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Yes, I know my title ends in a preposition. Sue me, grammar police of the world. There’s a reason that content dominates the world of marketing: It allows businesses to leverage their knowledge and stand out from their competition. Besides being cost effective, content marketing provides value that quickly builds relationships with customers.
It also creates brand loyalty, establishes a business as a trusted industry resource, and helps customers educate themselves to make informed buying decisions.
Content marketing also helps you rebrand your business as it evolves. Consistently delivering fresh content helps your brand keep up with changing leadership, shifting business strategies, mergers and acquisitions, and added products.
Although content marketing is crucial for any business to stay competitive, it certainly isn’t easy. Effective content marketing requires creativity and a well-designed content strategy. A good content marketing strategy helps ensure that all pieces of content are in line with the business model, while making sure content is planned with profitable results in mind.
Whether you’re rebranding your business, or you just want your content marketing to outshine the competition, help is available.
Mediaplanet
Mediaplanet’s content is distributed through print, digital, mobile and social channels. The company designs their content to inspire readers to take action. They publish print and digital campaigns about timely health, business, technology, lifestyle, education and corporate social responsibility topics.
Their content is created in partnership with influential celebrities, award-winning journalists, associations, and thought leaders. They design their content to engage their clients’ target audience via their newspaper partners, while promoting corresponding digital campaigns.
Their newspaper partners include USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune and Miami Herald. Their USA’s Managing Director, Luciana Olson, explains “from conception to production to distribution, we focus on creating impactful awareness campaigns that ignite readers and excite clients.”
NewsCred
NewsCred helps marketers create effective content and engaging storytelling. They offer an easy-to-use platform that streamlines the marketing process, including audience insights, content recommendations, brand governance, social publishing, distribution and analytics.
NewsCred gives businesses access to the world’s largest content marketplace. They provide original content from award-winning freelancers, licensed content from 5,000 leading publishers, and user-generated content from brand advocates.
According to CEO Shafqat Islam, “When done right, content marketing allows brands to inspire, excite and educate their audience. If brands can efficiently create and curate quality content at scale, they become hyper-relevant in the eyes of their customers. This creates a much deeper, more meaningful relationship and builds a two way dialogue, unlike traditional advertising.”
Contently
Contently describes themselves as “a technology company that helps brands create great content at scale.” As CEO Joe Coleman told MarTech Advisor, their software supports every step in the content marketing process—creation, ideation, workflow, and governance, and on to publishing integrations, measurement, optimization, and more.
Their platform allows brands to manage all their content in one place, streamline approval processes, and instantly optimize every aspect of all content marketing campaigns with patent-pending analytics that tell you what to do next—and how to tie your efforts to business results.
Coleman says brands need to have clearly defined metrics around the type of people they want to get in front of and draw in including basic demographics such as age and geo-location but also frequented sites, the type of content that’s engaging in the first place – be they blog posts, social media posts, etc. — and how often it takes them to make a purchase decision after being presented content in any form.
Scripted
Scripted helps their clients produce content with affordable flat-rate pricing and a quality guarantee. They enable businesses to scale their brand’s content with managed content services. Scripted employs a team of account managers who help ensure consistency across all of a brand’s content. Their goal is to create the highest quality content at any volume, whether it’s blog posts, product descriptions, social content, local guides, or other types of content.
For clients who are having a hard time thinking of new blog topics, the company provides a browsable new topic marketplace. Clients can then order blog posts directly from writers who pitched the ideas.
CEO Curtis Kroeker says it’s about providing options. “I see the opportunity to enable anyone – from individuals to enterprises – to access a pool of world-class talent well beyond what they can find in their local market.”
SkyWord
The Skyword platform is designed to help brands transcend the digital noise and develop their brand as a global search and social destination. The company employs a team of content strategists who help coordinate a global pool of writers for their clients.
They also provide their clients a marketing calendar to align a brand’s strategy with the rest of its marketing. The calendar gives other teams across a client’s entire organization visibility into the content marketing plan. The company’s platform lets clients track metrics such as content, contributor and social performance, along with Google Analytics such as channel, acquisition, engagement, and goal-completion metrics.
TapInfluence
Content is highly effective when fueled by influencer marketing. According to TapInfluence, the company was founded with a single purpose: “To facilitate real conversations between people and brands by tapping into the power of digital influencers and their authentic, trusted content – allowing consumers, influencers and brands to get heard.”
Their platform gives a brand the ability to automate the process of identifying and engaging with digital influencers. They help their clients collaborate with the right influencers to create compelling content that motivates consumers to take action.
Bonus Resource For Internet Marketing Agencies
AgencyPlatform
If you own an internet marketing agency that helps businesses optimize their content with effective SEO, AgencyPlatform is a resource to look in to. AgencyPlatform is a marketing dashboard designed for agencies that need white label services with value added features like social media management, project collaboration, and PPC tools.
AgencyPlatform offers audit reporting that gauges domain strength, on-page optimization, off-page optimization, readability, conversion metrics, social engagement, and competition. The company also provides weekly ranking reports and ranking snapshots that give agencies a quick look at overall client rankings.
Other options include a web-form builder for capturing lead data, webinars to help keep agencies up-to-date with the latest SEO strategies, and a mobile website generator with hosting included.
Is Your Content As Effective As It Should Be?
Some marketing functions can confidently be handled in-house. But with so many technologies, platforms and creative talent available for effective content marketing, why go it alone? By making sure your industry knowledge and your brand’s story are brought to life by seasoned experts, you might just gain the competitive edge you’ve been looking for.
This article originally appeared on Forbes.
