With marketing strategies and tools constantly improving, there’s a need for experts to guide brands and businesses through the ever-changing marketing landscape.
But how do you choose the best agency fit?
We analyzed 8,000+ listings of content marketing agencies on Clutch, a B2B review platform that allows businesses to publicly review businesses with which they’ve worked, to get a better sense of the breadth of content marketing agencies out there and which could be best for you.
What Constitutes a True “Content Marketing Agency”?
Clutch contains more than 8,000 companies that consider themselves as offering the service of “content marketing.” Of that group, 213 (~2.6%) could be considered “primarily content marketing shops,” meaning more than 40% of their service offering is content marketing.
There are many qualities, sizes, and characteristics that go into making a content marketing agency. Be clear about what you’re looking for in an agency and pay attention to how they talk about themselves and their services.
“Content” is a boundless term – some agencies might just be production houses cranking out blog posts, while others develop strategies to increase organic traffic.
Think about what you’re really after, and make sure the agency provides it.
Agency Headcount: How Big are These Agencies?
When analyzing data from Clutch, we can see the distribution of a company’s size, or “headcount,” of all 8,000+ agencies versus those with a 40% or more content marketing focus.
While they are quite similar, those with a content marketing focus skew slightly smaller overall, with a smaller overall percentage for agencies with less than 50 employees and none appearing in the 1,000+ employee range.
Agencies that place a greater, singular focus on content marketing tend to have similar company sizes compared to marketing agencies that offer a wider range of services. This occurrence may speak to the overall size of the content marketing service need and the ability to create and grow an agency successfully with a central focus on content marketing without having to provide “full service” offerings.
Content marketing, as a field, is beginning to stand on its own.
How Much Does It Cost?
Ah, the question on everyone’s mind. This is a tough aspect of hiring an agency, because while many of them want to be transparent about their service offerings and prices, they also don’t want to reveal their pricing to their competition. As a result, you typically have to inquire about specific costs.
However, Clutch incentivizes agencies to disclose this information by offering wide ranges to select from rather than requesting a specific number. This is extremely helpful because it allows people searching for an agency to identify which ones they can afford with their allocated budget.
There are two common types of pricing models that content marketing agencies work within: price per hour and price per project. There are benefits to both depending on the type of work an agency offers.
Depending on the internal structure of your brand or company, it might be more beneficial to bring on a marketing agency by the hour or by the project.
Say you are a business owner, and you’re beginning to dip your feet into the content marketing pool. You don’t have any automation in place. Analytics? Never heard of it. Your blog has been stale for months, and you don’t have an editorial calendar in mind, let alone in place. In this case, it might make sense to hire a content marketing agency by the hour to get a sense of how things work, how long they take, and how much it’ll cost. Then, you can start setting your marketing priorities.
However, say you are a brand owner who has some grasp of marketing. You might have some email funnels in place, but you’re looking for something more, like a group to tackle marketing campaigns or blog posts only. In this case, hiring by the project could make more sense.
How About Those That Focus Primarily on Content Marketing?
Looking at just those whose service offering is over 40% content marketing, we see a shift in cost structures.
Here, we see zero agencies charging in the under $25/hour range, with a larger percentage falling in the $100 to $149/hour grouping.
We also see a larger percentage falling into the $1,000 to $5,000 per project range, with far fewer in the $10,000+ ranges. This likely indicates that a decent portion of those that focus primarily on content marketing services (the over 40% group) focuses mostly on lower cost content production (basic articles and SEO content) rather than higher cost items like in-depth or data-driven content.
This ties back to what we mentioned before: “Content marketing” can mean a lot of things, so it’s necessary to read and vet each agency in detail to determine if the agency and its specialties match up with your goals.
Service Distribution: Popular and Common Offerings
With over 150 different marketing strategies to choose from, teams can now opt to choose an agency with a niche range of services that match up to where the brand is positioned in its industry.
Over 8,000 Clutch listings give some insight into the most popular marketing offerings that came from qualified and reviewed marketing agencies.
This is the overall distribution of all service offerings. As expected, content marketing takes the top spot. The distribution of other offerings is fascinating, with search engine optimization (SEO) showing up in second place, hinting at the intertwined, symbiotic relationship between content marketing and SEO.
Agencies with SEO services tend to view marketing from a holistic, comprehensive perspective, as their overall goal is to improve rankings in search engine results (and, thus, bolster organic traffic, conversions, brand awareness, etc.).
Agencies that do both content marketing and SEO likely take a more strategic approach to ensure content meets particular goals related to growth.
What Services Command the Most Focus From Agencies?
On Clutch, there’s a function that allows agencies to note the percentage distribution of each service it offers, giving readers a complete view of how a particular agency spends its time and resources.
The graph below looks at the average percentage of each service offering across all companies. Essentially, this shows us the average amount of focus the entire industry devotes to each field, informally breaking down each focus area’s popularity and, more specifically, the top services based on overall time commitment.
We can see that video production, SEO, web design, digital strategy, and marketing strategy have the top five overall highest percentages. Agencies that offer those services are more likely to focus a greater degree on those and less likely to have more highly diversified service offerings due to the involvement of those more time-intensive fields.
This could allude to some of the more common ways to employ content strategy as a part of your marketing planning. This can mean focusing on reaching out to your target audience through high user intent, valuable, keyword-researched content; producing creative, compelling video content; or complementing that great content with an intuitive, aesthetically pleasing website user experience overall.
All of this is great insight when it comes to figuring out who you want to hire: Are you looking for an agency that specializes in a particular tactic, or do you need one that can use a few methods to achieve your goal?
How Does Company Size Impact the Services That Agencies Offer?
Looking closer at how service categories differ by company size, we can see that there is actually a great deal of similarity across all size segments, showing us these principles carry weight across all agencies.
Note: This view is a sampling and excludes the more tangential and specific service offering groups. We are aiming to see a comprehensive overview of the most common services in the industry to gauge an average breakdown in a standard agency.
This observable sameness across the groups demonstrates the inherent “bootstrapability” of agency offerings, or the ability for even low-budget startups to succeed. From sole proprietorships to 1,000-plus-person behemoths, it’s possible to offer most of these services individually.
Despite overall similarities, there are some differences of note. In particular, we see larger agencies offering more traditional advertising services, custom software development, branding services, and video production over smaller market players. This makes sense, as these services generally have higher cost internal dependencies related to their execution.
How Satisfied Are Customers of Content Marketing Agencies?
So far, we’ve established that marketing agencies, especially content marketing agencies, have a huge range in size, offerings, and value. As such, the reviews are mixed, and some brand owners can spend thousands on a “surefire” marketing agency and be left with nothing to show for it.
Selecting a content marketing agency with care ensures the quality of the services you will get later on.
Services with public-facing end products tend to earn high ratings, such as video (broadcast and production), market research, consulting (CRM and business), and design (graphic and packaging).
Conversely, development-oriented categories struggle to earn positive feedback from their clients, with e-commerce, custom software, and mobile app development falling to the bottom quartile, along with technical design categories like UI/UX, app testing, and mobile app marketing.
When agencies move into development work, it can be difficult to satisfy clients, perhaps indicating they took the work without being able to deliver expectations or that the expectations were overblown.
Either way, hiring agencies to do development work might not be the best use of time if hiring an in-house development team is feasible.
Conclusion
Content marketing agencies are just one sliver in the network of marketing. The secret to hiring one is rooted in a deep understanding of your brand identity, goals, and quite a bit of introspective analysis. However, a great agency will work with you to determine your best steps to success.
