverage one with another as you build your custom content empire!?

Getting Started Is Half the Journey

Upwards of 75% of large companies choose to outsource their content marketing . Outsourcing your content marketing doesn't mean you can completely wash your hands of the process. But it’s important to also not get lost in the minutia either. Not every single content piece needs to be perfect–is every tree the best tree in the forest? Start planting and see how things develop, then you can start creating a garden of exponential growth.

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