Why We’re Offering Content Strategy Consulting Services

We’ve been thinking a lot about content lately — both our own and our clients’.

It’s something we always have in mind. After all, quality content is one of the key ingredients needed to keep the marketing-driven web platforms we build running smoothly. But the demands of producing all that content, week after week, month after month, pose some serious challenges for our clients. And not just our clients — for us, too.

We know it from our own personal experience producing content for Newfangled, and we also know it because it’s echoed by our clients as we work with them to plan, build, launch, and maintain their sites. Starting with the preliminary planning stage, almost all of our clients express equal parts excitement and anxiety about beefing up their content strategies (in most cases, building a site with us does mean an increase in content types and publishing frequency). These folks understand how important thought-leadership content is to the success of their online marketing efforts, but they aren’t quite sure they have the resources necessary to make it happen on an ongoing basis. They just know they want to try.

Unfortunately, that same mixture of enthusiasm and trepidation often plagues clients all the way through the launch of their new sites and beyond. That was our sense, anyway. But we wanted to get a firmer grasp on how our clients are faring when it comes to content, so we recently polled a small group of them to see what they had to say.

The responses we got bore out our hunch: many agencies struggle to “do” content as well as they’d like. While every single respondent indicated that the content they produce has a meaningful impact on their new-business pipeline, over half of them said they struggle to meet their word counts each month — and that’s despite the fact that roughly the same number have budget allocated especially for content marketing. More specifically, 70% of respondents said they struggle to manage content calendars and internal resources; 55% have a hard time framing content for SEO; and 30% have difficulty shaping their content strategy in the first place. Others struggled with promoting content, measuring the performance of their content, and coming up with topics for their writing.

The takeaway is pretty obvious: content marketing is an extremely effective approach — one that we believe is much too valuable to pass up — but it comes with its own unique set of problems. It doesn’t run on autopilot, and it’s definitely not “free,” even if you aren’t explicitly devoting budget to it.

What to do?

Our New Services

I recently wrote a piece for our blog about the changes we’ve made over the past several months to Newfangled’s internal content production processes — changes which amount to a new system for managing our content marketing and which have already proven themselves. Since putting this new system in place, our output has increased by 85%. The changes we made were necessary in and of themselves — and we’ve shared the details because we think others will find it equally useful — but they were also a testing ground for something we’ve long wanted to do: offer more focused, hands-on assistance to clients in planning, implementing, measuring, and optimizing their content strategies.

Now that our system is solidified and proven, we want to offer it to you.

Here’s how it works: We start with a six month commitment. During the initial onboarding period, we’ll meet frequently to help you set up or refine an existing content strategy for your website, taking into consideration your big-picture goals as well as your unique business proposition, web personas, and stages of the buying cycle. We’ll express the strategic decisions we make in the form of a content matrix and editorial calendar. Then, moving forward, we’ll meet for monthly editorial meetings with your team of content creators to plan the next month’s content in terms of topics and writing assignments, as well as to review the performance of the previous month’s content. Then, we’ll help you manage writing deadlines and optimize each piece for SEO before you publish it to your site. We’ll also help provide general editorial guidance to ensure that your content is structured in a way that is scannable and digestible.

We’re really excited to be offering this service, as we believe it addresses a real need for the businesses we work for and with. And, if you’re interested in learning more about our content consulting services, take a peek at this simple, dowloadable overview we’ve put together.