9 Tips to Market Your Content Writing Agency

Lately, more and more businesses have realized the potential of content marketing, which is visible in the increased budgets for 2022.

If you are up to grabbing a larger share of the pie, read on to learn how to market your content writing agency and grow your business.

A report found that 90% of enterprise marketers agreed to publish short articles or posts for content marketing purposes in the past year. This means businesses are investing in putting out valuable pieces of content regularly.

Stand out amongst the rest by adopting some of the best marketing strategies for your content writing agency. The goal is to have your prospects look up to you as an industry expert. Blend in informational content with a dash of your service offerings.

Businesses would love to know what you offer and how well you offer that. The uncompromised quality standards in content coupled with consistent publishing across the platform will get the prospects’ attention.

But how do you begin getting those eyeballs that convert? And how to increase the reach of your agency content?

Read on to get actionable tips to market your content writing agency with content calendar apps which help drive visibility and conversions.

Contribute thought leadership to relevant and reputed business magazines

Thought leadership articles are knowledge-sharing pieces that come from your personal and professional experience, lessons that you have acquired by overcoming challenges, and industry expertise you have acquired over time.

In all, thought leadership articles will:

Reflect on your experience and professional credentials
Demonstrate your passion for a purpose — e.g., content marketing, quality, performance, etc.
Your distinctive in-depth perception perceive on a particular challenge

These articles should add value for readers, provoking them to make a decision, and implement what you share.

These articles can be used in outreach to approach various business magazines which a larger audience than yours to help build your presence online. Publishing will drive visibility, which in turn builds a reputation in online media.

Here is how to get started:

Search for business magazines online; ideally, have your content marketing team in the agency search for business magazines that are accepting blog pieces.

Run purpose-driven Google search queries:

‘Write for us’ + startup
‘Write for us’ + business magazine
‘Submit your content’ + digital marketing
‘Submit guest post’ + online business, etc.

For more, you can read on how to find guest posting sites.

Once you have the published content on your desired website, promote it on social media and also try pushing the publisher to put it out in their circle. This improves your credibility and helps create a following in the longer run.

Share your best client work on LinkedIn and Twitter

You love publishing your written content on social media. Well, clients love it too! Especially if you tag them and give a virtual shout-out.

They would love to get recognized on social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter.

An ideal client content to share is one that:

Adds value to your followers: If your followers have shown interest in a genre of content, share the pieces that match the niche of your clients.

To know what your followers like to read, head to Google Search Console and check your top landing pages.

Is liked and shared by your clients: This involves sharing your post on LinkedIn or retweeting your post to ensure maximum reach.
Drives engagement in the comments section by answering every query: Since it is your client’s post, ensure you help them with comment responses as no comment should go unanswered. Even thanking someone who appreciates your post is a must.

Two quick tips to follow when you are frequently publishing your client’s work:

Put Twitter and LinkedIn notifications always on for the client’s profile. You should never miss a notification when their social media teams share content. If they share your published work, closely monitor your audience's responses.

Simply click on the ‘bell icon’ on Twitter to never miss any update

If you are in charge of posting on social media for your published work, find out the best time to tweet and put a LinkedIn post. And then, use tools like Hootsuite and Meta Business Suite to schedule the publishing of your content post.

Attend conferences and networking events (in person and virtual)

Blend in personalized networking by attending conferences and networking events. Your content writing agency can build trust with in-person events or video interactions. Prospective clients you meet will recall you for a long time if you have ever met them in person or engaged in a virtual conversation.

Ultimately, you do this to add a face or a personality to your online presence, ensuring that people remember you.

Here’s how attending conferences and networking events help your content writing agency:

Gets your business noticed
Get references for new business
Build trust for your content writing business
Provides a platform to share your ideas and vision
Find collaborators to leverage their reach (more on it later)

If you are a sport for in-person networking, check out the following for your content writing agency:

BNI: There are several local chapters of BNI held across the globe. You will find key business persons from a diverse range of professions and sectors getting together once a week.
Meetup: This online platform helps you search for local Meetups based on topics, industry, or demographics. You may network with other authors, vertical industry members, or others who can help you connect with the community. These gatherings promote informal contact over business-focused networking.
Network After Work: They are known for conducting educational gatherings. Their online events draw people from throughout the U.S. In the absence of a pandemic, several large cities have local Network After Work activities.

You or your content writers should also try attending one of these events once a year:

For more such events, you can check out this list of writing conferences.

Try attending these networking events with a purpose. For instance, come ready with questions such as how to manage content, how to measure results, and creating a vision. This helps cater to your current clients better and goes beyond simply writing content.

More on what else can you offer than plain text…

Create value-packed downloadable resources (such as templates, checklists, etc.)

When it comes to creating value-packed content, think of intuitive ways to engage your audience. One way is to create marketing collateral that helps you create engaging content to share your narrative. Ideally, these will be digital assets that contain valuable content but are distributed freely to drive audience engagement.

Here’s how you can divide your collaterals into different phases of the marketing funnel:

You can go for some of the below-mentioned marketing collaterals that contain valuable downloadable resources:

Email templates: Ready-to-use, campaign-specific email templates for soft leads. This should include some of the finest copies in your repertoire in a downloadable format.

Here’s how to prepare an email template

Infographics: Create a handy infographic that contains how-to’s, tips & tricks, and the latest industry data.

Tools to use: Canva, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, and others

Case studies: Show your prospects how you serve your existing clients. This should have a narrative of your client's challenges, how you overcame those with your team’s skills, and how you ensure beating the odds in time to come.

Here’s your quick guide to writing a case study

Best-practices checklist: Here, think of what informative checklist in a PDF or image format your prospective clients can use. This can include quick checks before publishing a post, a list of things to consider when crafting brilliant headlines, a checklist on an ideal blog format, etc.

For example, you can consider this content writing checklist.

Leverage these resources by making them downloadable for those who share their email. This will help generate soft leads, helping you know who your target clients are and how to approach them in a meaningful way (since you already know what they are looking for based on their downloads).

Consistently post top-notch content on your agency website blog

Posting content on your agency website blog is a must. This will work the same way as your thought-leadership articles, but here, you are publishing more nuanced content that appeals to your current and prospective clients.

Most people would visit your agency website blog to acquire knowledge. Keep this in mind and aim to cater for their needs while writing content.

Here is why you should consider following this practice:

Shows subject matter expertise: When visitors come to your website, they know what you are good at and how well you do it. Think of it as your content portfolio to showcase how you like to get it done to the world.
Demonstrates your work ethics and standard: Consistent quality content publishing showcases your skills, commitment, and quality. It is a reflection of your team’s productivity and creativity and can churn out quality content pieces regularly.

Consistent publishing often demands creating a content calendar and sticking to it. This comes in handy to merge tasks for writers and designers.

On ensure quality pieces, follow the below-mentioned tips:

Grammatically correct: Ensure putting out grammatically correct content. This includes proofing it before publishing and running a couple of quick tests using grammar tools like Grammarly, SmallSEOTools, etc.

For more, check these free online grammar-checking tools.

Relevant content to your business: You can create content that appeals to a wider audience but does not stretch beyond your business verticals. Being in a content industry, you can write about digital marketing, PPC, SEO, content marketing, writing hacks, etc. but not about web design, sales funnel, CRM, etc.

Remember, relevancy-based content ranks well on Google search results.

Should be engaging with data, graphics, videos, etc.: Make your content stand out from the rest by including data, graphics, videos, expert quotes, etc. This adds reliability, helps you rank better, makes readers want more of them, and hooks them to read further.

Gripping your audience with strong content requires a good readability score. This applies if you are going for a shorter content piece like listicle articles. For this, try using any or combination of the following tools:

Pro tip: Capitalize My Title is a great tool to come up with consistent headlines to avoid title capitalization issues. This showcases your attention to detail when publishing content onsite.

Try paid ads on Google and social media

Another way to market your content writing agency involves going for paid ads on Google and social media.

Paid ads on Google that get clicked have 65% of buyer-intent keywords, guaranteeing you a greater audience and better visibility. These ads target people looking for content writing services, guaranteeing more probable buyers on your site.

Social media ads are cheaper than Google ads. For instance, a Twitter ad costs only $0.38 per click compared to $2.69 for Google Ads. Still, you have more chances of conversion if you target your audience precisely.

Let’s explore both these avenues for your content writing agency.

Google Ads

Google Ads, or Pay-Per-Click (PPC), is search engine marketing where you choose relevant keywords and create copies to advertise your content writing services. This enters you in the SERP auction, where marketers compete to have their adverts visible to people looking for their products.

How it works

Google Ads helps target the right audience, the ones who are looking for a particular service — content writing. Here, you need to define your audience in AdSense.

Key factors to consider:

Choosing keywords: Go for the Competitive yet cost-effective ones. You will be bidding on keywords based on search volume and relevance.
Setting up a budget: Once you finalize your keywords, it is time to decide the ad spend. This will help you determine how long your ad campaign will run and what would be the cost per click.
Analyzing results to gauge ROI: Once the campaign is over, analyze quality leads and check conversions. This helps gauge the effectiveness of the ad campaign and, thereby, your campaign’s ROI.

Social media ads

First, choosing the right social media platform for your marketing strategy is important, as a lot would depend on knowing which platform your audience uses the most.

For this, determine the reasons for running your campaign. It can be one of the following:

Once you finalize the intent behind running an ad campaign on social media, follow these steps:

Step 1: Identify the target audience

Build an ideal customer profile to filter out the right platforms to run ad campaigns.

For instance, if your content writing agency is targeting SaaS, LinkedIn is a great option. Leverage LinkedIn Navigator, which hosts a range of tools and capabilities that help your ad reach CMOs and CXOs at SaaS companies.

Here’s a quick overview of major social media platforms and what the audience seeks while using each one.

Step 2: Follow your competitors’ footsteps

Know what other content writing agencies are doing on social media and how they fare on a different medium. For instance, they may perform better on Twitter but worse on Facebook.

To understand why, try and understand the following aspects:

Time since they are using a particular platform?
Their day-to-day activities
Level of engagement they generate; comments, likes, re-shares, increase in the number of followers, etc. Also, check for bots.

Step 3: Run campaigns on different platforms and analyze KPIs

If you are ready to test just one platform, allocate your budget wisely on different platforms to test and analyze results for future ads.

Check for the following KPIs:

Reach
Cost of ad
Likes
New followers
Comments
Amplifications
Conversions

Here’s a quick look at how to analyze KPIs for your social media ad campaigns.

Join Slack communities and groups

Slack communities or channels are private communities where you may connect with others who share your interests (in content generation). It is a great platform that helps creators connect and collaborate with others in the industry without all the annoyance of social media spam.

Slack communities exist for various professions, jobs, and hobbies. To identify the community that best suits your interests or requirements, you should do research online. Especially on Reddit and databases such as Slofile, you'll discover listings of Slack groups.

While most Slack communities are free to join (on invitation), others might need approval. For the latter, you will need to:

Fill out an application form
Pay an admission fee, if any
Remain active and add value

You can check out this guide on finding open slack communities.

Your content writing agency can benefit from the HARO (Help A Reporter Out) community. It sends requests from journalists, inviting writers to contribute to the content in multiple subcategories covering a wide range of industries. Use this to gain backlinks for your agency business and clients.

Partner up with other service agencies (such as web design) for referrals

When you attend conferences and networking events, you can find yourself potential business partners. Ideally, these businesses work in web desig, digital marketing, social media, etc.

One way to find these partners is to keep a tab on their social media and engage meaningfully over different platforms. Set up a collaboration meeting for the following:

1. Social media campaigns: Collaborate with industry peers to show how your businesses add value. E.g. web design and content go hand-in-hand to establish a digital identity.

Such a campaign can involve the following:

Cross-promotion: You and the partner agency agree to market each other's services to your respective audiences via cross-promotional efforts.
Content sharing: You and another agency agree to share each other's content regularly with your respective audiences.

2. Client emails: Reach out to your clients and offer them added services of the company you collaborate with. Have your business reach out to a client for value-added services. If the client is getting their new website designed, they need content.

In either case, you can tie up with businesses to make a partnership work at a symbiotic level based on:

A contract, where you agree on a business partnership for a fixed number of months or a set number of campaigns. Here, you can decide the share percentage you will pass on to the partner whose lead converts.
A lump sum/fixed referral bonus can be shared as a token of appreciation on conversion.

Build strong client relationships for referrals

Don’t just meet your customers’ expectations, exceed them. There's a reason why 64% of marketing executives believe that word-of-mouth marketing is the most successful kind of marketing. To unlock that channel, you need to serve your clients by going beyond their expectations so that they can refer your content writing services to other businesses.

As a content writing agency, P2P marketing serves as a powerful tool to acquire new business prospects. When a new business receives recommendations from companies already using your services and knows your work, the chances of conversion are high.

It is better to be proactive and figure out businesses you want to connect with for acquiring referrals.

Here's how you do that:

Send NPS: Share the NPS (Net Promoter Score) survey to existing clients and identify which are highly satisfied. The ones who rate you high, send them the email asking for referrals.

Reward clients: Your existing client can be incentivised to recommend your services if you are willing to reward them for getting new referrals. Negotiate free services, complimentary articles, monthly subscription discounts for a quarter, etc., to reward them for referring your content writing business.

Use LinkedIn: LinkedIn provides a 'recommendations' section that serves as informal recommendations for everyone who checks your profile and reads your evaluations. Use this to get in touch with your existing clients and ask them to share their experience working with your agency. Ideally, this should be on the founder's (or co-founders') profile.

Share testimonials: One indirect way to get referrals is to have testimonials from existing clients. Ask them to write a testimonial or create a testimonial video, share it across social media, and see the magic happen.

Distribute content: Since you are in the business of creating content, leverage these expertise to provide valuable content to your existing client. Request them to promote it aggressively to their customers and business networks. This will help you establish a name in front of referrers' minds, creating trust and authority.

If your clientele is all in the same industry, you may want to take a shot at the following:

Tempt your existing clients and potential referrals by offering them free webinars or workshops.
Creating Whitepapers are a great way to keep up with industry trends. Have your clients share it with their peers.
The client's case study goes as a collaborative piece, inciting others to know more about your business.
Q&A session geared toward new businesses through a Facebook live session.

If you put in the time and effort to guarantee that your current clients get value, they will perform most of your marketing.

The tips above are just the tip of the iceberg!

Following the tips above shows the possibility of marketing your digital marketing agency. The actual work may need you to adopt multiple tactics to find out how deep the rabbit hole is.

For now, you can start with one of the techniques and check the results to find out which one works for you the best. Also, keep it consistent and ongoing as results would take time.