Hiring a B2B Content Marketing Agency: What You Need To Know

Helpful summary

Overview: B2B content marketing agencies, like Embarque, specialize in using content to grow a business’s audience, driving conversions and sales through various content forms like blog posts, infographics, and social media copy. We engage in extensive research and SEO to ensure each content is effective and tailored to business growth needs.

Why you can trust us: We at Embarque have demonstrated our expertise in driving business growth and enhancing online visibility, as evidenced by increasing MentorCruise's annual revenue, year on year by 1,600% and ranking ScrumGenius in featured snippet for a +17k traffic keyword with 0 backlinks in under 30 days.

Why this is important: Successful B2B content marketing positions your brand as an industry leader, consolidates branding, showcases your business value, and drives organic site traffic, essential for creating brand awareness, increasing revenue, and boosting ROI.

Action points: Consider hiring a B2B content marketing agency if your in-house resources are limited. An agency like Embarque offers the expertise and results of an in-house team at a lower cost.

Further research: Evaluate potential agencies by reviewing their portfolio, assessing their alignment with your values, and comparing pricing to ensure value for money.

Want to find the perfect B2B content marketing agency for you?

It may well be some 25 years since Bill Gates said “content is king”, but the quote remains true. To build your brand and business in 2022, you need a strategic content plan, something we know all about at B2B content marketing agency Embarque.

From SEO research and content strategy to hiring and vetting creators to carry out your plan, effective content marketing requires an investment in time and money. This is why we believe you should leave it to the experts. With that said, in this article, we’ll look at:

What a B2B content marketing agency does
Whether your company should invest in B2B content marketing services
How to hire a B2B content marketing agency
What to look for when vetting a content marketing agency

Why listen to us?

Navigating the ins and outs of B2B content marketing can be tough, but at Embarque, we've got the hang of it from hands-on experience. We've worked with MentorCruise, and they saw their yearly revenue go up by a whopping 800%. Also, a gaming server we worked with made it to the first page on Google, bringing in an extra $35,000 in revenue. For Flick, our strategies boosted their blog traffic by 178%, showing how we can really make a difference for small businesses in terms of SEO success and making more money.

What Does A B2B Content Marketing Agency Do?

Content marketing services use content to grow your business’s audience and ultimately drive conversions and sales. Content marketing agencies focus on creating, publishing, and promoting valuable and relevant content to drive traffic to your site.

Depending on your business, that could mean writing blog posts, infographics, white papers, scripts for videos or podcasts, web and social media copy, and so on. Importantly, before any content creation, B2B content marketing agencies do a huge amount of research and strategizing behind the scenes to get actionable data on the content that will help your business grow.

B2B content marketing agencies should also have considerable expertise with SEO. Search engine optimization is the technical side of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website. Good SEO has many benefits for your business, including boosting the rankings and visibility of your content so that buyers find you and convert.

B2C Vs. B2B Content Marketing Services

In comparison to B2C (business-to-consumer) marketing, B2B (business-to-business) companies have different requirements. The B2B sales cycle is much longer than in B2C and business buyers tend to be more risk-averse and evaluate the pros and cons of an investment more carefully than consumers. A successful B2B content marketing strategy must reflect these differences and be tailored to the company’s requirements.

Through SEO and topic research and informative, well-written content, successful B2B content marketing allows you to:

Position yourself as a subject matter expert and thought leader in your industry
Consolidate your branding and educate your customers on it
Demonstrate the value that you offer other businesses
Get organic traffic to your site and rank on the first page of Google results

Should My Company Use A B2B Content Marketing Agency?

There’s no doubt that your business needs to invest in content marketing if you’re looking to create brand awareness, drive revenue, and increase ROI. Whether or not you hire a B2B content marketing agency or do your content marketing in-house, like 56% of American B2B companies in 2020 depends entirely on your business’s needs and resources.

For in-house content marketing, you’ll need the time, tools, and expertise to:

Create your content strategy based on your business’s goals, your competitors, and industry trends
Carry out extensive topic research
Define an SEO strategy including performing keyword research and link building
Write, edit, publish and promote high-quality content - or spend time hiring and vetting writers to do so for you
Track the performance of your content strategy with detailed reports and actionable insights

Unless you’ve got a suite of SEO tools and a team of digital marketing experts and great writers, the above may well seem out of reach. In that case, hiring a B2B content marketing agency is well worth the investment for your company. With an agency like Embarque, you enjoy all the benefits of an in-house content team at a fraction of the cost and with demonstratable results.

Take our content marketing services for MentorCruise, for example. Through customer and keyword research, branding strategy, content creation and optimization, we helped them increase their annual revenue by over 800%. For expert content strategy proven to drive growth, it’s worth hiring a B2B content marketing agency.

How To Hire A Content Marketing Agency

Once you’ve decided to make the investment in B2B content marketing services, follow these 4 steps and our best vetting practices to find the right agency for your company:

Define the aims of your business and therefore your content marketing strategy. The type of content marketing you’ll need depends on what you want to achieve. For example, to increase awareness of your brand amongst your target audience, you’ll want to focus on thought leadership, opinion articles, and market research.

That was the aim of our content strategy for ScrumGenius. We got them to rank in the elusive featured on Google for a keyword with over 17,000 monthly searches. This has demonstrated their subject matter expertise to the search engine and to users and paving the way for high conversion and a boost in sales.

Do a portfolio review. As with any individual or service you plan to invest in, you want to know they have the experience and skill to drive results for your company. When researching a B2B content marketing agency, look for case studies and content samples from businesses similar to yours. Assess their industry and subject matter expertise to get an idea of how suitable they are for your company and how well they write.

Make sure to check out their own content too, to see if they practice what they preach. For example, Embarque also takes time to create our own high-quality articles with actionable advice on content marketing and SEO to demonstrate our expertise.

See if your values and culture align. Finding the right B2B content marketing agency means knowing your businesses share the same culture and values to drive your strategy and partnership. Having a read of their website and even getting in touch for a chat with them is the best way to see if you’ll be happy working with them.

Check their pricing. Look at agencies that share their pricing openly so you can see exactly what you’re getting and assess how this fits into your budget. Compare their pricing to the content marketing services you require and see how their cost lines up against their case studies to ensure you get value for money.

Embarque’s pricing is openly displayed on our website. Our flexible and scalable content packages can be tailored to your companies requirements, and all of them include consultations with a project manager, just like having your own in-house content manager. We also offer one-off content marketing services, making our agency accessible to businesses of all budgets. This also allows you to test the waters to see how much you love our work!

How To Vet A B2B Content Marketing Agency

Here’s what to look for in a great B2B content marketing agency to refine your shortlist down to the services you want to hire:

SEO knowledge: ask how they do their SEO research and for examples of their success.
Confidence in and passion for what they do in terms of content, strategy, and industry, as well as in the company, people, and processes themselves.
Self-awareness: ask about any weaknesses they identify in their company.
Results: check their case studies include several different success stories and consider them in context. Be wary of “one-client wonders” and of claims of clients ranking consistently #1 on Google, as they may already have had high domain authority and brand awareness.
Great content and content creation process: ensure you feel confident that they employ professional content creators and follow strict editorial processes to produce high-quality content like Embarque does.
B2B vs. B2C expertise: as we mentioned earlier, the specific needs of your B2B company require an agency experienced in that vector.
Reporting and continuous strategy optimization: even if you enjoy an immediate boost in sales, understanding your content marketing metrics is essential to driving a sustainable strategy for long-term growth. Ask the agency what kind of reporting they do and how this informs the content strategy and editorial calendar going forward.
Expectations: ask when they expect to see results and how you can track deliverables. Remember, if an agency’s proposition seems too good to be true in terms of timing and results, you may well end up disappointed. You should also ensure you’re both on the same page regarding the level of input you’ll have in the strategy.
Finally, ask how they select their clients too. A good B2B content marketing agency wants to work with trustworthy, quality companies that they know they can help.

Grow Your Business With The Right B2B Content Marketing Agency

Hiring the right B2B content marketing agency for your company is a surefire way to generate leads and boost conversions through excellent content. If you’re a startup or small business looking to scale growth with a premium content marketing agency, get in touch with julian@embarque.io to discuss what Embarque can do for you!