How To Hire A Content Marketing Consultant Who Gets Results

Content marketing has become one of the best ways for businesses to attract leads and customers. Traditional marketing is getting less and less effective day by day, and there are many downfalls if you are promoting your brand only through traditional marketing. Some of the biggest drawbacks include the heavy cost involved, lack of personalized approach to reaching customers, and the fact that traditional marketing techniques usually target an entire market instead of a single consumer.

So, what is the better approach to get your product in front of your audience effectively? Creating high-quality content! However, content marketing requires time, money, subject matter expertise, and know-how of best practices. If you’re new to content marketing—or if you don’t want to do the heavy lifting yourself—the following guide walks through finding and hiring a content marketing consultant and focusing on business results.

What Is Content Marketing?

The concept of content marketing has been around for ages. According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), content marketing is a long-term strategy designed to create a strong long-term relationship with your consumer base by providing them high-quality content that they can associate within their everyday lives. Eventually, when a customer researches and makes a decision to buy your product, you will gain their loyalty, and they will be more likely to buy it again from your brand.

Unlike traditional marketing techniques, content marketing shows that you are concerned about your customers and focused on their needs and wants. In today’s world, customers like to think that they are being cared for, and that’s where content marketing strategies come into play and grab their attention. The world is becoming louder and noisier by the day, and giving clear, helpful information is more valuable than ever.

How to Measure Content Marketing Results

Now that you know what content marketing strategy is and how it works, let’s drill down into some of the ways you can measure your content marketing results. Using some of the techniques mentioned below, you can assess your return on investment (ROI) and see where the opportunities lie in your marketing campaigns.

Track Actionable Metrics

Tracking your most actionable metrics on your content like email engagement rate, time on site, comments, topics of interest, and more are important sources to monitor your content marketing performance. These insights can not only help you measure success but also to adjust your content marketing strategy based on real data.

Track Your Conversions

Tracking your conversions in terms of email subscriptions, event registrations, and leads can go a long way in finding the return on your content marketing investment. Much of this is doable through free out-of-the-box features in a tool like Google Analytics. This information will help you adjust your content marketing strategy over time and make necessary changes to your content creation and distribution. Having insight into how many of your target users are actually buying from you will give you an idea of whether your content marketing is effective compared to your expectations.

Learn from Industry Peers

Talking to and learning from your industry peers can also help you evaluate the effectiveness of your content marketing campaigns. Observing and discussing the approaches others use in different can help you come up with ideas that you can incorporate into your content marketing. It can also help you benchmark success and avoid trying costly approaches that don’t work.

Be Ready to Adapt and Change

No matter how much tracking, learning, and reviewing you do, the greatest challenge lies in getting out of your comfort zone and implementing bigger changes in your approach. If you don’t adapt and improve based on the results you track, all the effort is wasted.

Hire a Content Marketing Consultant

If you are new to the world of content marketing, taking care of all major and minor factors required to excel might take a toll on you and take your time away from other valuable business activities. To make things easier, you can bring on a professional content marketing consultant to help with strategy and implementation. A good content marketing consultant will:

• Guide you with their previous experiences and prevent you from the pitfalls that are bound to happen during the learning process
• Help discover your unique customer needs
• Create an execution plan for you that is based on their experience and research
• Set goals and metrics for tracking success

Reasons to Hire a Content Marketing Consultant

You Don’t Know How to Differentiate Your Brand

Many times, during your content marketing journey, you might observe that you are looking into your story so closely that you are unable to hear it objectively as a reader would. A seasoned content marketing consultant will help you craft your own story. They will help you evaluate why your product is unique and how you can take the product and reach out to your audience in an appropriate manner. They’ll research what information your customers care about and how they want to learn about products or services like yours. They will also listen to your goals and business objectives clearly and devise strategies to achieve them.

You Don’t Have Enough Time to Create High-Quality Content

When you’re running a business, it’s tough to keep up on content marketing. When you’re busy, you’re prone to forget the day-in-and-day-out activities of a successful content marketing strategy. It might leave your audience wondering why your business hasn’t posted a blog in 5 months and has a limited social media presence.

A good content marketing consultant will create content for you that is relatable, engaging, and worthwhile for your target audience. This will help you decide the factors to focus on throughout your marketing campaign. They can also determine which channels are the most appropriate for your brand promotion, and they can also create a baseline report so you can track your progress as you go along.

You Want Innovative Ideas

You may know your business best, but getting help and advice from the outside is an important exercise in generating leads and conversions. It holds especially true if you want to make a change and really step up your content marketing game. A content marketing consultant is helpful in bringing and implementing results-driven changes within your content marketing that you wouldn’t even think to do.

Your Buyer Personas Are Still Undefined

Defining your buyer persona is a crucial process. It can make or break the entire content marketing strategy for your organization. Defining the target audience of your product based on buyer persona is tricky. Help from a professional content marketing consultant is vital, especially if you’re not sure where to start.

Your buyer persona is a highly detailed profile developed for your current and targeted customers. It’s based on demographic, psychographic, and behavioral information. The buyer’s persona clearly illustrates the image of your potential buyers and their pain points and preferences. Enlisting the help of a good content marketing consultant can help you throughout this process. The sooner you can define your buyer’s persona, the sooner you are able to improve the overall content strategy your organization has implied.

You Don’t Know Where to Post Your Content

Simply posting your content everywhere on the internet has no significant impact on your marketing; in fact, it can even have a negative cost-benefit impact. Furthermore, low-quality content can actually leave a bad impact on your brand.

There are many platforms you can use to get your content out there. However, with so many options, it can be a bit overwhelming and tricky to decide where to start from. A seasoned content marketing consultant can guide you on the tools to use, the message to be communicated, and which platforms to take advantage of. All of these recommendations will be based on the previously developed personas.

A content marketing consultant can help you customize your content according to the platform where it will be published. They can even help you out with search engine optimization (SEO) and paid content promotion to make sure your content gets the most attention from your target audience.

How to Hire a Content Marketing Consultant for Your Business

Once you decide that a content marketing expert is right for your business, it’s time to find one that fits your goals. The idea of finding the right consultant for your business can be daunting, so here are some tips for making the process smooth and beneficial.

Be Crystal Clear About Your Requirements

Before hiring a content marketing consultant for your business, make sure you are clear about your own requirements, the goals you want to achieve through your content, and how you can take the help of the content marketing consultant to reach those goals. Defining your requirements helps you find and evaluate qualified consultants, and helps the consultants know quickly if they’d be a good fit for the project.

Choose a Platform for Hiring

Choosing the right platform to find and hire a content marketing consultant is another factor to consider. Always opt for platforms that are reliable, well-known, and have positive reviews. Shortlist a few marketplaces and then match them with your ideal scenario. The one that matches the closest should be your first choice for hiring a content marketing professional.

When you have selected candidates for the content marketing specialist for your business, make sure you have their contact details, their portfolio, and references when possible. Be as specific as you can about what you expect before hiring a consultant.

Schedule an Interview, Hire, and Onboard

When you’re using a platform like FreeUp to hire a content marketing consultant, a small interview or with a freelancer can be helpful in evaluating the candidate and making sure they are the right one for your business. You can ask the questions you want to during the evaluation to help you understand if they’re a good fit—from focusing on their character and attitude to talking about similar projects they may have completed. Beware of any red flags that you observe, and if it happens, trust your gut feeling.

Once you are satisfied with the candidate, hire them through the platform where you found them. We suggest you get them on board for a short video call so you can get a clear idea of their reliability and abilities. Make sure you are completely satisfied with their work, communication skills, and professionalism. If you aren’t ready to jump in completely, get them on board for a smaller project and then show them the bigger picture. Communicate your requirements to them and tell them what kind of work you’re expecting.

Lastly, make sure you both are always on the same page throughout the project. Discuss every minute detail with your content marketing consultant, encourage their work, and give them remarks. Ask for project roadmaps, milestones, and how they’ll track and report results. You need to make sure they know where you are coming from and where you want them to go.

Conclusion

Content marketing is a complex discipline that requires an investment of time, knowledge, and energy. If you’re ready to get results from your content marketing, hiring a consultant may be your best option.

To find pre-vetted content marketing consultants on FreeUp, create your free client account.