One pattern we’ve seen consistently is that enterprise companies come to us after hiring an agency that technically did content marketing, published regularly, grew traffic, and hit their deliverable counts, but never generated pipeline. The content looks fine on the surface, ranks for keywords, and drives traffic, but rarely converts enterprise buyers into demos or sales opportunities.

In our experience, that failure comes down to a few recurring problems.

• Most agencies treat enterprise content marketing as a volume problem rather than a strategy problem rooted in how enterprise buyers actually make purchasing decisions.
• Most enterprise content marketing services target high-volume, top of the funnel keywords that attract early-stage researchers, not the active buyers who are already evaluating vendors. This has always been a flawed approach for pipeline generation, and it’s getting worse as AI tools absorb informational queries that used to drive organic search traffic.
• Most agencies don’t have a process for identifying genuine product expertise, so the content they produce is too generic and doesn’t really tell enterprise buyers how it could solve their pain points.
• Most enterprise content teams have no visibility into whether their brand appears in AI-generated responses when buyers are researching vendors on tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity, and most agencies they’ve hired don’t have a strategy for that either.

What’s behind all of this is a distinction we think matters a lot when evaluating agencies at the enterprise level. There are two fundamentally different things an enterprise business might need from a content marketing agency:

• Managing a content program at enterprise scale, with complex approval workflows, brand governance, compliance requirements, and global operations.
• Creating content that actually converts enterprise buyers who are making six or seven-figure purchasing decisions with long sales cycles and multiple decision-makers involved.

Most enterprise content marketing agencies are built for the first, but most enterprise marketing teams actually need the second, or some combination of both.

In this article, we’ll walk through the key factors enterprise marketing teams should use to evaluate content agencies, explain how we address each at Grow and Convert, and share profiles of the agencies whose names come up most often in this space.

Grow and Convert is an SEO and GEO-focused content marketing agency with experience working with several enterprise companies. If you want to hire an agency to handle your enterprise content marketing, you can learn more about working with us here. If you’d like to learn how to do this yourself, check out our content marketing course and community here.

Factors to consider when evaluating enterprise content marketing agencies

We’ve worked with enough enterprise companies to have a clear sense of what separates agencies that generate real pipeline from those that produce content without much to show for it. 

Below are the four factors we’d focus on when evaluating enterprise content marketing agencies.

Factor 1: Is their strategy built to generate pipeline, not just traffic?

The number one factor to evaluate in any content marketing agency is whether their strategy is designed to drive their company’s bottom line, i.e., generate leads and pipeline, or to just grow traffic. Most agencies, including those that market themselves to enterprise companies, usually focus on traffic growth. They target keywords with high search volume, report on sessions and rankings, and treat pipeline contribution as something that’s hard to measure as a vendor in an enterprise setting, and therefore not their responsibility.

Enterprise content marketing has a specific version of this problem. Because enterprise deals are large and sales cycles are long, there’s a temptation to justify content investment through brand awareness and thought leadership metrics rather than direct pipeline influence. Most agencies are happy to operate that way because it removes measurement pressure from them.

The agencies that actually drive enterprise pipeline start with the keywords and topics that enterprise buyers search (in both Google and with LLMs) when they’re already evaluating solutions, not when they’re trying to understand a problem category for the first time. 

In our research across dozens of B2B clients, bottom of the funnel content converts at 4.78% compared to 0.19% for top-of-funnel content. For enterprise companies where a single converted account can represent hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, that difference matters enormously.

When evaluating agencies on this factor, ask them to show you a client’s content strategy and explain how each piece connects to the pipeline. Ask what metrics they report on each month. If the answer centers on traffic, rankings, or domain authority rather than demos or sales opportunities sourced from content, that’s a meaningful signal about how they measure success.

Factor 2: Do they have a process for capturing genuine product expertise?

Enterprise buyers are sophisticated practitioners. A VP of Finance evaluating spend management software, or a CISO evaluating a security platform, can immediately tell whether a piece of content was written by someone who understands their problem at a practitioner level or by a writer who spent a few hours researching the topic online or used AI to produce generic copy.

Most agencies produce what we call “Google research paper” content, either on their own or with AI help. A writer is handed a keyword and assembles an article by just Googling what already ranks for that term. The output is generic, tells the reader nothing they couldn’t find on other websites, and gives enterprise buyers no reason to trust the vendor behind it. AI writing has only exacerbated this problem, with writers asking ChatGPT to just produce a piece on this topic, which, by definition, is AI just repeating what others have already said on that topic. 

In contrast, at Grow and Convert, we have an interview-based writing process, where writers conduct detailed conversations with product managers, engineers, sales leaders, and customer success teams before writing anything. Those interviews help the writers surface the specific insights, differentiators, and customer pain points that competitors cannot replicate because they require insider knowledge. For enterprise companies with complex products and sophisticated buyers, this is the content writing process that has consistently produced results for our clients.

When evaluating agencies on this factor, ask them to walk you through exactly how their writers develop domain expertise on a client’s product. If the answer involves content briefs and keyword research but no direct interviews with subject matter experts, the content they produce will reflect that gap.

Factor 3: Do they have an AI search strategy for enterprise visibility?

Enterprise buyers increasingly use AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude to research vendors and build shortlists before ever talking to a sales team. If your brand isn’t appearing in AI-generated responses when buyers search for solutions in your category, you’re being filtered out of consideration before the conversation starts.

Most content marketing agencies have not built a structured methodology for AI search visibility. They may list GEO or LLM optimization as a service, but what they’re actually doing is applying tactics, like optimizing a few pages, adding FAQ schema, or pursuing mentions on third-party sites like Reddit, without a coherent model for how AI systems retrieve and cite sources or how to systematically improve visibility across an entire content program.

Our research found a 72% correlation between ranking on the first page of Google and being cited by AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, which increases to 77% for the top three positions. Owned content ranking in traditional search is still the foundation of AI visibility, but there are additional layers around off-site brand mentions, third-party citations, and on-site content structure that influence whether AI tools recommend your brand when enterprise buyers ask relevant questions.

What makes AI search meaningfully different from traditional SEO is that enterprise buyers aren’t typing short, repeatable keywords into Google. They’re having detailed, personalized conversations with AI tools that factor in their company size, existing tools, and specific pain points, and getting recommendations tailored to their exact situation. That means generic, high-volume informational content doesn’t give AI systems enough to work with when matching your product to a specific buyer’s situation.

When evaluating agencies on this factor, ask them to describe their specific framework for improving AI search visibility, not just whether they offer it as a service. Ask how they measure it, which platforms they track, and what their process looks like for improving a brand’s citation rate over time.

Factor 4: Do they understand enterprise buying dynamics, not just enterprise operations?

This is the distinction we raised in the introduction, and it’s worth going deeper on because it’s where many agency evaluations go wrong.

There’s a meaningful difference between an agency that knows how to operate inside a large organization and an agency that knows how to create content for the buyers that large organizations are trying to reach. The first type has experience managing complex approval workflows, navigating brand governance processes, coordinating content across multiple business units, and producing high volumes of content at scale. Those are real capabilities that some enterprise companies need.

The second type understands how enterprise deals actually happen. They know that a six-figure software purchase involves multiple stakeholders with different objections, that the buying timeline is measured in months, that the content a VP sees during the evaluation phase needs to speak to business outcomes rather than product features, and that category-level keywords with enterprise modifiers like “project management software for large teams” or “SOC 2 compliant data integration” convert at far higher rates than broad informational queries.

Most agencies that market to enterprise companies are strong at the first and weak at the second. They understand procurement and compliance. They don’t necessarily understand how to create content that generates inbound interest from the specific decision-makers their clients are trying to reach.

When evaluating agencies on this factor, ask them to show you examples of content they’ve produced specifically for enterprise buyers. Ask how their keyword strategy accounts for longer sales cycles and multi-stakeholder buying committees. The answers will quickly tell you which type of agency you’re looking at.

Best Enterprise Content Marketing Agencies

Below are content marketing agencies we’ve run into or names we’ve heard associated with enterprise content marketing. Before listing those, we start with a detailed overview of our own and how we built Grow and Convert to address each of the four factors above, and the results we’ve achieved for clients.  For each, we’ll explain their approach, what they specialize in, and what types of companies they work best with. 

1. Grow and Convert

Grow and Convert is our SEO and GEO-focused content marketing agency. We’ve spent over 10 years executing content marketing strategies that drive demo requests and pipeline for enterprise B2B companies, not just traffic. 

Unlike agencies that optimize for top of the funnel metrics like traffic or rankings, we focus on bottom of the funnel content that generates qualified leads and measurable ROI through our Pain Point SEO and Prioritized GEO frameworks.

We work with enterprise B2B companies that sell complex products to sophisticated buyers, including large organizations with long sales cycles, multiple decision-makers involved in each deal, and significant revenue attached to each closed account.

Here’s how we address each of the factors we mentioned above:

Factor 1: We build content strategies around pipeline, not traffic

The core differentiator of our agency is that we measure performance on leads generated, not just traffic or rankings.

For every client, we create an ROI graph that tracks leads generated from our content each month against the number of leads they need to break even on their monthly investment with us. This gives enterprise marketing teams something concrete to show leadership: not sessions and impressions, but actual pipeline contribution from content.

For enterprise clients specifically, this means our SEO keyword strategy is built around the queries enterprise buyers search during an active evaluation, not during early-stage research. There are a few distinct keyword types we target for enterprise companies:

• Category keywords that reflect an active buying decision, such as “best [software category] for enterprise” or “enterprise [software category] software”
• Comparison keywords where buyers are already evaluating specific vendors, such as “[your product] vs. [competitor]”
• Jobs-to-be-done keywords that map to the specific outcomes enterprise buyers are trying to achieve, such as “how to manage compliance across multiple business units” or “how to consolidate HR software for large teams”
• Keywords with enterprise-specific modifiers that signal buying intent, such as “SOC 2 compliant,” “for teams of 500 or more,” or “with Salesforce integration”

Note, as we explain below, these keywords map really well to a company’s bottom of funnel topic map for AI search: the collection of topics users may ask AI tools about and where you want LLMs to mention your brand as a possible solution. 

In our research across enterprise B2B clients, bottom of the funnel content converts at 4.78% compared to 0.19% for top of the funnel content. For enterprise companies where a single converted account can represent hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue, that difference is the entire argument for doing content this way.

Factor 2: We have a structured process for capturing genuine product expertise

Enterprise buyers are practitioners and senior decision-makers. A CISO evaluating a security platform or a CFO evaluating financial software will immediately recognize whether a piece of content was written by someone with genuine domain expertise or assembled from generic research. 

Most content produced by agencies falls into the latter category because writers are handed a keyword and asked to research the topic online, producing what we call Google research paper content that tells enterprise buyers nothing they couldn’t find elsewhere.

Our process is different. Before writing anything, we conduct in-depth interviews with product managers, engineers, sales leaders, and customer success teams at each client company. For enterprise clients, this often means interviewing the people closest to large-deal sales cycles, the account executives who understand enterprise objections, the customer success managers who know how large organizations actually implement and use the product, and the subject matter experts whose perspectives carry credibility with senior buyers. 

The resulting content contains what we call originality nuggets, specific insights and perspectives that competitors cannot replicate because they require direct access to your team and customers.

Factor 3: We have a structured AI search strategy

Enterprise buyers increasingly use AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude to build vendor shortlists before engaging sales teams. Procurement teams at large organizations use these tools to identify solutions, compare vendors, and understand the landscape before a formal RFP process begins. If an enterprise company’s brand isn’t appearing in those AI-generated responses, it’s being filtered out of consideration before a sales conversation ever starts.

Most content marketing agencies approach AI search visibility through isolated tactics rather than a coherent strategy. We built the Prioritized GEO framework specifically to address this problem.

The framework treats AI visibility as a layered strategy: owned content ranking in traditional search as the foundation, followed by off-site brand mentions and third-party citations that signal authority to AI systems, and finally, on-site content structure optimized for AI retrieval. 

For enterprise clients specifically, our Tier 1 work goes beyond ranking for high-intent buying keywords. We build what we call a GEO topic map: a collection of content covering every product angle, use case, buyer persona, and competitive scenario in which an LLM could recommend you.

Our goal is to produce content that teaches LLMs to associate your brand as a possible solution when enterprise buyers describe their specific pain points in a conversation — content written at enough depth and specificity that when an AI tool searches the web while formulating a response, it finds clear, detailed signals about when and why your product is the right fit.

We track AI visibility at the topic level for every enterprise client using Traqer.ai (our own AI visibility tracking tool), which monitors brand citation rates across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews over time. We’ve also written about how we build topic-based GEO for clients in detail here.

Factor 4: We build content for enterprise buying dynamics, not just enterprise scale

Most agencies that serve enterprise companies understand enterprise operations. They know how to manage approval workflows, navigate brand governance, and produce content at scale inside a large organization. What they often don’t understand is how enterprise deals actually happen and what content moves enterprise buyers through the purchasing decision.

Our content strategies for enterprise clients are built around that buying process specifically. We map keyword strategies to the stages of an enterprise evaluation, from the initial queries a VP searches when they first recognize a problem, through the comparison and vendor evaluation searches that happen mid-cycle, to the compliance and implementation questions that come up before a deal closes. 

We write for the business outcomes and risk considerations that senior decision-makers care about, not the feature-level details that would appeal to an individual contributor. And because enterprise deals involve multiple stakeholders, we think about the full buying committee when developing content, not just the primary user persona.

You can learn more about working with us here, or read our full guide to enterprise content marketing strategy here. 

2. Tendo Communications

Tendo Communications is a B2B content and UX agency that works exclusively with large enterprise companies. Founded in 1999, they provide services including content strategy, content creation, UX design, content operations, and content performance. They are one of the oldest agencies in this space and one of the few that focuses entirely on the operational complexity of large B2B organizations rather than growth-stage or mid-market clients.

Unlike most agencies in this space, they integrate content strategy with user experience design. They acquired a UX design agency to bring both disciplines under one roof, making them well-suited for enterprise organizations managing large content ecosystems across multiple products, regions, and audiences.

Their production model centers on a Content Studio approach that provides dedicated editorial teams for sustained content production at scale. They use a proprietary audience-centric framework built around persona development and journey mapping, and work with clients on a long-term strategic basis across multiple regions, languages, and business units rather than as a project-based content vendor.

They have worked with companies like Cisco, Salesforce, HPE, Autodesk, VMware, Informatica, and Okta.

Visit their site for more information.

3. Animalz

Animalz is a content marketing agency that works with B2B SaaS companies, enterprise software companies, and venture capital firms. They describe their programs as built to drive organic growth through content that reflects genuine domain expertise rather than research-assembled writing, and they have worked with enterprise technology companies alongside growth-stage SaaS clients.

Their production process starts with a deep onboarding phase where they study the client’s product, industry, and go-to-market strategy before developing a content strategy and moving into production through direct SME interviews. They emphasize building content that requires insider knowledge, which they believe is what separates effective B2B content from generic writing assembled from existing search results.

They also offer Answer Engine Optimization as a dedicated service, which includes brand visibility audits across Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. They have published detailed frameworks on improving AI citation rates and employ a dedicated AI and marketing operations function internally.

They have worked with companies including Google, Amazon, Atlassian, GoDaddy, Airtable, Amplitude, Intercom, UiPath, and Ramp.

Visit their site for more information.

4. Siege Media

Siege Media is an organic growth agency specializing in SEO, GEO, content marketing, and digital PR. Their content strategy begins with a proprietary keyword prioritization framework, and they are explicit that their writers are senior specialists matched by vertical expertise rather than generalist freelancers.

Their production process emphasizes quality over volume, with approximately half of their content creation time dedicated to design alongside writing. They are also vocal about their selective use of AI in content production, stating that while they use it for certain tasks like brainstorming and outlines, writing is rarely one of them.

On the AI search side, they have built two proprietary tools. BlueprintIQ audits content against live AI search results across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity to identify gaps in topical coverage. DataFlywheel refreshes existing content assets on a rolling quarterly basis to maintain relevance for AI citation. These tools put them among the more technically developed agencies on this list when it comes to GEO execution.

They have worked with companies like Zapier, Figma, Instacart, Asana, and Intuit.

Visit their site for more information.

5. Brafton

Brafton is a full-service content marketing agency that has been operating since 2008. Their services cover blog writing, graphic design, video production, email marketing, social media management, PPC, web design, and SEO consulting. They work with a wide range of company sizes across industries including technology, healthcare, finance, and manufacturing, and have offices across the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia.

A distinguishing feature of their model is a proprietary content marketing platform they have built for workflow, project management, and content performance tracking. Each client is assigned a dedicated content marketing strategist who provides strategic direction alongside the production team. Their writers are described as full-time in-house staff rather than outsourced freelancers, matched with clients based on industry expertise.

They also offer generative engine optimization as a dedicated service, covering content optimization for AI retrieval, structured data, and citation tracking across AI platforms. Their engagement model is unit-based rather than per-piece pricing, which gives clients flexibility across different content types and volumes.

They have worked with companies like Webex, ViewSonic, Oxford University Press, and TruGreen.

Visit their site for more information.

6. Column Five

Column Five is a B2B content marketing agency that focuses on brand storytelling for enterprise SaaS and AI companies. Founded in 2009, they position themselves around helping companies develop a differentiated point of view and then expressing it across multiple content formats, including video, motion graphics, infographics, interactive content, and written content. Their tagline is “the best story wins,” which reflects their emphasis on narrative and brand identity alongside organic growth.

Their process begins with a proprietary Story Scan Program that audits a client’s brand messaging, competitive positioning, and content gaps before any production begins. They describe their approach as audit-first, strategy-second, and execution-third, and have published case studies showing multi-year engagements with enterprise clients where they work across multiple internal teams simultaneously.

They also offer Answer Engine Optimization consulting and AI-powered content services as part of their service line, and they explicitly position these services to help brands get found by both human audiences and LLMs. They also operate a proprietary AI content tool called Iris for clients that need content at scale.

They have worked with companies including Instacart, Databricks, Vercel, Salesforce, LinkedIn, GitHub, Microsoft, and SAP.

Visit their site for more information.

7. Omniscient Digital

Omniscient Digital is an organic growth agency that helps B2B software companies drive pipeline through SEO, GEO, and content. Founded in 2019 by alumni from HubSpot, Shopify, and People.ai, they position themselves around revenue as the end goal rather than traffic growth, and they publish detailed thinking about content strategy and organic growth through their own blog and podcast.

Their research methodology, which they call OmniscientX, includes competitive analysis, buyer research, content gap analysis, LLM visibility indexing, keyword exploration, product alignment, and SME interviews before strategy development begins. They emphasize hiring for business acumen alongside SEO skills and integrate closely with client product marketing, sales, and go-to-market teams rather than operating at arm’s length.

Their GEO work incorporates LLM visibility indexing and citation analysis from the research phase onward, and they apply RAG principles and semantic modeling to improve how AI systems retrieve and surface client content.

They have worked with companies like Jasper, SAP, Asana, Loom, Hotjar, Adobe, and Smartling.

Visit their site for more information.

8. Foundation Inc

Foundation Inc is a distribution-first content marketing agency for B2B companies, founded by Ross Simmonds. Their core premise is that most agencies invest heavily in content creation while underinvesting in distribution, and their entire process is built around that belief. They describe their methodology as research, create, distribute, and optimize, with distribution treated as equally important as production.

Before producing any content, their team studies client audience newsletters, online reviews, sales calls, Reddit communities, social platforms, and competitor content. They then build a 12-month content engine with specific distribution playbooks for each piece, covering newsletter placement, founder content, social media, YouTube, Reddit, and sales enablement channels.

Their content creation process includes formats built specifically for LLM visibility, and their optimization work targets ChatGPT, Claude, SGE, Gemini, and Perplexity. Their homepage explicitly positions them as an agency that increases LLM visibility alongside pipeline generation.

They have worked with companies including Webex, Mailchimp, Snowflake, Canva, Procore, and Paychex.

Visit their site for more information.

9. Power Digital

Power Digital is a full-service performance marketing agency that works with both B2B and consumer brands. Founded in 2012 and backed by private equity, they are one of the largest agencies on this list by headcount and operate across a wide range of services, including SEO, paid media, paid social, email, influencer marketing, PR, affiliate marketing, programmatic, and content. 

Their core technology is a proprietary platform called Nova, which connects first-party client data to inform strategy and performance measurement across channels.

Content marketing sits within their broader owned media offering rather than as a standalone specialty. Their model is built around integrating content with paid and earned media channels rather than treating organic content as an independent growth driver. This makes them a strong fit for companies seeking a single agency to manage multiple marketing channels simultaneously.

They offer generative engine optimization as a dedicated service, covering LLM visibility audits, content structuring for AI responses, technical schema implementation, and citation engineering across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and Microsoft Copilot. Their Nova platform also connects AI search performance data to broader marketing attribution.

They have worked with companies like ASICS, Crocs, Taylor Guitars, and Data.World.

Visit their site for more information.

10. iPullRank

iPullRank is an enterprise content marketing and SEO agency based in New York. They describe their focus as Relevance Engineering, a proprietary framework that integrates content strategy, technical SEO, information retrieval, digital PR, and user experience to optimize content for both traditional search and AI search platforms. 

They work primarily with enterprise and mid-market companies and claim to have delivered over $4 billion in organic search results for their clients.

Their approach is built around the idea that enterprise brands need specialized partners rather than generalist agencies that treat content and SEO as interchangeable services. Their Relevance Engineering framework uses semantic content structures, passage scoring, and retrieval modeling to engineer brand visibility across AI search platforms alongside traditional Google rankings. They also offer AI search audits that surface a client’s current presence across both traditional and generative platforms.

On the content side, their team combines technical SEO expertise with content strategy and content engineering, and they are explicit that their writers and strategists are specialists rather than generalists. They publish detailed original research and thought leadership on natural language processing, machine learning applications in SEO, and how AI systems retrieve and rank content, which reflects how technically grounded their methodology is.

They have worked with enterprise companies like LG, American Express, Citi, and DocSend, as well as Fortune 500 companies across financial services, media, and retail.

Visit their site for more information.

Want to work with us or learn how to implement our enterprise content marketing strategy?

• Our Agency: You can learn more about working with us here.
• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn how to grow their enterprise business with content can join our private course, taught via case studies, here. We include a lot of information and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we and other members give feedback. We also get on live Zoom calls about once a month and dissect members’ actual content strategies and brainstorm ideas on how we’d form content strategies for their businesses.
• Join Our Content Marketing Team: Alternatively, if this style of enterprise content marketing appeals to you, consider joining our content marketing team as a writer or content strategist. We have awesome clients. We’re a remote company. We pay well. And you won’t have to stress about getting your own clients or spend a bunch of time doing outreach to get them.

Both are built on the principle that most content teams waste time on well-established but ineffective tactics that, at best, drive traffic with extremely low conversion rates to qualified leads. 

Over the years, we’ve noticed that this problem is especially acute in enterprise companies. Enterprise organizations have all the content operations infrastructure you’d expect: content teams, agency retainers, editorial calendars, brand guidelines, content governance policies, multi-step content workflows, and they publish content consistently and in large volume. But where those resources are pointed to is at a strategy that’s fundamentally flawed: it’s focused on chasing search volume in SEO or citations in AEO/GEO (or frankly, in AEO/GEO, many organizations right now simply don’t have a coherent strategy and aren’t sure what to focus on). 

So,  when leadership asks what all that investment actually produced and how it connects to business goals, the content team can only point to traffic numbers or publishing volume, and they can’t really trace content to pipeline or revenue.

Specifically, here are the flaws in the typical enterprise content strategy: 

• Traffic, not conversion-focused strategy: Their content strategy is built around high-volume, top of the funnel keywords that drive traffic but have extremely low conversion rates to sales-qualified leads (SQLs). Enterprise content marketing teams gravitate toward broad, educational terms mostly because they operate in a silo and are disconnected from sales data or product teams, and traffic is the metric that’s easiest to report on.
• Content just summarizes Google: Enterprise companies often have large content teams or multiple agency partners, but the actual writing process follows the same playbook: a writer or AI tool researches the keyword, reads what’s already ranking, and produces a synthesized version of the same information. At enterprise scale, this is a particular problem because the people reading this content are practitioners who already know the basics and can immediately tell when an article was written by someone who has never actually done the work.
• Too little product sales copy: They avoid selling their product in their content. Enterprise content teams often treat blog content as a brand awareness exercise, so articles deliberately avoid explaining how the product actually solves the problem being discussed. This exacerbates the low conversion problem. 

The approach we’ve built at Grow and Convert addresses all three of these problems, and in this article, we’ll walk you through our entire enterprise content marketing process:

1. Prioritize high-buying-intent keywords: Prioritize keywords based on buying intent rather than search volume, focusing on the terms enterprise buyers actually search when they’re evaluating solutions to specific problems. Traffic and brand awareness are fine goals, but if the brand isn’t consistently visible for bottom of funnel, high-intent searches, you’re leaving SQLs on the table for no reason. This is even more pressing in AI search because AI tools simply don’t link to or mention brands for top of funnel queries (more on this here). 
2. Produce content through internal employee interviews, not via genAI or humans regurgitating Google: Instead of having writers (or an AI tool) research topics on their own, which simply creates generic, me-too content, conduct interviews with internal subject matter experts to create content that contains genuine product and domain expertise. Enterprise buyers are not beginners, they’re advanced, and therefore your content also needs to be advanced. 
3. Sell your product in each piece of content: Because we emphasize producing high buying intent content, in this content, you need to talk about your product extensively, including specific features, differentiators, and use cases, rather than staying vague in the name of brand awareness.
4. Build links and AI search citations: Generate backlinks and optimize for visibility in AI search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity.
5. Set up conversion tracking and attribution: Track actual pipeline metrics like demos, trials, and sales conversations sourced from content, not just traffic and rankings.

Grow and Convert is an enterprise content marketing and SEO agency. If you want to hire us to handle your enterprise content marketing, you can learn more about working with us [here]. 

Our 5-Step Enterprise Content Marketing Process

We’ve written at length about each of these steps individually across our site. Here, we’re going to walk through how each step applies specifically to enterprise content marketing and link to further resources for each step:

Step 1: Identify High-Intent Keywords

The most fundamental part of an enterprise content marketing strategy is keyword selection. Keywords (or equivalently, prompts and topic areas in AI search) indicate the level of buying intent of the user.

If you’re only going after low-intent keywords, ones where the searcher isn’t in the market for your product at all,  then nothing else in your enterprise content marketing strategy is going to matter. The volume of content you publish doesn’t matter. The quality of your editorial calendar doesn’t matter. Your brand guidelines and approval workflows don’t matter. You will simply generate low intent, low converting traffic over and over again. 

Instead,  to create an enterprise content marketing strategy that actually generates appreciable pipeline and revenue, you need to prioritize keywords based on buying intent, not search volume. We’ve written extensively about this concept in our article on Pain Point SEO, the strategy we coined that prioritizes content ideas around high-intent keywords over high-volume ones to drive conversions.

Most enterprise content teams do exactly the opposite. They build their content calendar around broad, high-search-volume keywords that attract the widest possible audience, because the logic is that more traffic means more potential customers, but that’s not really the case. 

In practice, ranking for a keyword like “what is supply chain management” at 8,000 monthly searches will generate far fewer leads than ranking for “manufacturing supply chain management software” at 350 monthly searches, because the second keyword captures someone who already knows they need a solution and is actively looking for one.

This problem is especially pronounced in enterprise companies, where content teams don’t have visibility into which keywords actually drive the pipeline. If they operate in a silo, disconnected from sales data, they usually default to optimizing for the metric they can see: traffic.

We approach keyword selection differently. Instead of starting with search volume, we start with the customer journey and work backward to find the keywords that indicate someone is ready to evaluate or purchase a solution.

This means understanding your target audience and buyer personas deeply enough to know the language they use when actively looking for a product like yours, not just when researching a general topic.

These keywords are also where enterprise content marketing becomes a genuine lead generation channel rather than a brand awareness exercise. When someone searches for a specific problem your product solves, they’re further along in the buyer’s journey than someone searching for a general industry term, and content that meets them at that moment with real expertise and a clear product connection will convert at a fundamentally different rate.

We break these keywords into a few main categories and prioritize them roughly in this order.

Category Keywords

Every enterprise content strategy should start here. These are the keywords that indicate someone is actively looking to buy or evaluate a product like yours right now. Software category keywords describe the type of product someone is searching for, and for enterprise companies, they tend to follow patterns like:

• “Best [use case] software for enterprise”
• “[Use case] platform for large teams”
• “Enterprise [use case] software”
• “[Use case] software for [industry]”

Enterprise keyword research also tends to surface modifiers that don’t appear in SMB or mid-market searches. 

Enterprise buyers search for solutions that meet compliance requirements (“SOC 2 compliant [use case] software”), specific integrations (“marketing analytics platform with Salesforce integration”), and scale indicators (“project management software for 500+ users”). The more use cases your product serves and the more verticals you operate in, the more keyword opportunities you’ll find in this category alone.

These are the keywords that most enterprise companies are bidding on in paid ads, but, in our experience, aren’t pursuing organically through blog content. The search results for many of these terms are dominated by software review sites like G2 and Capterra, which means a well-written, expert-driven article from the company itself can compete effectively by going deeper into how the product actually works and what makes it different.

Comparison Keywords

The second category of high-intent keywords we prioritize is comparison keywords, including “[competitor] alternatives” and “[brand] vs [competitor]” searches. These are valuable because the searcher is already in evaluation mode. They know which product category they need and are now deciding between specific options.

For enterprise companies, comparison keywords often look like:

• “[Competitor] alternatives for enterprise”
• “[Brand] vs [competitor] for [industry]”
• “[Competitor] vs [competitor]” (where you insert your brand as a third option)
• “Best [competitor] alternatives for large teams”

The third variation is particularly useful for enterprise companies that are newer or less well-known in their space. If two established competitors have significant search volume for their head-to-head comparison, you can create content targeting that keyword and position your product alongside both of them. This puts your brand in front of buyers who are already deep in the evaluation process, even if they haven’t heard of you yet.

Enterprise comparison content also tends to be more nuanced than what works at the SMB level. Enterprise buyers are evaluating products across multiple dimensions (security certifications, integration depth, implementation timelines, support SLAs), so the comparison content needs to address these factors specifically rather than just listing features side by side.

Use Case, Pain Point, and Jobs-to-be-Done Keywords

After covering the core bottom of funnel category and comparison keywords, we move to use case, pain point, and jobs-to-be-done keywords. These are terms where the searcher has a specific problem or operational need but isn’t yet searching for a product category by name. They’re either describing a challenge they’re trying to solve, or a specific task they need to accomplish.

For enterprise companies, pain point and use case keywords often follow patterns like:

• “How to [solve specific operational problem] at scale”
• “[Specific pain point] for [industry] companies”
• “How to manage [process] across multiple teams”
• “[Operational challenge] for [enterprise role]”

Jobs-to-be-done keywords are closely related but the distinction matters. Pain point keywords describe a problem the searcher is experiencing, while JTBD keywords describe a specific task or outcome the searcher needs to accomplish. The searcher isn’t necessarily in pain — they just have a job to do and are looking for the best way to do it. These tend to follow patterns like:

• “How to [complete specific task] for [enterprise context]”
• “Best way to [achieve specific outcome] across [multiple departments]”
• “[Specific task] template for [industry]”
• “How to automate [process] at scale”

Both types convert well because the searcher is describing something that the enterprise product directly solves, even if they aren’t aware a product category exists for it. Someone searching for “how to standardize vendor onboarding across 12 offices” might not know that vendor management platforms exist, but that search describes exactly the job your product was built to do.

This is also where selling your product in the content (which we’ll discuss in Step 3) becomes especially important — if you write a thorough article about the problem but never explain how your product solves it, you’ve done all the hard work without capturing any of the value.

Enterprise pain points and JTBD keywords are where internal knowledge from sales and customer success teams becomes critical. The best keywords in this category often come from listening to the specific language enterprise buyers use during sales calls, reading through support tickets, and understanding the operational problems that drove your largest customers to seek out a solution in the first place. Asking your CS team “what are the top five things enterprise customers use the product to accomplish in their first 90 days?” will often generate keyword ideas that no research tool would surface on its own.

We recommend enterprise companies only move to top of the funnel content after they’ve exhausted their bottom of the funnel and middle of the funnel keyword opportunities. Top-of-the-funnel content can help build topical authority and support rankings for higher-intent pages, but it should never be the starting point for an enterprise content strategy.

This is even more important now that AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews are answering broad, educational queries directly without sending users to your site. A top of the funnel strategy that used to drive significant traffic now drives very little, and that traffic still doesn’t convert well, making it the worst of both worlds.

In contrast, bottom of funnel queries where users are asking for product recommendations are exactly where AI tools list and cite brands, which makes BOFU content valuable for both traditional search and AI visibility.

One exception to the bottom-up prioritization is worth mentioning. In the first few months of an enterprise content marketing initiative, SEO content takes time to rank, which creates a gap between when you start investing and when you start seeing organic results. 

To bridge that gap and show early traction to leadership, we produce what we call “Disruption Stories” alongside our SEO content. These are non-SEO narrative pieces that tell the story of why the company was founded, what specific problems the product was built to solve, and how it works differently from existing solutions.

We then promote these through paid channels, primarily LinkedIn, to drive traffic and conversions while the SEO content is ramping up. This gives leadership visibility into early results and buys the time needed for the organic content strategy to compound.

Step 2: Produce Content Through Expert Interviews That Deeply Satisfies Search Intent

Finding the right keywords is only half the problem. The other half is producing content that does two critical things simultaneously: 

1. Fulfill search intent enough to actually rank for those keywords
2. Is written well enough to actually  convert your ICP when they read it.

The “Google Research Paper” Problem

Most enterprise content programs get both of these parts wrong in a specific and consistent way. Whether the content is produced by in-house writers, freelancers, or agency partners, the content creation process is usually some variation of the same thing: the writer receives a keyword and a brief, researches the topic by reading what’s already ranking on the first page of Google, and writes a synthesized version of that information in the company’s brand voice.

We call this the “Google research paper” approach, and it produces content that is factually accurate but offers nothing the reader couldn’t find elsewhere. This is a problem for any company, but it’s a particular problem at enterprise scale for two reasons.

First, the people reading enterprise content are practitioners, decision-makers, and technical evaluators who are not beginners, they are advanced in their field. Their needs and questions are advanced. They don’t need a “beginners guide” to their own field or to know the “10 trends” in that field “to look out for” next year. They can immediately tell when an article was written by someone who doesn’t have hands-on experience with the subject matter.

Second, enterprise buying decisions involve multiple stakeholders, which means the content needs to be substantive enough that a champion inside the organization can share it with their team and it holds up to scrutiny.

AI-generated content has made this problem worse, not better. AI tools can produce content faster and cheaper, but the output is fundamentally the same as the Google research paper approach — it can only synthesize what already exists. It cannot produce original insights from someone who has actually built, sold, or implemented the product.

Our Solution: Internal Interview-Based Content Writing

At Grow and Convert, we solve this by building every article around a direct interview with a subject-matter expert within the client’s company. This is not a casual conversation or a quick fact-check. It’s a structured 30-45 minute recorded interview designed to extract the specific insights, examples, and perspectives that make the article genuinely different from everything else ranking for that keyword.

Before the interview, our content strategist researches the target keyword, analyzes search intent, reads top-ranking content, and identifies specific gaps and angles that existing content doesn’t cover. They then prepare a set of interview questions designed to pull out exactly those missing pieces from the expert.

During the interview, the goal is to get the expert talking about their actual experience: how the product works in practice, what specific problems enterprise customers face, how implementation typically plays out, what objections come up during the sales process, and what makes their approach different from competitors. These are the details that a freelance writer or AI tool could never produce on their own because they simply don’t have access to this information.

After the interview, the writer builds the article around these insights, weaving them into a piece that satisfies the search intent for the target keyword while containing perspectives and details that are genuinely original. We call these details “Originality Nuggets,” the specific pieces of information that make the content impossible to replicate by reading other articles or prompting an AI tool.

Writing With Specificity, Not Generalities

We also apply what we call the “Specificity Strategy” throughout the content creation process. This means replacing generic statements with concrete, specific details from the interview.

Instead of writing “our platform helps large companies streamline their onboarding process,” the writer uses the specific details the expert provided: “our platform reduced onboarding time from 6 weeks to 9 days for a manufacturing company with 12 regional offices, primarily by automating the document collection and compliance verification steps that previously required manual coordination across three different departments.”

That level of specificity is what makes enterprise content credible to practitioners, and it’s only possible when the content is built from expert interviews rather than desk research.

Enterprise content needs to demonstrate real product and domain expertise because the buyers are more sophisticated and the stakes of the purchase are higher. An SMB buyer might read a comparison article and sign up for a free trial within the same session. An enterprise buyer is going to share that article with their procurement team, their IT security team, and their VP, and every person in that chain needs to come away feeling like the company genuinely understands the problem and has a credible solution.

Interview-based content also creates a competitive moat that scales. Every article you produce through this process contains insights that exist nowhere else on the internet, which means competitors cannot replicate it and AI tools cannot synthesize it from existing sources. Over time, this builds a library of genuinely differentiated content, which becomes increasingly valuable as AI search engines begin to favor original, expert-driven content over recycled information.

Matching the Right Expert to Each Piece of Content

For enterprise companies with large teams, matching the right expert to each piece of content is also equally important. Not every article should feature the same person. The best approach is to match the expert to the keyword category:

• Product managers and engineers are the best sources for software category content, because they can explain how the product actually works, what architecture decisions were made and why, and how specific features solve specific problems at enterprise scale.
• Sales leaders and account executives are the best sources for comparison and alternatives content, because they hear directly from prospects why they’re evaluating competitors, what gaps they’ve found in other products, and what factors ultimately drive the buying decision.
• Customer success managers are the best sources for use case, pain point, and jobs-to-be-done content, because they see how enterprise customers are actually using the product day to day, which workflows they’ve built around it, and which outcomes they’re measuring.

This process ensures that every article draws from the most relevant firsthand experience available inside the company, which produces content that feels authoritative and specific rather than generic and surface-level.

It also solves a problem that enterprise content creators consistently struggle with: producing content that is both on-brand and genuinely expert-driven. When content workflows rely on writers working from briefs and existing materials alone, the output tends to be either on-brand but shallow or detailed but off-message.

The interview process bridges that gap because the writer gets the substance directly from the expert and shapes it within the company’s messaging and content management guidelines.

Step 3: Sell Your Product in Each Piece of Content

This is one of the most counterintuitive parts of our process for enterprise content teams, and it’s also one of the most impactful. Most enterprise content programs operate under an unspoken rule that blog content should educate, not sell. The assumption is that if you provide enough value upfront, the reader will eventually find their way to your product on their own. In practice, that rarely happens.

We see this play out in a very specific way across enterprise blogs. The article will do a thorough job of explaining a problem, walking through different approaches, and providing useful information. But it will never explain how the company’s own product solves that problem. It might mention the product once in a CTA at the bottom of the page, or it might not mention it at all. The content team considers this a feature — they believe that “selling” in content would undermine the reader’s trust.

We think this is a mistake, and a costly one. If someone is reading your article about vendor onboarding challenges for enterprise companies, and your product directly solves that problem, not telling the reader how it works is doing them a disservice. They came to your site looking for a solution. They’re reading your content because the keyword they searched indicated they have a real problem. The most helpful thing you can do is show them exactly how your product addresses it.

Selling your product in content doesn’t mean turning every article into a product landing page. It means weaving specific, relevant product details into the article at the points where they naturally answer the reader’s questions.

For a software category article targeting “enterprise project management software,” this means going beyond a generic feature list and explaining how your product handles the specific concerns enterprise buyers have: how permissions and access controls work across teams of 500+ people, how the platform integrates with the tools their teams are already using, how implementation and onboarding work for a company with multiple departments, and what the security and compliance posture looks like.

For a pain-point article targeting “how to reduce vendor onboarding time across multiple offices,” this means explaining the problem thoroughly, acknowledging the different ways companies try to solve it, and then walking through how your product automates the parts of the process that create the most friction. Show screenshots. Describe the actual workflow. Explain what changes for the user on day one versus day thirty.

For a comparison article targeting “[competitor] alternatives for enterprise,” this means being direct about where your product is stronger and where the competitor might be a better fit for certain use cases. Enterprise buyers are sophisticated enough to know that no product is perfect for everyone, and being transparent about tradeoffs actually builds more trust than claiming superiority across the board.

The underlying principle here is what we call “Customer-Content Fit,” which means matching the content format, depth, and messaging to where the reader is in their buying journey and what they need at that specific moment. Not every piece of enterprise content should look the same. A software category article needs detailed product walkthroughs and feature explanations. A pain point article needs problem diagnosis and workflow-level product demonstrations. A comparison article needs honest, side-by-side analysis.

This also applies to content formats beyond blog posts. Many enterprise organizations spread their marketing campaigns across case studies, white papers, webinars, podcasts, and video content without a clear strategy for how each format connects to the pipeline. The same Customer-Content Fit principle applies: case studies work best at the bottom of the funnel when a prospect needs social proof to share with their procurement team. White papers can work at the middle of the funnel when a prospect needs to understand a problem more deeply before evaluating solutions. But every format should tie back to a specific stage in the customer journey and include clear product messaging rather than treating content as a brand awareness exercise with no conversion path.

Enterprise content teams resist selling content for several reasons, all understandable but ultimately counterproductive.

The first is organizational. In many enterprise companies, the content team sits under brand or communications, not under demand generation. Their mandate is awareness and thought leadership, not pipeline, so they naturally produce content that prioritizes brand perception over conversion. Shifting this requires either changing the team’s mandate or building a content function that reports into a revenue-focused leader.

The second is the belief that buyers don’t want to be sold to. This is partially true because enterprise buyers don’t want to read a thinly disguised product pitch that provides no real value. But that’s not what we’re advocating. We’re advocating for content that provides genuine value through expert insights and thorough problem analysis, and then earns the right to explain how the product fits into the solution. When the content is good enough, talking about the product feels natural, not salesy.

The third is that many content teams simply don’t know their own product well enough to write about it in detail. This is where the interview-based process from Step 2 becomes essential. When the writer has conducted a 45-minute interview with a product manager or solutions architect, they have the specific details, language, and examples they need to talk about the product credibly. Without that interview, the writer defaults to vague descriptions pulled from the marketing site, which is exactly the kind of content that enterprise buyers ignore.

The difference between content that mentions the product and content that doesn’t is significant. Across the articles we’ve produced for clients, bottom of funnel content that includes detailed product positioning converts at rates that are dramatically higher than top of funnel content that doesn’t. 

We published the data behind this in our article on what keywords convert the highest, where we analyzed conversion rates across 95 blog posts and found that bottom of the funnel posts converted at 4.78% on average, compared to 0.19% for top of funnel posts. That’s a 25x difference, and a large part of it comes down to whether the content actually sells the product or stays deliberately vague.

For enterprise companies, where each conversion can represent a six or seven-figure deal, that difference is even more consequential. A single well-positioned article that ranks for the right keyword and clearly demonstrates how the product solves the reader’s problem can generate more pipeline than an entire quarter’s worth of top of the funnel blog content.

Step 4: Build Backlinks and Brand Mentions

Even with the right keywords and expert-driven content, enterprise articles won’t rank if the site doesn’t have the backlink profile to compete. Link building is especially important for enterprise content marketing because the keywords worth targeting tend to be competitive, and the sites currently ranking for them, software review platforms like G2 and Capterra, established industry publications, and competitor blogs with years of domain authority, have strong link profiles.

Most enterprise companies approach link building in one of two ways, and neither is particularly effective.

The first is to do nothing and hope that good content attracts links on its own. This occasionally works for top of the funnel content that gets shared on social media, but it almost never works for bottom of the funnel content because articles about “best enterprise project management software” don’t tend to go viral.

The second is to run generic outreach campaigns that blast hundreds of sites with templated emails asking for links. This produces low-quality links from irrelevant sites that do little to move rankings.

We approach link building differently. We focus on building a smaller number of high-quality, relevant links from sites that actually have authority in the space. The specifics of how we do this are covered in depth in our articles on content distribution, but the core idea is that relevant links from sites in your industry or adjacent industries carry far more weight than a large volume of links from random directories and guest post farms.

For enterprise companies, there are a few link building advantages that large companies don’t typically leverage. Enterprise brands tend to have existing relationships with industry publications, analyst firms, partner companies, and professional organizations. These relationships can be leveraged for link building in ways that feel natural rather than forced, like co-authored research reports, contributed expert commentary, partner integration pages, and industry roundtable content all generate high-quality links while also serving a legitimate business purpose.

Repurposing existing content assets, such as webinar recordings, research data, or customer interviews, into linkable digital assets can also generate backlinks without requiring new content creation. LinkedIn, in particular, is a valuable distribution channel for enterprise content because it’s where enterprise buyers and decision-makers already spend time, and content that performs well there tends to attract organic links and mentions from industry peers.

Beyond traditional link building, brand mentions, and citations across authoritative third-party sites are becoming increasingly important for AI search visibility. AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews decide which brands to recommend based partly on what we call third-party consensus — how frequently and consistently your brand is mentioned, reviewed, and cited across independent sources on the web. When multiple authoritative sites mention your product in the context of solving a specific problem, AI tools interpret that as a signal that your brand is a credible option worth recommending.

This is why we actively build third-party citations as part of our link building process. Getting your brand mentioned in relevant industry publications, software review sites, partner directories, expert roundups, and contributed articles creates the kind of consensus that both Google and AI search tools reward.

For enterprise companies, this matters because when a buyer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity “what are the best vendor management platforms for enterprise companies,” the tools are pulling from that web-wide consensus to decide which brands to include in the response. Companies that only have their own website talking about their product will lose out to competitors who have built that third-party presence.

We’ve written extensively about how to approach this systematically in our article on Prioritized GEO, which lays out our three-tier framework for improving visibility across both traditional and AI search.

Step 5: Set Up Conversion Tracking and Attribution

This is the step that most enterprise content programs skip entirely, and it’s the reason content gets treated as a cost center. If you can’t show leadership that content generated 40 qualified leads last month, or that three enterprise deals currently in the pipeline originated from blog content, then content will always be the first budget line to get cut when the company needs to tighten spending.

The mistake most enterprise content teams make is treating measurement as something they’ll figure out later, after they’ve published enough content to have something worth measuring.

We take the opposite approach. We set up conversion tracking before we publish the first article because every piece of content we produce targets a high-intent keyword where the reader has a real problem and a real reason to take the next step. If we’re not tracking whether they take that step, we’re flying blind from day one.

Enterprise content teams tend to report on the metrics that are easiest to measure: pageviews, organic traffic, keyword rankings, time on page, and social shares. These metrics are fine for understanding content reach, but they tell you nothing about whether content is actually contributing to the business. A blog post that gets 10,000 monthly visits and zero demo requests is not a successful piece of content, no matter how impressive the traffic number looks in a slide deck.

The KPIs that matter for enterprise content marketing are conversion metrics: demo requests, trial signups, contact form submissions, and sales conversations that originated from or were influenced by content. These are the numbers leadership cares about because they directly connect to the pipeline and revenue.

This doesn’t mean you should ignore traffic and rankings entirely. They’re useful leading indicators, especially in the first few months of a new content marketing initiative when content is still building rankings and it’s too early to expect significant conversion volume. But they should never be the primary metric for evaluating content performance.

For our clients, the specific attribution setup depends on the enterprise company’s tech stack, including their content management system and CRM, but the core approach is consistent. Every article needs a clear call to action that matches the intent of the keyword it’s targeting.

For bottom of the funnel content, that’s typically a demo request or free trial signup. For middle of the funnel content, it might be a consultation request or a product walkthrough. The CTA needs to be tracked as a conversion event in your analytics platform so you can see exactly which articles are generating leads.

We use GA4 conversion tracking and BigQuery as the foundation. For each article, we track the number of users who arrive from organic search, the number who click through to a conversion page (demo request, trial signup, contact form), and the number who actually complete the conversion. This gives us a clear conversion rate for every piece of content, which we can then report on by keyword category, by funnel position, and by individual article.

For enterprise companies with longer sales cycles, we also recommend connecting content attribution to the CRM. When a lead comes in through a blog post and eventually closes as a six-figure deal, that information needs to flow back to the content team so they can demonstrate the revenue impact of their work. Most enterprise CRMs (Salesforce, HubSpot) support this kind of first-touch or multi-touch attribution, but it requires intentional setup and coordination between marketing and sales operations.

When you have conversion data, the conversation with leadership shifts fundamentally. Instead of presenting a content report that says “we published 12 articles and grew organic traffic by 15%,” you can present a report that says “our content generated 47 demo requests this month, 12 of which are now in active sales conversations, and three articles account for 70% of that volume.”

That second report is the one that gets content marketing treated as a revenue driver rather than a cost center. It’s also the report that justifies continued investment, because you can show exactly what the company is getting for its content spend and which types of content are producing the best returns.

We build these reports for every client engagement using what we call ROI graphs, which plot the cumulative number of conversions generated by content against the monthly investment over time. These graphs make it easy to see when content marketing becomes profitable and how the return compounds as more articles rank and generate leads.

For enterprise companies with larger budgets and higher deal values, the break-even point is often surprisingly fast, because a single enterprise deal closed through content can pay for months of content investment.

Conversion tracking is also not just a reporting function but a strategic advantage. When you know which keywords and articles are driving the most conversions, you can double down on what’s working, adjust what isn’t, and make every subsequent content decision with real data instead of gut instinct.

Want to Work With Us or Learn More About How We Approach Enterprise Content Marketing?

We hope this article gives enterprise content teams a clear framework for building a content program that drives pipeline, not just traffic. If you’d like to take the next step, there are a few ways to work with us:

• Hire our agency. Grow and Convert is an enterprise content marketing and SEO agency that handles strategy, keyword research, content production, link building, and conversion tracking. If you want us to execute enterprise content marketing for your company, you can learn more about working with us here.
• Join our content marketing course. If you’d like to learn how to do this yourself, we teach our full content marketing process in our course and community. Members get access to detailed lessons on every step covered in this article, plus live calls where we review real content strategies and give feedback. You can learn more and join here.
• Write for us. If you’re a content writer or strategist who wants to work with us, you can learn about open positions here.

Content Writing Tips

1. Use an interview-backed research process
2. Be your own editor
3. Organize your thoughts into bullet points
4. Look for symmetry between your intro and body sections
5. Read your piece only by its headings
6. Get to the value of a sentence faster
7. Write towards the job, not job titles

The first tip — use an interview-backed research process — is the most important on our list.

At Grow and Convert, we interview our clients to 1) generate blog post topics and 2) help us write those posts to deliver value. This process is crucial for writing high-quality content because understanding the audience shapes how you write.

The next 6 tips focus on editing and presenting the information you’ve gathered from your interviews. But remember, incorporating interviews is essential. Without them, your content might read well but will lack the specificity and detail that impress an informed target customer and motivate conversions.

A quick note on the growing role of AI tools in content writing: We recently surveyed 50+ marketers about their writing process with AI. The second most common use case was improving writing with AI. We found that the tips in this post still apply when using AI tools. For instance, you can upload a piece of content to your AI tool and ask it to make edits that align with tip #3 (organizing thoughts into bullet points) or tip #6 (getting to the value of the sentence faster).

1. Use an Interview-Backed Research Process

When you get an assignment, emphasize to your client the importance of conducting an interview to help you research the topic. Use this interview to gather insights about the intended audience and what matters to them within the context of your topic.

There are several benefits to this approach.

First, it leads to better results for your clients, which helps show value and improve retention. When writing a piece of content for a company, your goal is usually to capture their target customer’s attention (whether through Google Search, ads, or email campaigns) and prompt action from the customer (like signing up for a free trial, scheduling a demo, joining a newsletter). 

To do this effectively, you need more than just topic knowledge — you need insights into your client’s customers, particularly the features they value most. 

For example, let’s say you’re working on content marketing for StartUp Accounting, a (fictional) accounting service specializing in startups. They’re building an organic channel to attract new customers. As part of your content strategy, you’re writing a blog post targeting the keyword “best accounting software for startups.” The post will outline software options for startups while positioning StartUp Accounting’s services as a better option for specific use cases. 

This isn’t a trivial assignment. To do it properly, you need to understand key details, such:

• What do startups need most from accounting services? 
  
• How do startups manage their accounting before looking for software options? 
  
• How does your client’s service solve the specific accounting problems these customers face?

Even if you’ve written about accounting software before, you still need to know how StartUp Accounting specifically solves their customers’ problems.

In our experience, interviewing their team is the best way to gain this understanding. Without an interview, you’re left relying on Google, YouTube, AI tools, and the client’s website — which can be helpful but shouldn’t be the sole basis for your piece of content. What others say isn’t always valuable information to your reader. 

An interview lets you uncover unique insights about your client and their target audience that you can’t find anywhere else. 

Second, using interviews makes your job as a writer more enjoyable, more interesting — and, in a way, easier. When you interview a subject-matter expert, you’re learning new things from someone knowledgeable. This can be far more fulfilling than researching on your own, which often means sifting through a lot of bad mirage content found online.

It also makes researching the topic easier. You’re not left trying to figure out technical terms or nuances by yourself. You have a knowledgeable resource who can explain things clearly and put them into context. Plus, interviewing a client helps you understand which key points matter most and how to incorporate them effectively in your draft. This leads to a more efficient process and fewer edits when you submit the piece.

Finally, it opens up new topics you can write about with authority. Using an interview process also helps grow your career by allowing you to cover a variety of subjects. 

At Grow and Convert, we’ve written about:

• Route optimization software
• Hyperhidrosis 
• Digital asset management 
• Paid media reporting
• Concussions
• The US healthcare billing system
• International shipping for IT companies
• Time clock software
• User testing
• Translation software
• 1-to-1 private education

And much, much more.

How We Use Interviews to Shape the Entire Content Writing Process: From Initial Topics to Final Draft

If you’re working with a content writing agency, the typical content production process looks like this:

• The agency’s SEOs/marketing managers conduct keyword research for the client.
• They prioritize the keywords and assign projects to content writers.
• You, the content writer, receive a content brief outlining the assignment.

When I just started out as a freelance content writer, I would get content briefs that looked like this:

• Article Keyword: Best accounting software for startups
• Audience: Accounting department / CFO at startups
• Estimated word count: 2,000-2,500 words
• Article guidelines
  • Include links to stats that are no more than 3 years old
  • Include an image every 250-300 words
  • Write short paragraphs (no more than 4 sentences) and short sentences
  • Use headings. Specifically, include h3 and h4 subheaders, but not h5s
  • Include exact match keyword in the title and first heading
  • Run the piece through Grammarly and get an overall score of 90 or higher
  • Run the piece through Hemingway and get readability score of no higher than 7th grade

Unfortunately, all the information included in the brief is ineffective for guiding the writer to produce great content. It focuses on logistics — formatting instructions and basic on-page SEO (search engine optimization) best practices — rather than the argumentation or substance of the piece. 

Even if you agree with some of these guidelines (like keeping the content at a 7th grade level), these edits are the easiest part of the process. They can be done at the end of drafting, so they don’t make our list of the most impactful content writing tips. 

The hard part of content writing is creating content that is 1) aimed at your target audience and 2) backs up its claims. That’s the focus of our content creation process.  

In fact, our process starts shaping the argumentation and understanding of customer pain points and the brand or product’s unique selling points before the content interview. 

Namely, this begins during the topic ideation phase: 

• We interview our clients before we look for keywords. We learn about the client’s company, what pain points it solves for their customers, who their best customers are, who they think their main competitors are, etc.

• Based on those interviews, we come up with topics that we think are most relevant to our client’s target audience.

• We then find keywords that correspond to that topic. Keywords are a critical part of our process, and we’ve written at length on topics such as competitor keywords, bottom of the funnel keywords, secondary keywords. Our process focuses on finding keywords tied to the target customer’s pain points, which is why we don’t start with keyword research.

• Finally, when it’s time to write a piece for a particular keyword, we interview a member of our client’s team to ask them questions about the given topic related to customer pain points and how the product or service addresses those pain points in relation to the keyword we’re writing about.

After we interview a subject, writers fill out a questionnaire based on the interview.

Our questionnaire process is fundamentally different from a typical content brief. It’s not about logistical details like word count or the number of internal links. Instead, it focuses on:

• Understanding your target audience. This goes beyond simply saying, “Our audience is a startup looking for accounting software” or “Our audience is likely an accountant at a startup and may have a limited budget.” That’s surface-level. You should be able to articulate the specific pain points the reader is likely experiencing that led them to search for “accounting software for startups.” This insight comes directly from the client interview. Until you’ve had the interview, you can’t be sure if the driving motivator is a faster process, a more affordable option, a more scalable solution, etc. 

• Understanding the SERP (search engine results page) for the keyword. This involves analyzing the content ranking on Google and figuring out why certain pieces may be ranking. What does it say about search intent? For example, if multiple pieces in the SERP highlight “free” software, it might be worth talking about free software in your post. Whether you choose to cover the limits of free software or recommend it for certain customers depends on insights gathered in the interview.

After exploring those two areas, you propose an outline. Here, you have a lot of freedom. The outline section is a blank space, where you can propose your title, the kind of intro you want to write, and how you want the article structured. These decisions will be guided by your understanding of the target audience and the SERP.

If you’re interested in learning more about the questionnaire, topic ideation, content strategy process, sign up for our content writing course. 

If this is the kind of content writing you excel at and want to do more of, apply to work with us. While we may not always have readily available writing assignments, we’re always on the lookout for skilled content writers.

AI use case for this tip: If you want to experiment with AI to write articles more efficiently, consider recording your client interview and uploading it into an AI tool for summarization. The AI can analyze the interview and provide a structured outline or summary of key topics. This saves time by eliminating the need to re-watch and transcribe the interview, speeding up the writing process, while still allowing you to maintain control over the article’s argument and structure.

2. Be Your Own Editor

Often when I receive a piece of writing from a writer I work with, or when I’m re-reading my own work, I think “This needs another round of edits.”

I’m not just talking about fixing typos or spelling mistakes (though those are important, and thorough proofreading is a must). What I’m really noticing is that the content is geared towards helping the writer understand the topic rather than being written for the audience. Writers need to understand a topic, and they do that by writing out their thoughts. But that shouldn’t be the end of the process, because the piece is meant for the audience, not the writer.

Here’s a very simple and exaggerated example:

Let’s say a writer is writing a blog post targeting the keyword “employee time tracking software,” and their primary audience is small business owners who need to track employee hours.

They might write an intro like this:

“Every employee loves taking time off. But as a business owner you’re busy trying to do your job, run your business, and keep your company staffed. So it can be frustrating to have to keep managing every new time off request that comes your way. The good news is that there is software.”

There’s a lot to critique in that small paragraph, and none of it is positive. But let’s focus on the first two lines, which come across as a writer trying too hard to relate to the audience. The writer is stating the obvious to the business owner.

Remember, this piece is for people Googling “employee time tracking software,” so they already know they need to track employee time. They recognize it’s a problem, understand the need for a solution, and are actively seeking software for help. This opener doesn’t add anything new — it’s just obvious.  

If you were to read this as an editor, you’d think, “This is very obvious. What are the specific things the reader is trying to solve? Let’s start there.” And you’d see that “do your job” and “run your business” are the same thing and “keep your company staffed” is vague and potentially wrong.

Again, these things seem obvious when you consider the piece of content from an editor’s perspective, someone focused on the audience’s interests.

Before submitting work, make sure you’ve reviewed it with an editor’s mindset, not a writer’s.

But this is easier said than done, so I’m going to provide three different ways to help you switch into the editor role when working on your own piece.

Editing Tip #1: Take Some Time Away from Your Piece

For me, the best method is to step away from your piece for a day. When you’re in the middle of writing, you’re working in a state of mind that can make it challenging to see issues in your logic or approach. 

But once you take a break, you’ll return to it with fresh eyes, and things that weren’t obvious before will become clear.

Editing Tip #2: Change the Font & Color of Your Content

This method is great for catching typos and styling issues, but it also helps you shift into an editor’s mindset. 

By changing the font and color of your article to something absurd, like purple Comic Sans in size 16, you create distance between what you originally wrote and what is in front of you. It feels like a new piece written by someone else.

Editing Tip #3: Use a Text-to-Speech Feature to Have Your Piece Read to You

This is another great way to catch typos, spelling mistakes, and just awkward phrasing. By having your ears be the editor and not your eyes, you’re again creating distance between yourself and your piece.

Using text-to-speech can also help with structural edits. As you listen to your piece, you’ll understand what you expect to follow next logically and if that doesn’t happen, then that’s a sign that you need to revisit your piece’s structure.

3. Organize Your Thoughts Into Bullet Points

Sometimes, writers submit work that meanders, jumping from point to point without a clear structure or flow. You can spot this in your own work by reading it aloud. 

If it sounds a bit like listening to a kid tell you about their day at school, then it’s meandering.

The issues with meandering writing are two-fold:

• It can confuse your audience about the main point or message.

• It makes it harder for you as the writer to ensure you’ve addressed everything that needs to be covered.

For example, we have a client that works in the education space, providing personalized education for middle and high school students. One of our pieces is about how this private school helps students with sensory processing disorder, a learning difference in which students are either underwhelmed or overwhelmed by sensory input. 

Here’s an example of a meandering intro for that topic:

“When looking for the best schools for sensory processing disorder, you want to factor in several things. You want a school that can cater its environment towards the student. Sensory processing students often struggle with traditional classrooms, and need personalization. Sometimes a teacher may even suggest a sensory break to help overwhelmed students. Typically this is easier to do when a class is small, so look for small classes. Plus, keep in mind if your children have other classes or therapy sessions they need to attend.”

To me, this reads as rambling, which can confuse the reader and make it difficult to grasp your points. It also hides gaps in your argument. Without clarity, it’s hard to tell if you’re making the point you intend to.

An edit here would be to ask the writer to rewrite this using bullet points to organize their thoughts. Here’s how that might look:

In general, the best schools for sensory processing disorder will:

1. Cater the school environment towards your child: Teachers will be able and willing to alter the classroom’s stimulation levels to match your child’s unique learning needs, preventing exhaustion and maintaining their interest. This requires a high level of flexibility and a faculty that values one-on-one instruction.
   
   
2. Implement sensory breaks into classes: Sensory breaks such as periods for movement around the class, or moments for silence, help children with SPD stay motivated and prevent fatigue.
   
   
3. Keep class sizes small: Schools with smaller class sizes are generally more appropriate and mentally peaceful for those with SPD, as large classes are full of visual and auditory stimulations which can be highly distracting, and hard to control. Further, in large classrooms, teachers cannot provide specialized, one-on-one instruction that is so valuable for students with sensory processing difficulties.
   
   
4. Offer flexible scheduling: Students with SPD generally have appointments with therapists and counselors — this routine is significant and it’s best when a school can work with your child’s existing programs, not against them. For this, we recommend you find a school that offers flexible scheduling.

First, this just reads better. It also went through several edits to get to this level. By breaking the writing into bullet points, we realized we could add more detail to each section. 

The biggest takeaway from this edit is that the first bullet point, “cater the school environment towards your child,” is the main value proposition. The rest of the bullet points serve as supporting evidence for this key claim.

In short, organizing the content into bullet points allowed us to clearly identify the core argument of the piece.

Here’s the final intro:

In general, the best schools for sensory processing disorder are schools that are able to cater the classroom, campus environment, and class schedule towards the student. This can include:

1. Changing how an instructor teaches the curriculum. Perhaps your child does better with video tools or highly visual textbooks. Other children may do better with conversational teaching, where they and the instructor can engage in 1-to-1 dialogue.
   
   
2. Adapting the classroom environment towards the student (vs. making the student adapt to an uncomfortable and distracting environment). This can involve creating a sensory-sensitive environment, like using dim lighting, taking graphics and distracting images off walls, playing white noise in the background, etc.
   
   
3. Implementing sensory breaks into classes. Sensory breaks — such as periods for movement around the class or moments for silence — can help children with SPD stay motivated and prevent learning fatigue.
   
   
4. Keeping classes small. Schools with smaller class sizes are generally better suited for students with SPD, as large classes are full of visual and auditory simulations which can be distracting and overwhelming. Further, in large classrooms, teachers cannot provide specialized, one-to-one instruction that can be so valuable for students with sensory processing difficulties.
   
   
5. Offering flexible scheduling. Flexible scheduling benefits students and their families in key ways. First, some students may concentrate better earlier in the morning or later in the day. Being able to pick when class starts is a big plus for these students. Second, students with SPD may have appointments with therapists and counselors, and keeping this routine is important. So it’s best when a school can work with your child’s existing programs, not against them.

All these changes came from simply having the writer organize their original intro into bullet points.

4. Look for Symmetry Between Your Intro & Body Sections

At Grow and Convert, we sometimes write first drafts that either:

• A. Have a strong introduction, but a relatively weak body.
• B. Have a weak introduction, but a relatively strong body.

As a hypothetical of the first example (A), we could be reading a post about digital marketing dashboards. 

The intro can highlight what key features these dashboards need. But in the body, the post takes a few steps back, explaining the importance of digital marketing, providing some irrelevant stats (like how important companies think digital marketing is), and never really gets around to expanding on the value props positioned in the intro.

But more often, the opposite happens (B), and we read a post with a really fluffy and pointless intro. 

The type of intro that starts with a line like “Everyone knows digital marketing is important in this day and age. As the internet refuses to go away, more and more companies are focusing their marketing budget on online strategies.” But the body actually dives into useful information, like how to import and segment data into reporting dashboards.

This is why we recommend looking for symmetry between the intro and the body.

• For A, our feedback would be to take the good info in the intro and expand on it in the body, providing more detail. 
  

• For B, we’d suggest taking the valuable information in the body and using it to reverse-engineer an intro. 

Sometimes, writers submit very light intros because they’ve been taught (or simply believe) that most people skip the intro and go straight to the body. But people skip intros because they’re weak. If you make the intro strong, people will read it. And if they skip it, no worries — they’ll find the same valuable info in your body paragraphs. 

5. Read Your Piece by Only Its Headings

This feedback actually came from one of our clients. He requested that before submitting a piece for review, we read it only by its headlines. I hadn’t heard of this strategy before, but I quickly saw its value when I applied it to my work.

I’ve found this has two benefits:

1. Checking if your article is scannable. As you scroll through your piece, do the headings clearly describe what’s being discussed? Strong headings help readers decide whether to dive into a specific section.
   
   
2. Ensuring a logical narrative flow. Reviewing a piece by its headlines alone can reveal gaps or disruptions in the argument.

For example, let’s use this post. Here’s the outline by headings:

• H1: How to Improve Your Content Writing Skills by Using an Interview Process (+ 6 Other Content Writing Tips)
  • H2: 1. Use an Interview-Backed Research Process
    • H3: How We Use Interview to Shape the Entire Content Production Process: From Keyword Research to to Final Drafts
  • H2: 2. Be Your Own Editor
    • H3: Editing Tip #1: Take Some Time Away from Your Piece
    • H3: Editing Tip #2: Change the Font and Color of Your Content
    • H3: Editing Tip #3: Use a Text-to-Speech Feature to Have Your Piece Read to You
  • H2: 3. Organize Your Thoughts Into Bullet Points
  • H2: 4. Look for Symmetry Between Your Intro & Body Sections
  • H2: 5. Read Your Piece by Only Its Headings
  • H2: 6. Get to the Value of the Sentence Faster
  • H2: 7. Write Towards Tasks, Not Job Titles

The headings were written to be descriptive and informative every step of the way, so a reader can easily see how we’re going to follow through on our initial promise (the title of the piece).

But what if our heading outline looked like this, with the added heading in bold:

• H1: How to Improve Your Content Writing Skills by Using an Interview Process (+ 6 Other Content Writing Tips)
  • H2: What is Content Writing?
  • H2: 1. Use an Interview-Backed Research Process
    • H3: How We Use Interview to Shape the Entire Content Production Process: From Keyword Research to to Final Drafts
  • H2: 2. Be Your Own Editor
    • H3: Editing Tip #1: Take Some Time Away from Your Piece
    • H3: Editing Tip #2: Change the Font and Color of Your Content
    • H3: Editing Tip #3: Use a Text-to-Speech Feature to Have Your Piece Read to You
  • H2: 3. Organize Your Thoughts into Bullet Points
  • H2: 4. Look for Symmetry Between Your Intro & Body Sections
  • H2: 5. Read Your Piece by Only Its Headings
  • H2: 6. Get to the Value of the Sentence Faster
  • H2: 7. Write Towards Tasks, Not Job Titles

You’ll notice the added heading is “What is Content Writing?” in bold. This is a top-of-funnel heading that we often see in bottom-of-the-funnel content, but it doesn’t belong here, does it? 

The title of the blog post focuses on improving your content writing, with a specific example: using an interview process. Does it make sense to assume that someone clicking on this blog post (whether from Google search or an ad) doesn’t already know what content writing is?

By reading your piece by its headings, you can easily assess its flow and whether the structure works.

6. Get to the Value of the Sentence Faster

This is just another way of “cutting out the fluff” or “cutting out the fat” in your writing. I personally like to focus on the verbs to find the value, but that’s not the only way to do it.

For example, here’s a sentence we might see from a writer:

“The best thing about our software’s feature is that it lets you create schedules for your team that can then be auto populated each week.”

When I review it, the first valuable phrase is “create schedules for your team that can then be auto populated each week.”  While this seems obvious, I identified the value by focusing on the first dynamic verb in the sentence: “create.”

If I asked a writer to focus on that value and move it up in the sentence, we might get something like:

“With our software you can create schedules for your team that will auto-populate each week.”

We removed unnecessary phrases like “the best thing about” because the value lies not in our opinion of the feature but in the feature and its benefits.

7. Write Towards the Job, Not Job Titles

One of my more consistent pieces of feedback to writers is to focus less on job titles and more on the job itself.

Here’s an intro paragraph we might get for a piece targeting small businesses that need time clock software to track employee time worked:

“When you’re an HR manager, founder, COO, or any other admin who handles time tracking, you know how difficult it can be to track time worked by employees.”

Now, there’s plenty we could say about that sentence, but let’s focus on that long list of job titles. The writer is trying to show they’re writing towards the audience, but in reality, they’re doing a bit of the opposite.

I don’t imagine that someone reading this will go “Oh hey, I’m an HR manager” and be convinced the article is for them. The better way to connect with an audience is by describing the job act or function they’re currently doing and why it isn’t working.

So, an edit I’d give a writer would be: “Remove the job title, but still convey to the reader who the post is for by focusing on the tasks associated with the job.”

If we do that, we might get an opening sentence such as:

“When you’re trying to get accurate time records for each employee, you need to manage time off requests (segmenting the requests down into separate categories, such as paid time off and sick days), employee leave balances, total hours worked, and any carryover balances from last year.”

This new version doesn’t rely on job titles (which are insufficient anyway in describing the breadth of your potential audience) because it focuses on the specific job acts your audience is performing. It’s much more specific. Whether you’re a middle manager, team lead, department manager, or HR manager, if you’re trying to get accurate time records for your employees, you’ll resonate with the tasks outlined in the intro.

Final Thoughts: Be Wary of Content Writing Tips (Even Ours)

Effective content writing connects with the target audience. That’s the key content writing tip to take to heart.

As a writer — especially a freelance writer trying to build your career — make sure the tips you follow help you connect with your audience.

To first do this, you need to be able to articulate:

• Who your audience is
• Why they’re reading your content

In my view, that’s the biggest challenge in writing great content. The tips shared here have helped me and other writers improve our content writing process. If you find that a tip isn’t helping you, then set it aside and focus on the overarching goal of writing good content: delivering value to your reader.

Additional Resources for Content Writers

The specific tools and tips that you use to improve your writing will depend on the type of content you’re creating. At Grow and Convert, we focus on SEO-driven pieces that target bottom-of-the funnel keywords.

We’ve written several other posts that can help writers in this space, including:

• SEO Content Writing: A 5-Step Process You Can Follow
• The Detail Principle for Writing Good Blog Posts
• How to Write Great Blog Introductions

We also have case studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of our content marketing strategy, such as:

• How Writing for Humans Increased Blog Conversions by 66% to 900%
• How We Scaled Content from Bottom of the Funnel to Top of the Funnel While Still Bringing the Client Conversions
• How We Scaled a Client to Over 200 Signups a Month

If you’re interested in writing for Grow and Convert, you can learn more here. 

We also offer a content marketing course that covers:

• How to identify SEO keywords that drive qualified leads from organic traffic.
• How to write content that outranks the competition. 
• How to measure conversions (and which metrics matter most) while scaling your content operation.

From several years of experience, as well as countless conversations with other businesses doing content marketing (both in-house and with agencies), we’ve developed a good sense of what businesses are looking for when they hire content marketing agencies, what they’re disappointed by in the ones that don’t work out, and what true growth looks like in a successful engagement. 

So, to help businesses choose the right content marketing agency, we’re going to share our most important learnings and the key factors that you should consider when evaluating different content marketing firms.

Then, we’ll share how we’ve addressed each of these factors at our agency. And lastly, since most companies like to evaluate multiple agencies, we’ll share the best content marketing agencies we’ve heard come up a lot over the years (including ours).

Below, we cover:

• 4 factors to consider when evaluating content marketing agencies
• Our agency’s process: How we’ve addressed each of these factors
• Best content marketing agencies to consider

Note: Many companies wonder if they should hire an in-house marketer instead of an agency. We discuss the pros and cons of both options in this post. 

If you’re interested in hiring our agency to do content marketing for your business, visit our work with us page.

If you’re interested in working for our agency as a content writer or strategist, check out our careers page (we’re hiring).

And if you’re interested in learning the strategy and processes we use to do content marketing, check out our course and community.

4 Factors to Consider When Evaluating Content Marketing Agencies

To begin, we’ll cover the 4 biggest factors you need to consider when evaluating agencies:

• Factor #1: What’s your content marketing goal?
  
  For example: website traffic growth, email newsletter growth, leads and sales — e.g., calls to discuss your service, trials/demos for SaaS companies, product purchases in eCommerce.
  
  And is the agency’s content strategy optimized to achieve that business goal?
  
  This is the #1 factor you need to be clear on. In our experience, most companies want leads and sales — i.e. real customers and measurable ROI! — while most content agencies are built to grow traffic and email marketing lists. This mismatch causes problems.
  

• Factor #2: Do they have a process for gaining product and domain expertise, and expressing that through content?

• Factor #3: Do they have processes to actively promote the content they produce?

• Factor #4: Do they have detailed case studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of their strategy?

Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

Factor #1: What’s Your Goal From Content (Traffic, Emails, or Leads and Purchases)? And Is Their Content Strategy Optimized to Achieve That Goal?

Companies have different mindsets regarding the goal they hope to achieve from content marketing. In our experience, most want leads or sales — whether that be eCommerce purchases, sales call signups, or trials and demos in SaaS — because they want measurable ROI out of all their marketing channels, including content. This makes sense.

But there are some, for example, later stage companies with existing large lead generation numbers, that may want to use content for traffic and email signup growth. Others just have a vague idea that they want to do inbound marketing, and may not even realize that this is a choice they can make (i.e. they assume content is solely for getting traffic and brand awareness).

The first thing to understand is that this is a choice. You can optimize content around metrics like website traffic and email signups (what most digital marketing agencies do), or you can optimize content for generating leads and sales (what our agency does).

If you just want website traffic to grow your online presence, it will be much easier to find an agency whose strategy aligns with your goal.

However, most businesses ultimately want to see ROI from content, which means seeing leads or purchases attributable to content and meaningful increases in revenue over time.

In our experience, this requires a very different content marketing strategy (like the one that we use and have explained at length in previous articles like this and this).

That’s why we think this is the first and most important consideration when evaluating content agencies: Know your goal and figure out if the agency’s strategy and process is built to satisfy it.

If your goal is customer acquisition, then ask the agencies you evaluate if that’s what their strategy is optimized for. Ask them to be very explicit about this:

• Is their process designed to produce content that gets leads and sales?
• How does it work to actually achieve that goal?
• Are they data-driven and can they prove that their process works?

If an agency is asked if their process produces leads and sales, they’re obviously going to say yes, so you have to be very specific in your questioning. Focus on the second and third questions above, see if they can explain exactly how their process generates service signups or product purchases (not email signups, those are very different). Use your gut instinct — if you can’t figure out how their process will get leads or sales to increase, it probably won’t.

The biggest complaint we hear from companies who’ve had bad experiences with agencies — and frankly, the biggest complaint we had in our past experiences working with agencies — comes down to misalignment between what the agency optimizes content for, and what the company actually wants. So don’t skip this factor.

Factor #2: Do They Have a Process for Expressing Product and Domain Expertise Through Content?

Second, regardless of what your content marketing goal is, it’s important for whoever is producing your content to be able to express domain expertise in a way that feels native to your brand.

This is especially true for B2B businesses whose target audiences are often advanced industry experts who need to be communicated with at an expert level. If you don’t speak to them at their level, you risk reputational damage and turning off potential customers.

However, expressing product and domain expertise is important in B2C, too. Particularly if you choose to optimize your strategy for leads and/or sales, the topics you’ll write on will be very product or service-centric. This means whoever is writing your content will need in-depth knowledge of your product or service, the nuanced pain points that they solve for customers, and the ways in which your product is differentiated from competitors.

Most outside agencies or freelance writers will not have this product and domain expertise, and therefore need to have a process for getting this information out of the minds of the experts at your company, and expressing it through your content.

With that said, what we’ve seen in the market is that many agencies and freelancers end up doing what we call “Google research papers.” Like a high school student doing a research paper, they Google around the topic they were given and regurgitate what everyone else is saying on a given topic.

Instead of producing engaging content, this is undifferentiated and generic. So, when evaluating agencies, make sure you ask them:

• What is their process for being able to write and convey your value props, benefits, messaging, and differentiators in a way that feels native to your brand?

• Do they even have one? And if so, how does it work?

Is it a one-off interview at the beginning of the engagement? Is it a few one hour calls? Do they regularly interview experts at your company on a piece-by-piece basis?

We have found the latter approach — doing interviews on a piece-by-piece basis — to be both extremely rare when working with outside agencies, yet the most effective approach for expressing product and domain expertise through content. This is the approach we take at our agency and what we think differentiates good and great content, which we’ll discuss more below.

Factor #3: Do They Actively Promote the Content They Produce?

Content writing is just one facet of the content marketing process. For content marketing to work, it’s also necessary to do content promotion. This is what drives actual traffic to your articles.

So, another key thing to understand is what the agency offers with regards to content promotion. Is it included in their service? Sold separately? And what exactly do they do?

For example, do they just share the content they write via your own brand’s social media marketing channels (tweet it out for you, share it on your LinkedIn page, etc.)? Because that’s something you could easily do yourself.

Or, if they rely strictly on search engine optimization (SEO), is there anything they do in the short term to help drive traffic to articles during the time it takes for them to rank?

This is a key issue to address because what an agency offers for promotion will determine how much you’ll need to do on your end to drive traffic to your articles.

Ensure They Don’t Use a “Keyword Sprinkling” Strategy and Call That SEO

We’ve spoken with several clients who’ve had bad past experiences with SEO agencies. And after digging into the content those agencies were producing, we’ve learned that they often use a “keyword sprinkling” strategy.

Essentially, they’ll create “SEO” articles by simply “sprinkling” a bunch of keywords throughout their articles. But as we’ve explained in our article on SEO content writing, ranking highly for valuable keywords takes a significantly more strategic approach than this. Specifically, for the most valuable and competitive keywords, you need to have one single article or landing page completely optimized for a single keyword.

If an agency says that they primarily rely on SEO to drive traffic, be sure to have them explain to you how they go about ranking content for specific keywords. Ask them:

• What’s your process for doing keyword research?

• How do you choose keywords to target?

• What’s your process for analyzing search engine results pages (SERPs)?

• How do you reflect those analyses in your writing to get articles to rank?

• Can you show us examples of articles you’ve written that are ranking highly in Google?

• Are you doing digital PR or building high-authority backlinks to the articles?

Content or SEO services worth hiring will be able to answer these questions in detail and show you results they’ve gotten for other clients.

Note: We’ve published a detailed article on our SEO writing process, which you can read here. We’ve also published a detailed case study on SEO rankings data from 20 active and former clients, which you can read here.

Factor #4: Do They Have Detailed Case Studies That Demonstrate the Effectiveness of Their Strategy?

It’s very common for content marketing companies to share a lot of theoretical advice and information, but show little to no data or case studies that back up what they say and prove that their strategies work. It’s also common for them to put up badges about having “award winning” digital marketing services, quotes from past clients, or random stats like “we grew X company’s organic traffic by 200%.”

These types of testimonials and unsupported claims are not reliable proof that an agency can do what they say. So, an essential thing to look for is whether or not an agency has published the results they’ve achieved for clients, and specifically explained the details behind how they achieved those results.

Otherwise, you just have to blindly trust their level of competency, which leads to very inconsistent experiences with agencies.

When reviewing agency case studies, look for details about the work behind the results. For example, if they’re claiming they increased traffic by some percentage for a past client, figure out:

• How many articles did it take?
• Did one article produce most of that or was it spread out?
• What keywords did they rank for?
• How and why did they choose those keywords?
• How long did it take to rank?
• What was the domain authority of that client at the start and end? Did they do link building?
• What didn’t work?

The more transparent agencies are with the results they’ve achieved and the ways in which they got those results, the more you can trust them to be able to replicate those types of results for your business.

Now, let’s walk through how our agency has addressed each of these factors, including the details of our content marketing strategy, our writing and promotion processes, and 6 long-form case studies we’ve published to demonstrate the effectiveness of our strategy.

1. Grow and Convert

#1. Our Content Strategy Is Optimized to Drive Leads and Sales

We’ve optimized our content marketing strategy to drive leads and sales (versus traffic and email signups) for two key reasons:

1. Most companies want to see ROI from content: Sooner or later, most brands that invest in a content agency want to see some form of measurable ROI. We learned early on that if we can show ROI to clients (in particular management and executive teams), the engagements last longer, allowing results to compound while making everyone happy.
   
   
2. There’s are people actively looking to buy the product or service you sell: For almost every business, outside of rare category-creating products, there is some significant volume of people who are actively looking to buy that type of product or service — or solve pain points that product or service solves. These people are Googling terms that indicate they are ready to buy. Our perspective is that it makes way more sense from a business standpoint that a content strategy goes after these ready-to-buy-now people first (where conversion rates are much higher), before trying to reach the people higher in the funnel.

We’ve written at length about how we drive leads and sales through content for different business types. Check out these articles for detailed walkthroughs on our philosophy and our process:

Our Philosophy on Content Marketing Strategy

• Pain-Point SEO: How to produce SEO content that drives conversions
• Mini-Volume Keywords: Why targeting small search volumes makes sense
• How to create a content marketing strategy: A 5-step guide

B2B Content Marketing Strategy

• A B2B content marketing strategy designed to generate leads & sales

SaaS Content Marketing Strategy

• How to create a SaaS content strategy that drives product signups

B2C Content Marketing Strategy

• B2C content marketing: A guide to drive sales with content

How We Hold Ourselves Accountable

For every one of our clients, we create an ROI graph like this one (a live graph from a B2B SaaS client we’ve been working with for over 2 years):

The horizontal lines represent the number of leads this client needs per month to break even on their monthly spend with us. Each month, we plot the number of leads from our articles on this graph. Then we report on our progress in relation to that break even number, so clients can see when they begin to have positive ROI.

We’ve written extensively about how we do this here and here, including more case studies and client data. Before we started our agency, this is the type of thing we were looking for but could never find. And we feel this is the number one differentiator of our agency.

#2. We Use an Interview-Based Writing Process to Express Product & Domain Expertise Through Content

We don’t produce articles in the “Google research paper” style we described above (self-researching a topic and writing what you find).

Instead, our writers start by interviewing people inside your organization who have the know-how and expertise to speak on that topic and convey how your product and your company has innovated or differentiated itself in the topic area of the article.

Thus, the writer is not asked to pretend to be an expert themselves. This is a massive shift from traditional content services and is essential to producing genuinely high-quality content.

We’re not talking about grabbing a few quotes from experts to throw into an article. We’re talking about hour-long recorded interviews where we shape an entire article around the viewpoint and knowledge of an expert inside your company, who can not only speak to the topic area but also tie-in your product.

This changes everything. It creates true thought leadership content, and adds genuine product expertise into our articles because we’re able to include copywriting on all the detail and nuance of how your product or service is differentiated, what it replaces, why features were designed in certain ways, and more that only experts inside your company would know.

#3. We Use a Two Pronged Content Promotion Process

We use a two pronged promotion strategy to drive both short- and long-term traffic to your articles as we wait for them to rank in Google. Specifically:

1. Paid ads / PPC marketing campaigns (short-term traffic): We use paid ads to promote content using two targeting methods: Cold audiences (using interest and demographic based targeting) and lookalike audiences (based on the client’s existing customer list or website visitors). We test paid channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, and Google Ads — based on each client and where we’re most likely to reach their audience.
   
   
2. Manual link building (long-term traffic): When certain pieces start ranking for their keyword, we strategically deploy link building to boost them to page 1 — or the top of page 1 — in Google.

The combination of these two steps gives our pieces a short term boost in traffic followed by long term sustainable organic traffic that adds up from different articles and grows over time.

We do all of the above from our own budget, with no extra spend for our clients, making us a truly full-service agency. This is markedly different from other top content marketing agencies and something we’re very proud of offering our clients.

#4. We Publish Detailed Case Studies to Demonstrate & Prove the Effectiveness of Our Content Strategy

Here are 6 in-depth case studies we’ve written to demonstrate how we’ve executed our content strategy for real businesses:

1. B2C content marketing example: How we grew Cognitive FX to 70,000 pageviews in 14 months
   
   
2. Content marketing case study: How we scaled Leadfeeder’s signups to over 200/month
   
   
3. Scaling content: Expanding from bottom of funnel content to top of funnel (Geekbot case study)
   
   
4. Scaling SEO traffic from 920 to 14,577 sessions in 6 months (Circuit case study)
   
   
5. How to do B2B content marketing without domain expertise (Rainforest QA case study)
   
   
6. How to create a keyword strategy for a new, innovative product (Case Study of a video editing software client)

Finally, if you’re interested, you can learn more about our agency, pricing, and reach out about working with us here.

Client Reviews

While we believe in our services and often go above and beyond to get results for our clients, you don’t have to take our word for it. We have an average of 4.8 out of 5 stars on Clutch (a popular third-party review site). 

Here’s what a few of our customers have to say:

Next, we’re going to share 11 other content marketing agencies we’ve seen or heard come up over the years, so you can weigh other options.

Note: We haven’t worked with any of the following agencies directly, so we can’t independently vouch for the quality of their work. But that’s why we outlined the 4 key factors for evaluating a SaaS content marketing agency above, so you can evaluate them. If you want to reach out to these agencies, we recommend you ask them about each factor and evaluate for yourself if (and how) they have a process to address them.

2. Animalz

According to their website, Animalz provides content marketing services to enterprise companies, startups, and VC firms. They list having worked with companies such as Google, Amazon, Airtable, and others. And they provide a variety of services including SEO consulting, brand awareness, lead generation, product marketing, and promotion and distribution.

Animalz doesn’t have any reviews on Clutch at the time of writing. 

Visit their site for more information about their services, team, podcast, and more. 

3. Siege Media

Siege Media is an SEO-focused content marketing agency that offers SEO, content creation, graphic design, website design, and link building services to businesses. They list having worked with companies such as Zillow, Shutterfly, and Tripadvisor. And they say their marketing solutions have generated over $148,646,000 in yearly client traffic value. 

Siege Media currently has 4.9 out 5 stars on Clutch.

Visit their site for more information. 

4. Optimist

Optimist is an SEO-focused content marketing agency for startups and growth-stage businesses. They specialize in working with product-led companies, and list having worked with companies such as Contentstack, FairShake, and HelloSign. Their services are broken out into startup content marketing, SaaS content marketing, and B2B content marketing.

Optimist doesn’t have any reviews on Clutch at the time of writing. 

Visit their site for more information.

5. Codeless

Codeless is a content production company offering a variety of SEO, content, and PR services. They say they create a proven, customized workflow for every client, and list having worked with companies such as Monday, Zapier, ActiveCampaign, and others.

Codeless has 4.8 out of 5 stars on Clutch. 

Visit their site for more information. 

6. Omniscient

Omniscient Digital primarily serves fast growing B2B software companies. They claim to tailor their approach to your specific goals, but their main services include strategy consultations, content creation, optimization of existing content, link building, and technical SEO audits. 

Omniscient doesn’t have any reviews on Clutch at the time of writing. 

Visit their site for more information. 

7. Seer Interactive

Seer Interactive claims to be a full-service digital marketing agency with a wide variety of services including digital strategy, paid media, content creation (including white papers, infographics, blog posts, and video production), and more. They also offer a data analytics platform to help you identify and track business KPIs. 

Seer Interactive can be found on Clutch, however, they only have one review with a half star rating, so it’s unlikely that their Clutch profile is a complete representation of the company. 

Visit their site for more information. 

8. Graphite

Graphite uses AI to identify groups of keywords with similar intent and to guide the writing process. When it comes to writing, Graphite’s AI will produce an outline and a list of keywords to get your writers started. They also have a proprietary tool to help you with internal link building. 

GraphiteHQ doesn’t have any reviews on Clutch at the time of writing. 

Visit their site for more information. 

9. Intrepid Digital

Intrepid Digital gives you direct access to SEO marketing experts and data analytics. They also offer paid media, search engine marketing, content creation and strategy, conversion rate optimization that aligns with a great user experience, and more.

An overview of Intrepid Digital can be found on Clutch, however, there are no reviews currently.

Visit their site for more information. 

10. Power Digital

Power Digital is a robust digital agency whose services include web development, web design, influencer marketing, email marketing, and much more. They serve B2B, B2C, fashion, retail media, and private equity companies.

Power Digital has 4.8 out of 5 stars on Clutch.

Visit their site for more information.

11. Quoleady

Quoleady is a content marketing agency that helps SaaS brands show up at the top of Google and inside AI-generated answers. By combining SEO, LLM optimization, and strategic content creation, they make sure your brand stays visible in both search and AI discovery.

The team behind Quoleady has worked with 200+ SaaS companies, including well-known brands like PandaDoc, Expandi, Monday.com, and GetVoIP, helping them drive signups and organic growth through high-quality, data-backed content. Quoleady is also running LLMO for SaaS, the largest Reddit community dedicated to exploring how SaaS brands can appear in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI search tools.

Quoleady has 4.9 out of 5 stars on Clutch.

Visit their site for more information.

12. Aimers

Aimers Agency is a performance-focused digital marketing agency specializing in paid acquisition for B2B SaaS and technology companies. Their services include paid search and social advertising, conversion rate optimization, landing page design, and in-depth analytics. What makes them stand out? They don’t just run campaigns — they act as an analytical powerhouse, continuously testing and optimizing to reduce your cost per lead while scaling volume. 

Visit their site for more information.

Want to Work with Us or Learn How to Implement Our Content Marketing Strategy?

• Our Content Marketing Agency: You can learn more about working with us here.

• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn how to grow their SaaS business with content can join our private course, taught via case studies, here. We include a lot of information and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we and other members give feedback. We also get on live Zoom calls about once a month and dissect members’ actual content strategies and brainstorm ideas on how we’d form content strategies for their businesses.

• Join Our Content Marketing Team: Alternatively, if this style of B2B content marketing appeals to you, consider joining our content marketing team as a writer or content strategist. We have awesome clients. We’re a remote company. We pay well. And you won’t have to stress about getting your own clients or spend a bunch of time doing outreach to get them.

In this guide, we break it down into four parts, discuss different approaches marketers typically take, and why we think our process, Pain Point SEO, is the most effective for a large fraction of businesses using SEO to acquire customers, not just grow pageviews. 

#1. Whether to Prioritize Keywords by Traffic or Buying-Intent

Most marketers and SEO advice tells you to prioritize traffic with all SEO efforts — that growing traffic is the goal of SEO. And for some businesses, this is absolutely correct. For example if you run a blog or media site monetized by ads, you should create an SEO strategy focused on maximizing traffic. 

However, for businesses selling a product or service — where revenue isn’t driven by ads — your keyword strategy should prioritize conversions (e.g., leads, sales, trials, add to carts) rather than just traffic. It’s important to remember that more traffic doesn’t automatically translate to more conversions.  

Let’s look at why that is. 

If we look at the sales funnel, the top of the funnel (TOFU) is where you draw in lots of people (i.e., a broad audience). As you move down the funnel, fewer and fewer people stick around until you’re left with just the ones that become paying customers. 

Many marketers believe that if you use SEO content to fill the top of your sales funnel, other content (e.g., product pages, white papers, case studies) will draw the readers in and down the funnel and eventually lead to conversions. This is the crux behind the high-traffic keyword strategy approach: target high traffic keywords with the assumption that more traffic will lead to more customers. 

But, let’s say you’re an IT company targeting the keyword ‘cybersecurity’ — a classic TOFU keyword. This term has a high search volume of 119k per month and is related to the service you offer. 

On the surface this looks like a great SEO keyword. But consider who would Google the term “cybersecurity”: 

• A student doing research on the topic
• Someone considering a career change
• An elderly person concerned about getting scammed, etc.

In other words, this is an introductory term for a broad topic, and most people Googling it are seeking overview-level information. 

Now consider who would be in charge of finding a new IT services company: Likely a high level manager-type who is already familiar with what cybersecurity is (they just need someone to manage it for them). Why would this person sit down at their computer and Google “cybersecurity”? They wouldn’t. 

If you ranked for this term as an IT security company, you’d find that the conversion rate from TOFU content to leads is quite low for products or services. We’ve seen across thousands of keywords for numerous clients over the years. 

For businesses selling products or services via their website and using SEO to acquire customers, not just traffic, we instead recommend targeting keywords with buying-intent.

This means that people searching for these keywords are actively looking for a product in that category, researching competitors, or otherwise showing intent to buy. In our experience, high buying-intent (also called bottom of the funnel) keywords convert at a much higher rate. 

For example, below is a graph that shows the conversion rates of 65 different posts — some targeting bottom of the funnel (BOFU) keywords and others targeting TOFU keywords. 

As you can see, the BOFU posts had a conversion rate of 4.78% whereas TOFU posts had a conversion rate of just 0.19% — that’s 25x the difference! And this is just one example; we’ve seen this across thousands of articles for clients across a wide variety of industries and business models. 

#2. Finding and Prioritizing Keywords

We’ll start by discussing how to find and prioritize keywords if organic traffic is your goal. Then, we’ll cover how we brainstorm and prioritize keywords to get conversions (jump to that section). 

High Traffic Keywords

It’s easy to find keywords with high search volumes. First, brainstorm a bunch of topics related to your business. For this example, we’ll say you’re selling human resources software. 

Your list might look like this: 

• Human resources management
• Hiring and onboarding
• Conflict management
• Training and development
• Performance management
• Recruitment
• Employee management, etc.

Then, enter each of these topics into a keyword research tool such as Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush and it will return a list of keywords that either contain the original keyword or are related. 

Most tools automatically arrange the list by search volume, but you can usually do this manually if it’s not already done for you. 

Once you have your list, consider how difficult it will be to rank for each keyword. The two most important factors here are keyword difficulty (KD) and domain authority (DA). 

KD indicates the level of competition for a keyword (most keyword research tools will provide this metric). The KD that you can handle (i.e., target and rank for) will depend on your DA and available resources. 

DA measures a website’s strength in terms of its ability to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs) compared to other websites. Ahrefs and Moz are the two most common tools that provide this metric. For reference, here is Ahrefs article on how their website authority metric works. You’ll need to consider your own DA and the DA of the top ranking websites for a given keyword in order to determine your chances of ranking. 

Both of these metrics are scored on a scale from 0–100. Higher KD numbers indicate more competition, while higher DA numbers suggest a greater likelihood of ranking.

But, you’ll need to experiment with different KD and competing DA to see what you can rank for. For example, DA isn’t the sole factor in ranking. If you look at the search result for any keyword, you’ll see the top results are never sorted by DA. It’s common to see lower DA sites ranking above higher DA sites for any given keyword. So don’t use that metric as the end-all-be-all of your ranking potential. 

High Converting Keywords

The most practical way to find keywords with high buying-intent is to look for ideas in these three categories: 

• Product or service category keywords
• Competitor comparison keywords
• Pain point keywords

Below, we’ll discuss how we use these categories in our SEO process with clients and provide examples to illustrate them. We’ll also link an in-depth article on additional ways to find high-quality keyword and content ideas.

Category 1. Product or Service Keyword

The first category of keywords we target describes our client’s product or service. They’re the top terms that most businesses are bidding on through paid search ads, and the most obvious keywords that any business would want their website to rank for.

For instance, if you sell marketing analytics software, you definitely want to target and rank for the keyword “marketing analytics software.” Similarly, if you offer Shopify development services, focus on ranking for “Shopify development services.” There’s nuance to going after these competitive terms, which we’ll discuss below, but these are the highest buying-intent terms for any business and therefore deserve high priority.

It’s important to note that there are often more product or service keywords — that is, relevant keyword variations closely related to your business — than many companies realize.  

For example, take a business we’ve worked with that sells remote executive assistant services to startups. The first obvious service category keyword is “executive assistant service” or “executive assistant for startups.” 

However, when you look and think a little deeper, there’s a wide array of keywords that they could target in this category:

• “Executive assistant” variations:
  • Executive assistant service
  • Executive assistants for startups
  • Remote executive assistant service
  • Executive assistant staffing agency
  • Executive assistant staffing firm
  • Startup executive assistant
    
    
• “Virtual assistant” variations:
  • Virtual assistant service
  • Virtual executive assistant
  • Virtual assistant for startups
  • Virtual assistant staffing agency
    
    
• “Administrative assistant” variations:
  • Administrative assistant service
  • Remote administrative assistant
  • Administrative assistant staffing agency
  • Outsourced administrative assistant

We find that many (if not most) of our clients face a similar situation: there are numerous ways people search for what they offer. As you start your keyword research, it’s useful to identify as many of these variations as possible.  

Category 2. Competitor Comparison Keywords (vs. and Alternatives)

The second category of keywords we look for are competitor comparison keywords. These include keywords such as:

• [Competitor brand] vs. [Your brand]
• [Competitor brand] vs. [Other competitor brand]
• [Competitor] alternatives

People who are searching these terms are either: a) looking to understand the differences between products or services because they have intent to buy, or b) unhappy with their current solution, and looking for a different product or service to use instead. Therefore, like product and service category keywords, these terms have very high buying-intent. And in our work, we’ve seen these keywords convert very well for our clients.

To identify keyword opportunities in this category, enter different variations of these terms (including relevant competitors) into Google or your keyword research tool to see what comes up. 

For newer or smaller brands, where there may not be much search volume for the brand compared to competitors, we’ve found success creating content targeting “[competitor] vs. [other competitor]” keywords. 

By including “[competitor] vs. [other competitor] vs. [our client’s brand],” we can piggyback off of the search volume of people comparing our clients’ competitors and position our client as a viable option.

The more competitors in your space, the more opportunities you’ll have for comparison keywords.

Category 3. Pain Point Keywords

The third category of keywords we look for are pain point keywords — keyword phrases that indicate the person searching has a problem that our client’s product or service solves. 

Pain point keywords allow you to reach people at the right time (i.e. when they’re trying to figure out how to solve a specific problem) and offer a natural opportunity to present your product or service as a solution to that problem. 

Here are some examples of pain point keywords we’ve targeted for clients and links to the content we created targeting them:

• “How to edit video fast” for our client Reduct: How to Edit Video Fast: 5 Tips to Speed Up Video Editing

• “Who is visiting my site” for our past client Leadfeeder: Who Is Visiting My Site? How to Identify B2B Sales Leads That Don’t Fill out a Form

• “Keep track of staff holidays” for our client Timetastic: How to keep track of staff holidays (without clumsy spreadsheets)

• “How do I know if I need an executive assistant” for our past client Persona Talent: How to Know When You Need an Executive Assistant—and When You Don’t

Compared to the first two keyword categories discussed above, pain point keywords rely heavily on a deep understanding of your customers and their specific challenges. 

Read our article on Customer-Content Fit, where we discuss in detail how we approach this.

How to Prioritize High Buying-Intent Keywords

1) Start with Your Product and Service Category Keywords

Product or service keywords tend to be the highest converting so we typically start with these. However, there are a few things to keep in mind:

• These are often high competition keywords, meaning it can take more time and require more backlinks to rank. If you want to eventually rank for these, it’s good to start on them ASAP.

• Long-tail keyword variations are typically easier to rank for than broad terms (e.g. “hvac software compatible with quickbooks” vs. “hvac software”). Targeting these keywords first can help you secure early wins while still focusing on high-intent keywords.

• Look for SERPs where the top results have fewer backlinks. These keywords tend to have lower keyword difficulty and can provide quicker ranking opportunities.

2) Mix In Some Competitor and/or Pain Point Keywords

It’s good to diversify the types of keywords you’re going after to see how different keywords perform from a rankings and conversion standpoint, spot new opportunities, and double down on what’s working (more on this below). 

These categories are often less competitive and easier to rank for than product/service category keywords, so you can get rankings and build momentum faster, even with high-intent terms.

The same considerations regarding competition and backlinks discussed above apply when choosing the order in which you tackle these.

3) Monitor Rankings and Conversion Metrics and Adjust Accordingly

Monitoring your SEO performance is crucial because it allows you to see what is and isn’t working. There are many tools available, but we use Ahrefs to track rankings and Google Analytics to measure conversions. 

Example #1: Prioritize High-Converting, Low-Competition Keywords

If you identify a subset of keywords that are easier to rank for or drive significant conversions, consider focusing on more of those.

For instance, a client we worked with operated in a niche where competitors hadn’t yet adopted the “competitor vs. other competitor” keyword strategy. Despite their low domain rating, we were able to achieve position 1 rankings for these terms. Additionally, these keywords drove substantial conversions despite having low search volume, so we prioritized targeting more of those keywords.

Example #2: Consider Increasing Backlinks

If certain keywords are stuck on page 2 or 3 in the SERPs, that may indicate that they need more backlinks to improve their ranking. In this case, consider increasing your link-building efforts for those pages. 

Example #3: Optimize Your SEO Title

If certain keywords are stalled near the bottom or middle of the first page, you might try updating the SEO title to something more compelling that can increase CTR, which can boost the ranking. We’ve had a number of instances doing SEO for our own agency where changing our SEO title helped us move from the bottom or middle of page 1 to the top.

Monitoring your rankings and conversion data is essential for spotting these opportunities and getting the most out of your SEO efforts. 

Other Ways to Come Up with Content and Keyword Ideas

In addition to the keyword research process we’ve shared so far, consider these tactics for generating content and keyword ideas:

• Interview key departments in your company that have deep knowledge of your customers and their pain points (sales, customer success, executive team, etc.).

• Use tools like email auto-responders to collect feedback from customers on their biggest challenges.

• Join or create online communities where customers ask questions and discuss challenges.

• Examine your Google Ads account for high-converting keywords that could also be tackled through organic search.

• Plug keywords into Google to uncover additional opportunities via Suggested Search, People Also Ask, and People Also Search For.

Check out our article on content ideation for in-depth advice on how you can approach this. All of these tactics can further inform your keyword research and help you find new keyword opportunities for your business.  

#3. How to Choose Pages to Optimize for Each Keyword

Once you’ve completed your keyword research, the next step is to decide which web pages to optimize for each keyword. Here are the key things to consider:

Factor #1: Match Search Intent

Examine your list of high priority keywords and determine if you have any existing pages that closely align with the search intent of each keyword.

When analyzing the SERP for a given product or service category keyword, check whether the top results are primarily home pages, product/service pages, or blog posts.

You’ll likely want to match the page you optimize with the types of pages that frequently appear in the top results, as that indicates the search engine algorithm favors that page type for the keyword. While there are exceptions, this is a good guideline to follow. 

So, if you have an existing page that closely matches the search intent, focus on optimizing it for the target keyword. Otherwise, create a new page.

Factor #2: Create Dedicated Pages

If you don’t have an existing page that closely matches the search intent for a keyword, create a dedicated blog post or landing page to go after that keyword. 

We cannot emphasize the importance of the word “dedicated” enough. Many companies and agencies attempt to target multiple keywords with a single page, but as Google’s algorithm has evolved, this approach has become far less effective. 

Getting a position 1 ranking requires deeply matching the search intent for each specific keyword, and in our experience, creating individual pages for each keyword is the best way to do that.

#4. Updating content

Many marketers recommend updating content on a fixed schedule because they feel Google rewards new content. However, we’ve found that updating content simply for the sake of updating content doesn’t significantly impact performance. 

Instead, we recommend updating content when the intent behind the SERP changes or there’s a new position or feature to discuss. 

You can learn more about when to update content here.  

Articles to Help with Executing Your SEO Keyword Strategy

This article has focused entirely on keyword strategy (i.e. finding and prioritizing keywords that have business value). But there’s a lot that goes into execution — doing SERP analysis, creating content, and measuring performance — that’s also necessary to get results.

Here are additional in-depth articles we’ve written to help you with the other essential steps in executing your keyword strategy:

• 6 Step SEO Content Strategy (Examples & Common Mistakes)
• SEO Content Writing: A 5-Step Process You Can Follow
• Underdog SEO: How to Beat Your Competition at Search
• Content Marketing Attribution: How to Measure Content Performance

Want to Work with Us or Learn More About How We Approach Content Marketing?

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute content marketing in this way, you can learn more about our service and pricing here.

• Write For Us: If you’re a content marketer or writer and would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.

• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here or watch our video walkthrough.

In this guide, we address that question using data from over 40 clients. 

First, it’s important to recognize that many factors affecting rankings aren’t easily quantifiable (e.g., writing style, topic coverage). Therefore, we start by examining easily measurable factors — such as time, number of published posts, and domain rating — to understand how they influence first-page rankings.  

Next, we explore various other, less quantifiable factors and explain our approach to handling them.

Table of Contents

• How does time affect the likelihood of ranking on the first-page of Google?
  
  
• Does domain authority matter?
  
  
• What are the key factors for high rankings and how can I achieve them quickly?
  
  
• What can I do to drive leads while I’m waiting for rankings to take hold?

How Time and Domain Rating Affect First-Page Rankings

(Note: The data presented here reflects results from our specific process. If you take a different SEO approach, your results may vary.)

To understand the impact of time and domain rating on achieving first-page rankings, we first analyzed the average number of first-page rankings our clients have achieved each month while working with us.

(Note: Many Google results now feature infinite scroll, meaning there isn’t a traditional “page one.” So, when we refer to page one, we simply mean the top 10 results.)

The graph above shows the average number of top 10 rankings our clients achieve over time. The x-axis represents the number of months we’ve published content for them, and each blue dot represents the average number of top 10 rankings our clients have achieved by that time. 

For example, tracking from month 10, you’ll see that our clients typically have about 20 first-page rankings. That indicates that, on average, after 20 months of regular publishing, clients rank on page one for over 50 keywords.

The key takeaway is a clear upward trend: The longer clients work with us, the more blog posts they have ranking on the first-page, with an average of over 100 first-page rankings after three years. 

While that’s great news, you can argue that the more content you’ve published, the more likelihood you have at first-page rankings. Naturally, a client with 50 pieces published will have more first-page rankings than one with only five. (For most clients, we publish 3 articles per month, each targeting a single SEO keyword. You can read more about our process here.)

From here, we wanted to isolate the effect of time on rankings by controlling for the number of pieces published. This led us to ask:

Does time alone affect rankings? And if so, how long does it take to rank on the first-page of Google?

To answer this, we used the same data from the graph above but adjusted it by dividing the number of first-page rankings by the number of pieces published for each client. 

In this new graph, a y-axis value of 1.00 indicates that the client has one first-page ranking for every unique blog post we published.  

By examining the overall shape of the data in this graph, we observe that around month 15, each post averages close to one first-page ranking. 

(Note: This value can exceed 1 because some posts rank for multiple target keywords.)

This analysis answers the question, “How long does it take to rank on Google’s first-page?” On average, it takes us a little over a year for each piece of published content to reach page one on Google. 

As expected, the number of first-page rankings increases as more content is published.

Domain Authority Does Help Pages Rank Faster

Website authority is a widely recognized SEO term that refers to the strength of your presence on Google’s search engine. Different SEO tools use various metrics to assess this authority. For example:

• Domain Rating (DR) by Ahrefs which evaluates backlinks and the strength of those backlinks to determine overall site authority.

• Domain Authority (DA) by Moz predicts how likely a website is to rank, although the specific factors considered aren’t readily available.

Both tools provide a score ranging from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating greater authority. However, it’s important to note that each tool measures different metrics.

Since many marketers rely on these scores to gauge their content’s ranking potential, we analyzed our data to see if it supports this idea. And it does. 

This graph shows the number of first-page rankings per post over time for two groups: 

• Clients with a Domain Rating (DR) above 50
• Clients with a DR below 50

For clients with a higher DR, the data reveals that they achieve around one first-page ranking per post just over a year after we begin publishing content for them.

In contrast, clients with a lower DR see about 0.6 first-page rankings per post at the same point in time. It’s important to note that the trend for the <50 DR group is still on the rise and hasn’t yet leveled off. This suggests that websites with lower DR could potentially reach the same number of first-page rankings as those with higher DR, but it would take longer. However, we currently lack the data to confirm this hypothesis.

Main Takeaway: It Takes Just over a Year to Achieve One First-Page Ranking per Post on Average

The key insights from this data are: 

• Time is the most crucial factor in determining whether a post will rank on Google’s first-page.

• On average, it takes a little over a year to achieve one first-page ranking for every post you’ve published.

• Website authority does play a role, but it’s not as significant as time. 

It’s important to note that this analysis focuses solely on time and domain strength as ranking factors. But many other factors influence rankings. 

To maximize your ranking potential, regardless of your domain rating or how long you’ve been publishing, you need to get these other factors right as well. 

In the following sections, we’ll explore the most important factors for ranking high on Google, based on our experience of helping over 80 clients rank for high-value keywords since 2017.

Other Factors That Affect Rankings (and How to Rank Faster)

In this section, we delve into the most critical factors that influence search engine rankings — factors that we focus on extensively for each client’s articles. While these elements are challenging to quantify and don’t lend themselves easily to correlation analysis, we believe they are essential for achieving higher rankings.

We will also briefly discuss routine tasks that are necessary but don’t provide a competitive edge on their own because they are standard practices (e.g., on-page SEO, mobile friendliness).

The Three Most Important Factors for Ranking on the First-Page of Google

1. Choosing Keywords Where You Have Topical Relevance

Topical relevance means that Google’s algorithm prioritizes sites that are authoritative on a specific topic, not just those with the highest number of backlinks. Essentially, Google wants to rank sites that it deems most relevant and knowledgeable about a given subject.

This concept has been widely discussed in SEO, including a nice example in the Ahrefs blog where niche cast iron cookware sites outranked a site with far more backlinks.

In our experience, we frequently see our clients’ posts outranking competitors with higher DA. This reinforces the idea that our client results are more influenced by relevance and time rather than just domain authority.

For instance, take a look at our client Cognitive FX, detailed in this case study.

They’re an awesome, cutting edge concussion treatment center in Utah that heals people who have been suffering from concussion symptoms for decades. 

Despite their impressive work, their Ahrefs domain rating is only 51, which is relatively modest.

We rank #1 for a lot of concussion keywords for them, and for most of those keywords, we’re outranking many medical sites with higher DR.

For example, look at the first-page results for the keyword “memory loss after injury”:

Despite having the lowest domain rating among the top four search results, we’re ranking #1 — outpacing sites like Mayo Clinic, which has a domain rating of 92.

Even in terms of backlinks, our specific page isn’t leading. We have no backlinks to that page, while #2, #3, and #4 results have 137, 40, and 1,417 backlinks, respectively.

So how are we achieving the top spot? Topical relevance.

Disclaimer: Of course we don’t know this for a fact. No one knows the exact “why” behind the results of Google’s search algorithm, but we can make educated guesses and we strongly believe this is true for our client results based on everything you’re reading in this post.

Our hypothesis is that Google recognizes Cognitive FX’s domain as being solely focused on concussions, which likely contributes to its high ranking.

In contrast, at the time of writing:

• The second result, MSKTC, provides rehabilitation for spinal injuries and burns, not just concussion rehabilitation.
  
  
• The third result, Headway, offers emotional support resources for a variety of ailments.
  
  
• The fourth result, Mayo Clinic, is one of the largest medical centers in the country, covering a wide range of medical services from complex surgeries to routine check-ups.

Cognitive FX, on the other hand, is highly-specialized in concussion treatment. This specific focus gives them a significant edge in topical relevance for concussion-related keywords, a trend we’ve observed consistently not just with Cognitive FX but with many other clients as well.

To summarize, while domain authority does play a role, it’s not the only factor. Focusing on bottom of the funnel keywords — those closely related to your niche and products — can help you compete effectively against higher DA sites. 

Topical relevance can be a powerful advantage.

If you’d like to learn more about topical relevance, check out our interview with Bernard Huang, the founder of Clearscope.

2. Matching Search Intent

Google’s algorithm prioritizes web pages that best fulfill the user’s search intent. If you meet that intent more effectively than other results, you’ll have a strong chance of ranking highly. 

While this might seem straightforward — like providing a list of accounting software for the keyword ‘accounting software’ — it can often be more complex.

Take the keyword ‘data visualization tool,’ for example. At first glance, you might think users are looking for a list of tools. But if you examine the SERP, you’ll notice different types of results:

• The top result is a list of tools.
• The second result offers definitions and examples.
• The third result is a product page.

So, which type of content should you create? Is the primary search intent for a list, informational content, or details about specific solutions? 

Moreover, the search intent can vary depending on the user’s role and industry. For example: 

• A data analyst with advanced technical skills might be looking for ways to enhance job efficiency.
  
  
• A business professional with limited technical expertise might need to present ideas to a corporate audience.
  
  
• A marketer might be seeking tools to create detailed reports for clients. 

Determining which persona to target involves understanding these layers of intent. 

To effectively address search intent, you need to conduct a thorough SERP analysis, which you can learn about here: How to Do SERP Analysis: Going Beyond the Basics. 

Once you understand the intent, the next step is to create content that meets those needs, which brings us to our next point. 

3. Writing Unique, High Quality Content

As the header suggests, writing great content involves two key aspects: uniqueness and quality. Let’s break down each component:

Uniqueness can manifest in several ways:

• Sharing original data: Provide fresh insights or data that others haven’t covered. 
  
  
• Offering a different perspective: Approach the topic from a new angle while still fulfilling search intent. 
  
  
• Interviewing experts: Incorporate insights from subject matter experts to add depth and authority.
  
  
• Discussing your product/service: For bottom of the funnel (BOTF) keywords, highlight how your product or service addresses specific pain points. 

If you want to write something unique, you can’t have AI write the article for you. The way AI works is that it pulls from existing material and creates something similar (i.e., it’s the opposite of creating unique content). 

Likewise, we advise against handing freelancers a brief and having them do their own research to write the article. We call this a “Google research paper” because the writer reads through the top results of Google and produces something similar to what already exists — it’s essentially the human version of what AI does. 

Creating high-quality content means delivering valuable information that aligns with the needs of the search term you’re targeting.

For BOTF keywords, high-quality content should not only rank well but also convert. You have to understand your audience’s knowledge level and position your product as the solution to their specific problem.

Here are some articles to help you write great content:

• Customer-Content Fit: A framework for producing content that attracts customers 
  
  
• The detail principle for writing good blog posts
  
  
• How to write great blog introductions (and why most are bad) 
  
  
• The Specificity Strategy: How to turn generic posts into stand out content
  
  
• Why your content needs “Originality Nuggets” to be effective

The Bare Minimum Tasks Needed to Rank

Lastly, here are three essential tasks often discussed in SEO that we consider basic “tickets to entry” for your site or your pre-publication checklist. 

(Note: If you’ve already handled these, feel free to skip to the next section.)

On-Page SEO

On-page SEO involves several factors beyond just fulfilling search intent, including:

• Using the keyword in the title
  
  
• Adding a meta description
  
  
• Internal link building
  
  
• Following URL best practices, like using the keyword in the URL
  
  
• Incorporating relevant keywords throughout the content
  
  
• Using relevant headers
  
  
• Ensuring your website has a clear, logical, and crawlable structure

While these tasks are important, they’re relatively straightforward compared to deeply analyzing search intent, crafting content to convert, and some of the other strategies we discussed earlier. These on-page SEO elements should be “checked off” for everything you publish.

User Experience (UX)

Another basic SEO housekeeping item is ensuring a good user experience (UX) and decent page load speed. Once this is setup properly, you shouldn’t worry about it too much. 

You can check your site’s performance with Google Page Speed. A high (or “green”) score isn’t necessary for most sites to rank well, but if your score is very poor, consider making improvements. 

Just don’t obsess over page speed. While it’s important for extremely competitive keywords (e.g., “buy flowers online”), for most companies targeting a wide range of SEO keywords, factors like topical relevance, matching search intent, and quality content are far more crucial. Instead, focus on whether your content fulfills search intent and the number of links it has.

Finally, make sure your site is navigable, modern in appearance, and both desktop- and mobile-friendly. 

Two Popular Pieces of Advice That Have Little Effect on Rankings

Update Content Regularly

Many marketers will tell you to update your content on a regular schedule because Google rewards content updates. In our experience, you only need to update content if the intent behind the keyword changes (or if you have something like a new feature to talk about that’s relevant to the keyword). Updating content solely for the sake of updating doesn’t necessarily lead to better results and often isn’t worth the effort. 

Build Lots of Backlinks

While backlinks do help improve rankings, they aren’t always essential. We often wait several weeks after publishing a piece to see how it performs on its own. 

If it ranks well right away or is steadily moving up, we’ll often leave it alone and focus our attention on other posts. However, if we want a specific post to move up faster or it doesn’t seem to be gaining much traction on its own, we’ll start building one or two links per month until we get the rankings we want.

How to Get Leads While You’re Waiting for Rankings to Take Hold

Although time is an important factor for ranking as we covered above, there are a few things you can do to drive leads temporarily while you’re waiting for high rankings:

• Paid ads can be a great way to drive traffic to your articles while you’re waiting for them to rank organically. In this article, we talk about common mistakes we see many marketers make that cause them to waste ad spend on hollow traffic that never converts. We also talk about what we do differently to improve ROAS.
  
  
• Social media can be an effective lead generation channel for B2C businesses because these buyers typically make decisions based on personal preferences and immediate needs. However, in our opinion, social media is less effective for B2B lead generation (with the exception of disruption stories, which we’ll cover below). B2B buying decisions are typically driven by specific needs (e.g., outgrowing a CRM) and often require a significant process change (e.g., company-wide training on a new CRM).
  
  
• Disruption Stories focus on highlighting the core problem your business was created to solve. Unlike SEO content, which is designed to rank for a specific keyword, disruption stories don’t target a specific keyword. Instead, they’re designed to be highly shareable on social media and to catch the attention of potential buyers who aren’t actively searching for a solution like yours. 

How to Work with Us or Learn More

• Work with our agency: If you want to hire us to create and execute an SEO strategy by identifying your best keywords, creating content that is laser-focused on ranking and driving conversions, and link building to improve your ranking positions, you can learn more about working with us here.
  
  
• Join our team: If you’re a content marketer or writer who wants to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.
  
  
• Learn our methods in our content marketing course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course and community, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here.

What is a disruption story?

A disruption story is a story that aims to capture the reason why your business, product, or service exists. Almost every founder starts a business because they were trying to solve an existing problem that they faced, and they came up with a better solution to solve it.

Disruption stories share that problem/solution combination to help grab the attention of people who face similar challenges and can be convinced that your solution is better than how they’re currently doing it.

This is in contrast to our Pain Point SEO methodology where a brand identifies and ranks for high-intent SEO keywords to drive conversions from people actively searching for a solution to their problem.

Disruption stories, though, aren’t based on search. They’re fundamentally different from a content strategy perspective. They have no SEO angle or keyword associated with them at all. They simply share the core value of the problem your business, product, or service solves with readers who would benefit from it. You get disruption stories in front of these target customers via paid and organic social media (instead of search).

What really makes disruption stories unique is their ability to be highly shareable while also providing the opportunity to sell your product or service. 

That’s also what separates them from what we call “top of funnel” content — the whitepapers, ebooks, and guides many brands create — which don’t directly sell the product or service. Disruption stories do sell the product. In fact, they are all about the product or service and why it was created. 

Below, we share the marketing benefits of disruption stories based on our experience creating dozens of them for various clients over the years, give tips on how to write them, and show examples of various disruption stories we’ve created and the results we’ve seen.

You can also listen to us talk about disruption stories here: Episode 15: Disruption Stories – What They Are and How to Write Them

Benefits of Disruption Stories

As we covered above, the main benefit of disruption stories is their ability to convert readers who aren’t actively searching for your solution but who would make good customers. 

However, there are also other benefits:

1. Disruption stories are a sales tool and reference article for other blog posts. Because they clearly outline the most fundamental pain points your business was created to solve and how you solve it, disruption stories can be used again and again by your sales team and whenever you refer to your main value proposition in any other blog post (or social media post).
   
   
2. To align the founders, marketing team, and sales team on the core value props. We’ve worked with multiple companies where the sales team, marketing teams, and founders all have different answers when asked what their main value props are (yes, really). Putting your story down in writing helps you align the entire company and clarify the most important pain points that you solve. (We cover this in more detail below.)
   
   
3. To gain traction as a new product/service in the industry. If you have a disruptive story to tell, chances are your target audience doesn’t know a solution like yours even exists. And, if you’re just starting out, chances are your website will have a low domain authority, which means you’ll need patience for SEO rankings to take hold. Sharing a disruption story on social media and through paid ads can help you build awareness for your product/service while you wait for rankings.  

How We Use Disruption Stories and Their Results

The number one benefit of disruption stories is that they convert — meaning they bring in visitors who match your target customer profile and resonate with the pain points you’ve positioned your product and service against. 

Whether you’re doing that successfully or not can be measured in conversions. We’ve had disruption stories convert for dozens of clients. While it’s not appropriate for us to show exact conversion metrics from a single article for a given client, we can show the results of disruption stories in a few ways. 

Our Own Conversion Stats

We have many articles on our site that can be considered disruption stories: Pain Point SEO, Mirage Content, Specificity Strategy, Content Brand, among others — and we’ve seen each of them bring in high quality leads for our agency. 

Here is one such example showing leads in the first few months of 2024 from our article on why we started Grow and Convert (that follows the format outlined above of typical disruption stories), which we promote regularly on paid social. 

Praise on Clients’ Social Media and Online Communities

We also routinely see disruption stories we write for our clients being shared or discussed on social media. For example, here is someone sharing the disruption story we wrote for our past client Rainforest QA:

If you really nail the pain point and value props, this kind of organic social sharing is common with disruption stories. It’s also an indication of bringing in the right audience. If it’s resonating and the people sharing it are your target customer, it is likely also bringing in conversions (you can learn how to set up conversion tracking here). 

Or here’s an example of a customer and user of our client’s product, Mirascope, commenting that he liked the disruption story we wrote for them and that it’s the reason he got interested in Mirascope. He wrote this in the Mirascope Community Slack channel:

Long Term SEO Benefits: Organic Backlinks

Finally, some disruption stories (not all) that really strike a chord with your audience can be a long-term link building asset. Take Pain Point SEO, for example. It describes our foundational SEO strategy of going after bottom-of-funnel keywords first instead of the usual content and SEO culture of chasing traffic and search volume and “nurturing” prospects down the funnel. 

Over the years, this approach has resonated with lots of marketers and companies, and while it didn’t “go viral” immediately, it has naturally acquired 167 backlinks from 113 domains over the past few years: 

And while disruption stories aren’t created with SEO in mind, the term ‘pain point seo’ even has its own search volume now: 

This example (pain point SEO) isn’t indicative of typical results for most disruption stories, but it simply shows what the potential is. The key is getting the pain point you’re talking about and the presentation of your solution to it (your product or service) just right, which is what we talk about next. 

How to Write Disruption Stories

There are three things that you need to get right in order to have a successful disruption story: 

1. The overarching narrative. This is your 2-3 sentence pitch for why your business exists, i.e., the pain it was designed to solve and how you solve it. It’s the foundation of your entire disruption story. Getting this right and having it be about a problem that your target audience really cares about is the absolute most important aspect to a disruption story.
   
   
2. The title. While titles are always important, how you craft them is even more important with disruption stories. Unlike SEO posts — where the reader is looking for an answer or solution — disruption story titles have to grab the reader’s attention and convince them to click into the post.
   
   
3. The introduction. Again, introductions are always important, but especially here. Consider a typical “Top 10 Time Management Tools” SEO post. How many readers skim past the intro and go straight to the list? While we don’t have exact numbers, it’s logical to guess that quite a few skip the intro because they know what’s coming and jump straight to the part that interests them most. (We still think you should write a quality intro for all SEO posts though.) But with disruption stories, your readers don’t know what’s coming, so they’ll read the intro in order to find out and decide whether or not to keep on reading. 

Below, we cover how to approach each of these in more detail. Then, we give some additional tips for how to write the body of the story. 

The Overarching Narrative: Why Does Your Product or Company Exist?

Most companies love to talk about how their product solves multiple problems and provides numerous benefits. That’s fine to list on your website, but in a disruption story, you need to be very clear about the primary pain you solve, because it’s just not that interesting to run into an article on social media that has an angle of “Here’s our product and its 10 core features”. 

You’re not creating a Product Hunt listing, you’re writing a story. It needs to lean into the why behind your product or service. 

• Why was it created? 
  
  
• What problems were so severe that you set out to create your own solution to solve them? 
  
  
• What are you disrupting and why? 

Above all else, this is what you need to get clear. 

The entire company needs to be aligned on these answers. Very often, companies come to us and the sales team, marketing team, product development team, and founders all have different answers for what their overarching value proposition is. This is healthy and there’s nothing really wrong with it, you should just view the act of crafting your disruption story as an opportunity to get aligned on your core value proposition and positioning. 

A good exercise to test whether or not you’re aligned is to ask each team (or each person if your company is small enough) to write down the main problem your company solves and how you solve it. 

We did this with our own team and here are a few of the answers: 

Notice the common theme of: pain point = content that doesn’t produce results + solution = we produce content that converts. 

This is precisely what’s written on our homepage: 

We put a lot of effort into clarifying and communicating this to our team and our clients, which is why our team gave such consistent answers. 

Here are some other examples from our clients: 

“Most companies have software engineers own QA. Our platform lets anyone own QA.” 

“Creating video testimonials typically takes a lot of time and resources. Our tool makes it easy to create quality video testimonials in minutes.”

The Title

The title of a disruption story is what summarizes the core angle and value proposition you decided on above. Since the title is key to getting attention and clicks via social promotion, we’ve found it’s best to make it provocative so it raises some eyebrows or is worth stopping and clicking on while still being clear and not esoteric or over the top. 

You’re not going for some artsy phrasing or clever wordplay here, this isn’t a billboard or magazine ad. Your target audience should understand exactly what you’re solving and what your product does — but be compelled enough to read the article. 

Here are a few examples:

“Producing Video Testimonials Used to Be a Huge Pain. Here’s How We’re Fixing It.”

For our client Vocal Video, their disruption story uses the formula of “name the pain” + “we fix it”. 

Another variation of this same idea is “here’s what everyone else is doing (and we think it’s flawed)” + “we do it differently”. For example, our client Rainforest QA used the title… 

“Asking Developers to Own QA is Broken. Here’s a Better Way.” 

Both titles work well because anyone who could benefit from either tool would immediately be able to identify with the pain points described in the first half of the title. Then, instead of stating the solution (like is done in the following example), saying “we fix it” makes the reader want to click on the story and find out how. Plus, the bold, direct language causes an emotional reaction, which further motivates the viewer to read the story.

“Engineers Should Handle Prompting LLMs (and Prompts Should Live in Your Codebase)”

Instead of naming the problem and saying they fix it, this disruption story title for our client Mirascope simply states how they think it should be handled — which is the opposite of what everyone else in the industry is currently doing. 

This model works well when the solution can be stated very clearly and simply. However, it doesn’t work when the solution requires a bit more explanation or if it isn’t immediately obvious that it’s an entirely different way of handling the problem. 

“Why the Large Law Firm Business Model Is Dying and What We’re Doing Instead”

For our previous client LAWCLERK, the title for their disruption story names a problem that many in the industry either (a) hadn’t yet put a name to but were feeling the effects of, or (b) were avoiding the problem altogether. 

Essentially, we’re calling out the elephant in the room. 

Again, this strikes a cord with potential clients because it immediately shows the reader that you see and understand the problem and that you have a solution for it.

The Introduction

The number one goal of the intro is to get the problem that you solve right. Your target audience should read the first few sentences and immediately be thinking “Yes! That’s exactly it. They get me.”

For example, let’s look at the opening line of Vocal Video’s disruption story:

“Creating video testimonials is time consuming, difficult to coordinate, and expensive, no matter what video testimonial service you use — and even if you’re doing it yourself.”

They didn’t just say ‘Companies struggle to create video testimonials”. They named the things that make video testimonials a pain: it’s time consuming, difficult to coordinate, and expensive. Then, they even address the solution that most companies turn to to fix these pain points: doing it yourself.

Anyone who is also experiencing this pain would immediately resonate with the first few lines of their intro and feel compelled to keep reading. 

How you do this will depend entirely on your audience (i.e., how much do they understand the details of the problem vs. just the pains that it causes), how many layers there are to the problem, and how you solve the problem (i.e., is it a simple solution or is it on the complicated side). 

Introductions need to include some combination of “here’s what everyone else is doing/how it’s typically done” + “here’s why we think that’s flawed/what led us to believe it was a problem” + “a preview of the solution you provide”. 

Here are a couple of examples. 

Example 1: Mirascope

Example 2: Vocal Video

Completing the Story

If you get the angle (overarching narrative), title, and intro right, the rest of the post should be straightforward. You simply complete the story and share how your product or service is designed to solve the problems you laid out. At some point in the body of a disruption story, you get into the details of your product or solution, its features, how it works, how it helps, results it’s provided for customers, etc. 

This takes different forms for different stories, but regardless there is always a heavy “sales” aspect to disruption stories. 

Finally, just note that even when you are selling your product, it’s still a story, and you should write it with that in mind. Meaning the features and benefits have to be constantly tied back to the problems you laid out in the introduction. There’s an art and a finesse to writing disruption stories. 

Here are some examples from the body of disruption stories we’ve written for clients; note how they keep the story tone:

Innovation Management at most companies is broken. Here is how we are fixing it. | InnovationCast

Why the Large Law Firm Business Model Is Dying | LAWCLERK

We should also warn that it can be easy to go down a rabbit hole when sharing your personal story. So, you need to be careful to stick to the overarching narrative and only cover topics that:

• Show you understand/have lived the reader’s pains.
• Show why/how your company solves those pains. 

The subtleties and care required to get a disruption story just right means that you need to choose your writer carefully.

Be careful about outsourcing this. Most freelance writers won’t be able to write an effective disruption story — especially if they’re just handed a brief or outline. Most “blog writers” or “content writers” are used to writing top of funnel SEO content that outlines beginner level concepts in an industry and doesn’t sell the product or service. 

In order for a disruption story to be effective, the writer has to have a thorough understanding of not only the audience’s pain points, but also the details of your product. So consider writing these in-house. 

If you decide to have your disruption story written by an agency or freelancer, be sure they have experience producing pieces like this and a process by which they can get this information about the positioning, pain points, and value props. For example, we interview the founders of your company and work closely with you throughout the entire outline and drafting process. 

How to Work With Us or Learn More

• Work with our agency: If you want to hire us to create and execute an SEO strategy by identifying your best keywords, creating content that is laser-focused on ranking and driving conversions, and link building to improve your ranking positions, you can learn more about working with us here.
  
  
• Join our team: If you’re a content marketer or writer who wants to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.
  
  
• Learn our methods in our content marketing course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course and community, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here.

But before that, we discuss 4 questions you should ask an agency to determine if it’s a fit. Why is this important? Because it can be difficult to find a B2B content marketing agency that will actually produce the results you want since many of them offer similar services and claim to produce “valuable business results”.

In our experience working with dozens of different B2B companies, the number one result B2B companies are looking for is to increase high-quality leads. And yet, most marketing agencies focus on growing traffic. As we’ll discuss below, those two things aren’t the same. Growing your traffic doesn’t automatically result in more leads.

Note: Many companies wonder if they should hire an in-house marketer instead of an agency. We discuss the pros and cons of both options in this post.

Best B2B Content Marketing Agencies

1. Grow and Convert
2. Animalz
3. Siege Media
4. Optimist
5. Codeless
6. Omniscient Digital
7. Seer Interactive
8. Graphite
9. Intrepid Digital
10. Power Digital
11. Fractl

If you’re interested in working with us, get in touch. You can also learn how to run our process yourself by signing up for our course. 

Factors to Consider When Choosing the Best B2B Content Marketing Agency for Your Business

Factor #1: Do they prioritize buying intent or traffic when choosing which topics to target?

The number one reason why most content marketers and B2B content agencies don’t produce leads for their clients is that they focus content efforts on topics and keywords with low to zero purchase intent. 

This is due to a mindset that says traffic potential should take priority, and with enough traffic, conversions will follow. But we’ve seen time and time again why this isn’t true:

When agencies prioritize traffic first, they choose topics and keywords that have the highest search volume. They look up terms related to their client’s category in SEO tools, sort by search volume, and that’s how they prioritize the order in which to tackle keywords. They tend to focus on “top of funnel” topics. 

Top of funnel (TOF) topics are topics that presumably could be interesting to your target audience, but have little or nothing to do with the actual product or service you sell. They lack any indication that someone reading has intent to buy (or even do research about) your product or service. And as a result, conversion rates for this type of content are miniscule. 

While this may be an effective strategy for certain “lifestyle” or B2C brands, it’s often a distraction for B2B companies who want to see measurable ROI and leads from their content marketing efforts — especially when there are people actively looking to buy right now. 

It also misunderstands the breadth of different high-intent search terms and how many prospective customers of B2B products are actively searching for and researching products at any given time. 

In our opinion, a B2B content strategy that does not prioritize showing up in those discussions is leaving extremely qualified leads on the table and is therefore inadequate. 

Our strategy, explained below, goes after those ready-to-buy-now prospects first before moving up the funnel. 

Note: This tendency to focus on TOF topics also stems from a cultural trait of content marketing which says that the role of content isn’t to sell — that it should only be about getting “brand awareness,” capturing people at the top of the funnel and nurturing them over months or years (through email marketing automations, remarketing ads, etc.), hoping they’ll one day become a customer. We think this “don’t sell” culture is completely misguided.

Factor #2: What’s their process for writing content that satisfies search intent and converts? 

Most B2B content is often too basic to appeal to or resonate with advanced business-to-business prospects.

There are two layers to this problem. The first stems from the TOF topic issue discussed above.

As an example, say you have a B2B SaaS company that sells an IT product to chief technology or information officers. If you write a piece on “10 tips to improve your B2B tech stack,” what veteran CTO is going to read that?

First, they don’t have the time to read generic pieces like that. Second, they likely know more than the writer who wrote about that. Third, their social feeds and email inboxes are filled with titles like that, so the chances of them reading yours are slim. Finally, the beginner-ness of topics like this mean that the content inside is also bound to be too beginner. So even if they do read it, it’s not likely to impress them enough to drive them to explore your product, start a trial, or request a demo.

The second layer has to do with the way most B2B content is actually written. Typically, a marketing manager hands freelancers or agencies a list of keywords or topics, and the writer, who is rarely a subject matter expert on the topic at hand, ends up writing what we call “Google research papers.” Like a high school student doing a research paper, they Google around the topic they were given and regurgitate what everyone else is saying on a given topic. (In their defense, what else are they supposed to do? The process itself is what’s broken. Below we explain how we have gone about solving this.)

As a result, even if content marketers get topics right, the content inside the article is still undifferentiated and ineffective at generating actual leads.

Factor #3: Do they promote the content they produce?

Outside of topic selection, another common issue we have seen is that most content “marketing” agencies don’t actually promote or distribute content — they are actually just glorified writing services. 

At best, they might share the content they write via your own brand’s social media marketing channels (tweet it out for you, share it on your LinkedIn page, etc.). But outside of that, if you ask them how they promote content, they’ll often just say, “We publish it and wait for it to rank in Google.” 

This leaves businesses waiting around for articles to rank while their content sits on their site doing very little. And because search engine optimization (SEO) takes time to work, that often means several months pass by before content even begins getting traffic, let alone conversions. 

Factor #4: Do they report on leads?

Finally, all of this culminates in arguably the biggest issue for us in our past experiences working with content agencies: They are unwilling to hold themselves accountable for generating leads. 

They’ll report on metrics like pageviews and traffic, or impressions in organic search (or worse, simply wordcount and number of pieces published). But when it comes to getting actual ROI from content marketing, all the pageviews or impressions in the world mean nothing if that content isn’t producing any measurable leads.

These are the key problems we set out to solve when we decided to start our agency. Now, let’s look at how we’ve done that.

1. Grow and Convert

We Legitimately Measure Our Performance on Leads Generated

The number one differentiator of our agency — and the thing that should matter most to any B2B company hiring a content marketing company — is that we measure our performance on leads generated. 

That is our benchmark. And that is the goal that our entire strategy and content creation process is based on. 

It’s not based on traffic volume or other vanity metrics. It’s based on driving qualified leads.

For every one of our clients, we create an ROI graph like this one (a live graph from a B2B SaaS client we’ve been working with for over 2 years):

The horizontal lines represent the number of leads this client needs per month to break even on their monthly spend with us. Each month, we plot the number of leads from our articles on this graph. Then we report on our progress in relation to that break even number so clients can see when they begin to have positive ROI. 

We’ve written extensively about how we do this here and here. Before we started our agency, this is the type of thing we were looking for but could never find. 

Now, because leads are our main goal, the steps of our content production process — and our solutions that correspond to the issues we discussed above — are optimized for this. And that begins with the topics we prioritize.

We Prioritize Bottom of Funnel Topics with High Purchase Intent First to Drive Faster Results

In our experience, we’ve learned that the best content marketing strategy for B2B businesses is to begin by targeting topics and keywords that indicate people searching are ready to buy.

For example, in B2B SaaS, that’s keywords such as:

• Top/Best product category keywords: Keywords like “Best marketing analytics software,” “Best visitor identification software,” “Best video transcription software.” 

• Brand/Product comparison keywords: Keywords like “HubSpot vs. Pipedrive” or “QuickBooks alternatives.” 

In contrast to TOF topics, where readers generally aren’t in purchase-mode, most people searching these types of terms are actively looking to buy. As a result, conversion rates are much higher — in some cases like 10X higher (a finding that led us to develop our foundational Pain Point SEO strategy).

B2B service businesses can take the same approach by targeting equivalent types of high-intent terms. For example, “best virtual assistant service,” or “business book ghostwriting service” as we’ve tackled for B2B service clients. 

Our strategy is to tackle BOF terms first because they convert at a significantly higher rate — allowing us to drive results faster. Then, once we begin exhausting BOF keyword opportunities, we’ll begin working our way up the funnel. We do this very strategically, focusing on pain point-focused topics where there’s a direct product tie-in.

Note: Related to our BOF-first content strategy is our constant emphasis on intent over keyword volume. We’ll happily go after keywords that show minimal search volume in SEO tools if they indicate the searcher has really high intent. And in fact, as we’ve explained in this post, that often results in some of our highest converting pieces for clients. 

You can read any of the articles linked above for in-depth discussions of these topics, or see the impact of this strategy via these case studies: 

• How We Scaled Leadfeeder’s Signups to Over 200/Month

• Scaling Content: Expanding from Bottom of Funnel Content to Top of Funnel (Geekbot Case Study)

• Mini-Volume Keywords: Why Targeting Small Search Volumes Makes Sense

• Scaling SEO Traffic from 920 to 14,577 Sessions in 6 months (Circuit Case Study)

We Interview Experts at Our Clients’ Companies to Write at the Advanced Level of B2B Audiences

Because these BOF topics are very product-centric — and because B2B decision-makers need to be communicated with at an industry expert-level — we don’t produce articles in the “Google research paper” style we described above (where we just self-research a topic and write up what we found, trying ourselves to become the experts). 

Instead, our writers start by interviewing people inside your organization who have the know-how and expertise to speak on that topic and convey their ideas into the article.

Thus the writer is not asked to pretend to be an expert themselves. This is a massive shift from traditional content services and is essential to producing genuinely high-quality content.

We’re not talking about grabbing a few quotes from experts to throw into an article. We’re talking about hour long recorded interviews where we shape an entire article around the viewpoint and knowledge of an expert.

This changes everything. It creates true thought leadership content, and adds genuine product expertise into our BOTF pieces discussed above because we’re able to include all the detail and nuance of how your product is differentiated, what it replaces, why features were designed in certain ways, and more that only product experts inside your company would know.

We Have a Two Pronged Content Promotion Process

Finally, we don’t just publish pieces and wait for them to rank in Google. We use a two pronged promotion strategy to drive both short and long term traffic. Specifically:

1. Paid Ads / PPC Marketing Campaigns (Short Term Traffic): We use paid ads to promote content using two targeting methods: Cold audiences (using interest and demographic based targeting) and lookalike audiences (based on the client’s existing customer list or website visitors). We test paid channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Ads based on each client and where we’re most likely to reach their audience. 
   
   
2. Manual Link Building (Long Term Traffic): When certain pieces start ranking for keywords, we strategically deploy link building to boost them to page 1 or the top of page 1 in Google.

The combination of these 2 steps gives our pieces a short term boost in traffic followed by long term sustainable organic traffic that adds up from different articles and grows over time. 

Companies also promote the content we create for them through email marketing, sales enablement material, paid ads, etc. — but regardless of how else they use it, we’re actively promoting it for them. 

We do all of the above from our own budget, with no extra spend for our clients, making us a truly full-service agency. This is markedly different from other marketing agencies and something we’re very proud of offering our clients. 

Further Reading

If you want to learn more, here is a summary of articles linked to above and others where we explain our process in depth: 

• Pain Point SEO: Our Foundational Process

• SaaS Content Marketing: Why You Should Focus on Bottom of the Funnel First to Drive Signups

• How Long Does it Take to Rank on the First Page of Google (Aggregate Case Study of Client Data)

• SEO Content Writing: High Level Explanation of Our Writing Process

Finally, if you’re interested, you can reach out about working with us here. 

Other B2B Content Marketing Agencies Whose Names We Hear Often

To help B2B businesses weigh different agency options, here are a few other content marketing agencies whose names we’ve heard repeatedly — either through clients having worked with them in the past or just through colleagues in the marketing agency.

Note: We haven’t worked directly with any of these agencies, so we can’t independently vouch for the quality of their work. But that’s why we outlined our 4 criteria of evaluating a B2B content marketing agency above. If you want to reach out to these agencies, we recommend you ask them about each of these 4 B2B content marketing challenges and evaluate for yourself if and how they have a process to solve for them. 

2. Animalz

According to their website, Animalz provides content marketing services to enterprise companies, startups, and VC firms. 

They list having worked with companies such as Google, Amazon, Airtable, and others. They provide a variety of services including SEO consulting, brand awareness, lead generation, product marketing, and promotion and distribution. 

Visit their site for more information about their services, team, podcast, and more.=

3. Siege Media

Siege Media is an SEO-focused content marketing agency that offers SEO, content creation, graphic design, and link building services to businesses. 

They list having worked with companies such as Zillow, Shutterfly, Tripadvisor, and others. And they say their marketing solutions have generated over $86,856,000 in yearly client traffic value.

Visit their site for more information.

4. Optimist

Optimist is an SEO-focused content marketing agency for startups and growth-stage businesses. 

They specialize in working with product-led companies, and list having worked with companies such as Contentstack, FairShake, and HelloSign. Their services are broken out into startup content marketing, SaaS content marketing, and B2B content marketing. 

Visit their site for more information.

5. Codeless

Codeless is a content production company offering a variety of SEO, content, and PR services. 

They say they create a proven, customized workflow for every client, and list having worked with companies such as Monday, Zapier, ActiveCampaign, and others. 

Visit their site for more information. 

6. Omniscient Digital

Omniscient is a digital marketing agency that primarily serves fast growing B2B software companies. They claim to tailor their approach to your specific goals, however, they offer a few standard services including strategy consultations, content creation, optimization of existing content, link building, and technical SEO audits. 

Visit their site for more information.

7. Seer Interactive

Seer Interactive claims to be a full-service digital marketing agency with a wide variety of services including digital strategy, paid media, content creation (including white papers, infographics, blog posts, and video production), and more. They also offer a data analytics platform to help you identify and track business KPIs.

Visit their site for more information. 

8. Graphite

Graphite uses AI to identify groups of keywords with similar intent and to guide the writing process. When it comes to writing, Graphite’s AI will produce an outline and a list of keywords to get your writers started. They also have a proprietary tool to help you with internal link building.

Visit their site for more information. 

9. Intrepid Digital

Intrepid Digital gives you direct access to SEO marketing experts and data analytics. They also offer paid media, search engine marketing, UX website design, content creation and strategy, conversion rate optimization that aligns with a great user experience, and more.

Visit their site for more information. 

10. Power Digital

Power Digital is a robust digital agency whose services include web development, web design, influencer marketing, email marketing, and much more. They serve B2B, B2C, fashion, retail media, and private equity companies.

Visit their site for more information

11. Fractl

Fractl offers digital PR services, organic growth consulting, content development, and technical SEO. However, they mainly focus on data posts for PR link building in order to increase rankings and media coverage. 

Visit their site for more information.

Want to work with us or learn how to implement our B2B content strategy?

• Our Agency: You can learn more about working with us here.

• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn how to grow their SaaS business with content can join our private course, taught via case studies, here. We include lots of detail and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we (along with other members) give feedback. We also get on live Zoom calls about once a month and dissect members’ actual content strategies and brainstorm ideas on how we’d form content strategies for their businesses.

• Join Our Content Marketing Team: Alternatively, if this style of B2B content marketing appeals to you, consider joining our content marketing team as a writer or content strategist. We have awesome clients. We’re a remote company. We pay well. And you won’t have to stress about getting your own clients or spend a bunch of time doing outreach to get them.

Questions? Comments? Feel free to share them in the comments below and we’ll respond.

• Why do you have a blog? Is the intention to drive high-quality leads or traffic? (Despite common misconceptions, driving tons of traffic doesn’t automatically guarantee that any of that traffic will turn into quality leads.)

• What type of strategy will you use: SEO or non-SEO focused? 

• Who is your target audience and what interests them?

• How will you produce content: in-house or by outsourcing?

After answering each of these questions in detail, you’ll also need to carefully consider how you implement that strategy.

For example, if you’re focused on leads and SEO, the keywords you choose will make or break the results you end up with. Some keywords drive a lot of traffic but few high quality leads, while others may generate less traffic but the conversion rate will be much higher — 100+% higher. (More on this later.)

In this guide, we’ll cover how to define your blog strategy — including common mistakes that most marketers make and how to avoid/fix them. Then, we’ll also share seven steps for implementing your strategy to ensure you get the best results. 

Note: If you’d like help implementing a leads focused B2B SEO strategy, you can learn more about our agency here and reach out about working with us here.

Strategy Decision #1: Choose Whether to Prioritize Traffic or Leads (Hint: You Can’t Do Both)

Most marketers don’t even realize that this is a choice or an option but it absolutely is. And it’s arguably the most important intentional decision you can make in building your blog strategy. You need to be intentional and honest about why you are doing content marketing: do you want traffic and brand awareness, or are you doing it for leads? 

In our experience working with countless B2B companies over 6+ years on their blog and content strategy, almost everyone is doing it for leads, traffic is just a means to that end. Sure, if you’re already the brand leader in your space (e.g., Salesforce, QuickBooks) or you just want exposure and mind-share, then a traffic-focused strategy may be the way to go. 

But most B2B companies want more leads and they think that first getting high volumes is necessary. This “traffic-first” thinking rests on two main assumptions:  

1. If thousands of people are visiting our blog, some of those people must convert.
   
   
2. If we can capture the email of people reading our blog, then we can drip content to them over time and eventually some of them must convert. 

In our experience, both of these assumptions are flawed. Here’s why. 

Flaw #1: The act of reading something related to your industry doesn’t mean they’re in the market for your product.

Consider the content strategy of a hypothetical HR software company. There is a world of difference in buying intent between someone reading “10 HR trends this year” or a “Guide on HR best practices” and someone searching for “best HR software for small business”. While the former two content titles are on the topic of HR and only interesting to read for HR professionals, they don’t indicate the reader is in the market for HR software. There is no buying intent. Whereas the latter example has tons of buying intent — that searcher and reader is definitely in the market for software like yours. In other words: traffic does not automatically mean conversions.  

Flaw #2: You can’t manufacture or force buying-intent with email marketing.

If a prospect reads one of your top of funnel articles and isn’t in the market to buy your HR software, then capturing their email with an ebook or whitepaper and sending them a bunch of emails isn’t going to suddenly make them decide to buy HR software. 

As a result of those two truths, if your goal is leads, we suggest focusing on high-buying intent topics rather than traffic. (That’s not to say that you ignore traffic — you simply prioritize lead generation in your blog strategy.)

This conclusion comes from data. Specifically, time and time again we’ve seen high buying-intent content produce higher conversion rates and more leads than TOF content. For example, take a look at the results we got for our client Geekbot, a self-service SaaS company.

In the first screenshot below, you can see that TOF content brought in significantly more traffic than high buying-intent or bottom of the funnel (BOTF) content, as expected. 

However, despite that massive advantage in traffic for TOF content, the BOTF content we produced still brought in way more conversions. 

The reason for this is that BOTF content has a massively higher conversion rate than TOF content: 

This is a result of the buying intent difference we discussed earlier. So, to reiterate, TOF content may bring in tons of traffic but BOTF will bring in more leads. Therefore, you need to be very intentional about whether your end goal is leads or traffic.  

Strategy Decision #2: Decide Whether to Do SEO or Non-SEO Content

The next fundamental decision to make is whether you’re going to create SEO or non-SEO content. 

With SEO content, you choose a specific keyword that users are searching for and then write the content specifically to rank for that keyword (more on how to do this later).

With non-SEO content, you focus on the blog topics and type of content you want to create (thought leadership pieces, playbooks, etc.) without targeting a specific keyword. The idea is that if your content is interesting enough, it will get viral shares, drive large amounts of traffic, and put your brand on the map.

Here’s a quick look at the pros and cons of each option:

Non-SEO Content

Pros

• You aren’t restricted by keywords or what’s already ranking.

• You can write about any opinionated, helpful, interesting topic that you want and write about it in the way that you want to.

Cons

• To get viral shares and drive huge amounts of traffic, you need to have something original or provocative to say. And, in our experience, very few companies have that. Or if they do, maybe they have one truly original or provocative idea, but not a year’s worth. 

• It can be very difficult to get sustained traffic because virality is temporary — at best, if everything goes right, you get a spike in traffic, then it dies down. 

SEO Content

Pros

• You get evergreen, compoundable results. Once you rank in the top three positions or even on the first page, the post will continue to generate traffic and conversions month after month. So, each month you can add to your stack of ranking articles instead of chasing new sources of traffic. 

Cons

• While it does take longer to see results from SEO, the long-term effects typically more than make up for the short-term costs and you can speed up results with content promotion. (More on this later.)

Strategy Decision #3: Identify the Pain Points of Your Target Audience

If your goal is leads, as it is for most B2B businesses, you’ll need to figure out what struggles drive people to your product/service and what parts of your service convince them to buy (i.e., their pain points). If you can identify these pain points, you can then write content that catches people who are in the exact moment where they’re ready to buy — without having to spend the time or resources to nurture them along. 

While you may have some idea of what these pain points are, you’ll get a much better answer and more ideas if you talk to the people who are closest to your audience that also know how your product/service fixes the issues they’re facing — i.e., your sales team and customer success team. 

You can ask them questions such as: 

• What was the customer/client doing before using our product/service (e.g., using a manual process/working with another competitor)?

• What was the issue with that solution that made them want to switch?

• What parts of our product/service come up the most often on sales calls?

• What questions do the best leads, the ones you know will close, ask? Versus what questions are indicative of tire kickers? 

The answers to these questions will dictate the topics you’ll write about and the SEO keywords you’ll target in your blog strategy. If you do nothing else except follow this step, you’ll still see a massive improvement in your blog’s effectiveness versus writing on random TOF topics the way most B2B companies do. 

Strategy Decision #4: Decide Who Will Create the Content (In-house vs Outsourced)

We’ve written an entire article on how to decide if you should outsource blog writing or handle it in-house. However, one important takeaway is that if you choose an SEO strategy, you’ll need a team to tackle jobs like keyword research, content writing, technical SEO, analytics, and web development. It’s unrealistic to expect that one or even two marketers can handle all of this on their own (especially if you expect to generate large volumes of content).

We’ve also written an entire article on the flaws with how most companies (and even many SEO agencies) outsource content writing. The main takeaway is that most companies ask writers to  a) research a topic and write a post, or b) write a post based off of a content brief. 

The main issue with these two approaches is that you’re putting the responsibility to come up with detailed arguments and supportive evidence on the writer. Since they aren’t subject matter experts, they won’t be able to do that effectively. Some companies try to solve this by having the writers interview third-party experts. However, the post then reflects the opinions of that expert rather than the opinions and views of your company. 

The best way to generate smart, unique posts that reflect your company’s voice is to have the writer interview subject matter experts within your company.

7 Tactical Steps for Implementing Your B2B Blog Strategy

Step 1: Decide How Often to Publish (Tip: Prioritize Quality Over Quantity)

In our opinion, your main goal should be to produce quality content because that’s what ranks, attracts the highest quality leads, and gets conversions. A single SEO ranking for your absolute best, highest buying intent keyword is worth 500 random top of funnel posts. However, many B2B marketing teams also get pressure from leadership to produce a high volume of blog content. 

Ultimately this balance is up to you, but in our experience, a perfectly fine option to balance both quality and quantity is to publish one new post per week (we’ve also seen good results from only publishing one or two new posts per month). For most companies, this is a perfectly fine volume. If the powers that be want more, you can slowly start to add more articles per month to your content calendar as long as you don’t compromise quality. This approach lets you work towards producing larger amounts of content while still ensuring that content will be effective. 

Step 2: Choose Your Topic

For SEO and lead-focused content, your goal should be to find relevant keywords with high-buying intent (i.e., keywords that show the googler is looking to buy a product like yours right now). We’ve written multiple articles around this topic. Here are a few to get you started: 

• How to Find & Rank for Bottom of the Funnel Keywords
• How to Find and Use Secondary Keywords to Increase Conversions: A Case Study
• How to Research Competitor Keywords (And Find Hidden Gems) 
• SaaS Keyword Research: Choosing Keywords That Drive Leads
• How to Use Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) Keywords in Your SEO Content Strategy

Finding non-SEO content ideas is often more difficult because you have to find something unique and shareable to write about. However, we still recommend starting with your potential customer’s pain points and brainstorming ideas around those. Here are some ideas: 

• Write your company’s disruption story. (This is essentially the story of why you decided to create your company.) 

• Pull together unique, interesting data and analyze it. 

• Craft case studies that highlight how your company solves a specific problem. 

• Share details about projects that you’ve worked on (or are working on currently).

• Discuss your company’s opinions about various aspects of your field. 

Step 3: Decide Whether to Produce New Content or Optimize Existing Content

In our experience, nine times out of ten, you’ll need to produce an entirely new piece of content to rank for the specific keywords you’re targeting. (You’ll always need to create new content for non-SEO topics.) 

However, sometimes there will be two keywords that seem nearly identical, which leads many marketers to wonder if it’s actually worth creating a separate post for each keyword or if they should lump multiple keywords into one post. The answer depends largely on how closely related the Google search engine results pages (SERPs) are. For this step, you can simply scan the titles of the top ten results — you don’t need to read each article.

If the results are nearly identical for both keywords, you can likely optimize one blog post for both keywords. However, if the SERPs are considerably different, you’ll need different posts. If there is some overlap, say three to five of the first page results, you’ll need to make your best guess and test it. 

Step 4: Research and Outline

For SEO blog posts, this step is where you’ll carefully read through each of the top ten results on Google. You’ll also want to scan through the “People also ask” and “Related searches” sections. The idea here is to figure out:

• What the top 10 results all have in common that you’ll also need to include to rank.

• How you’ll make your post unique or more helpful to the reader in some way.

If you make note of these things as you look through the SERP, you’ll have a pretty good idea of what needs to be included in your post. Then, you can arrange the information in a logical, helpful way and fill in the outline with any missing gaps such as examples to back up your arguments, background information, etc. 

For non-SEO content, you’ll follow a similar process of figuring out what everyone else is saying and then decide what originality nuggets you have to offer (i.e., how your post will be unique). With non-SEO content, you’ll also need to cast a wider net and look beyond Google results at whatever platform(s) you intend to promote it on (e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter, industry-specific forums).

Step 5: Create Content

If you’ve done the SERP analysis and outlining from the previous step well, then all of the arguments and structure of the piece should be decided so writing should be relatively straightforward. In terms of the actual writing, we’ve written extensively about content creation in other posts, which you can check out here: 

• The Detail Principle for Writing Good Blog Posts
• How to Write Great Blog Introductions (+ Why Most Are Bad)
• SEO Content Writing: A 5-Step Process You Can Follow
• Content Creation Process: How to Produce Unique Content 

You’ll also want to add a call-to-action (CTA), meta description, and any helpful visuals at this stage. 

Step 6: Publish and Promote

This step is essential for non-SEO posts since it’s unlikely you’ll get organic traffic. However, it’s also helpful for SEO. It can take up to a year before you see results from SEO, but content promotion can help drive short-term results and speed up the SEO process. 

When it comes to content promotion, there are three main options: social media, paid search, and link building (both external and internal links).  

Creating posts and threads on social media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) can drive traffic immediately after a blog post has been published. However, it can be difficult to maintain results with this strategy because organic social traffic is spikey — you get some website traffic if a post hits a chord with the audience, but it dies down quickly. Plus, getting that traction in the first place can be a challenge: algorithms change, it’s difficult to scale, and there’s already so much content promotion happening on social media that it can be hard to stand out. (We talk more about this topic here.)

That’s why we focus on paid search and link building as part of our SEO services. Both of these strategies are easily scalable and a great way to drive more immediate results.

Step 7: Track Results

Whether your goal is leads or traffic, you need a reliable, quantifiable way to track results. You can use GA4, HubSpot, or a tool such as WhatConverts to track leads. For SEO content, you’ll also need to track rankings with a tool such as Ahrefs or Semrush. 

In terms of ROI, here are a couple of articles to get you started and give you an idea of what to expect: 

• Content Marketing Attribution: How to Measure Content Performance
• Most Companies Measure Content Marketing ROI Incorrectly. Here’s Why (and How to Fix It). 
• How Long Does It Take to Rank on the First Page of Google?
  

Learn More About Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content marketing strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can learn more about our service and pricing here. We also offer a PPC service for paid search, which you can learn about here.

• Join Our Content Team: If you’re a content marketer or writer and would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.

• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s B2B content marketing strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course and community, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here.

• Bucket #1: They want to use content as a marketing channel that drives increased traffic, leads, and sales (i.e. what our agency would traditionally refer to as content marketing).

• Bucket #2: They want to use content as more of a thought leadership and brand-building effort, and they’re not as concerned about measuring specific metrics related to business growth. Think: ghostwriting for the CEO, producing interesting story articles to share on social media, etc. 

If you’re in bucket #2, what you need is simply a good writer. Specifically, someone who can communicate your perspective and unique ideas in a writing style that matches your brand’s voice. You don’t need to worry about SEO strategy or the various other things that put the “marketing” in “content marketing”. 

Now, don’t get us wrong, finding a good writer isn’t easy. We’ve learned this the hard way after filtering through 1000+ writer applicants and testing hundreds of writers over the last seven years running our agency. But we have learned that the key to writer hiring is having a good filtering process. 

We’ve written extensively about this in our article on hiring freelance writers. If you’re in bucket #2, read that in addition to our posts on creating a Content Brand and producing thought leadership content. Those pieces will give you a good idea of mistakes to avoid, how to find writers to meet your content needs, and how to do this type of content well.

In this post, we’re going to focus on how to outsource content creation when you’re in bucket #1 and you want to use content as a marketing channel that drives measurable business results. 

We’ll cover:

• Common misconceptions about outsourcing content

• A step-by-step process for vetting content marketers and agencies

• How much does it cost to outsource content creation?

Common Misconceptions About Outsourcing Content Creation

Misconception #1: Hiring a content writer is equivalent to hiring a content marketer

When companies decide they want to invest in content marketing, they often mistakenly think that they just need to hire a writer. But there’s a lot more that goes into content marketing than just the writing.

Specifically, most content marketers make the mistake of producing exclusively top-of-funnel content — the common introductory guide-type posts you’re used to seeing. The problem with this, as we’ve argued in many articles over the years, is that these top-of-funnel articles don’t typically generate conversions and qualified leads. 

As a result, we strongly believe the key to good content marketing is content ideation and strategy (often with some focus on search engine optimization). In addition, content marketing also includes understanding content promotion, analytics and attribution, and more. This combination of skill sets is not common in most “writers”, and typically even a “content marketer” is only going to have some portion of these skills.

So, if you’re going to invest in content marketing, it’s essential to understand that hiring a writer alone is not enough. One way or another you need to figure out how to get those other aspects of content marketing into your process.

It could be building that expertise in-house, or finding an agency that has that expertise and puts emphasis on these non-writing aspects of the content marketing process. Specifically, at our agency, there are often 3 to 5 people with different areas of expertise working together on your account. We have SEO strategists, content writers, a PPC specialist, a project manager, and a designer ready to deploy for each client. We could not produce the results that we do for our clients without these teams in place. 

Misconception #2: Overemphasis on whether to hire in-house vs. outsource content

Companies often put a lot of emphasis on whether they should outsource or make a full-time hire such as an in-house writer or content marketing manager. But in our opinion, the most important thing to be concerned about is: Does the person or agency you’re considering have a good strategy? Are they a good fit for the type of content you want to do? And do they have a proven track record of driving the type of results you’re looking for?

We can tell you from experience that finding great writers, content strategists, and agencies is hard. So, if you find a good person to run your content marketing in-house, take it. If you find a good agency to do it, take it. It doesn’t actually matter that much whether they’re outsourced or in-house. 

Are there some differences between the two? Sure. The main difference from our perspective is that outside agencies will typically have workflows in place to get content production up and running faster. But for a long-term investment like content marketing, this is trivial in comparison to whether or not who you hire is actually good.

Misconception #3: Outsourcing content means you won’t need to be a part of the process

Some companies think that outsourcing content implies you can fully outsource content and not be a part of the process at all. However, while there are agencies and writers out there that will do content for you in this way, this is one of the biggest reasons why companies are regularly dissatisfied with the content they receive from third parties.

If you want to produce high quality content that your brand is actually proud of, that necessitates participating in the content creation process — even just a little bit to give your perspective on the content. Otherwise, how could the writer or agency accurately portray the nuances of your brand’s perspectives on each content topic (not to mention your product or service differentiators, positioning, value props, etc.)?

This is why it’s best to work with writers or agencies that include you in the process. At our agency, we use an interview-based process in which we interview subject matter experts from within our client’s company for each new content topic we write about (more on this below).

Now, with all of this in mind, in the rest of this post, we’re going to walk you through a 5 step process that you can follow to vet content marketers and agencies. This process is equally useful for outsourcing content marketing as it is for hiring someone to join your in-house team.

5 Steps for Vetting Content Marketers and Agencies

Step 1: Decide whether you want content to generate leads, traffic, or something else

Companies have different goals they hope to achieve from content marketing. In our experience, most want leads or sales — whether that be eCommerce purchases, sales call signups, or trials and demos in SaaS. They want measurable ROI out of all their marketing channels, including content. This makes sense. 

But there are some, for example, later-stage companies with existing large lead generation numbers, that may want to use content for traffic and email marketing growth. Others just have a vague idea that they want to do content, and may not even realize that this is a choice they can make (i.e. they assume content is solely for getting traffic and brand awareness). 

It’s important to understand that this is a choice. You can optimize content around metrics like traffic and email signups (what most digital marketing agencies do), or you can optimize content for generating leads and sales (what our agency does). 

If you just want traffic to grow your online presence, it will be much easier to find a content marketer or agency whose strategy aligns with your goal. However, most businesses ultimately want to see ROI from content, which means seeing leads or purchases attributable to content and meaningful increases in revenue over time. 

In our experience, this requires a very different content marketing strategy (like the one that we use and have explained at length in previous articles like this and this).

Whatever you decide, the first step is to be explicit with potential candidates about this goal and base the rest of your questions and vetting process around how they’d help you achieve this.

Step 2: Ask them to come up with content ideas and walk you through how the ideas would work to achieve that goal

Once you’ve explained your goal, ask the candidate to come up with content ideas (the #1 most important aspect of content marketing strategy) and explain how those ideas would work to achieve your goal.

If your goal is to drive leads and sales, have them walk you through each content idea and tell you the story of how that piece of content would bring in a new lead or customer. 

In our opinion, this story should not be a long multi-step narrative that’s hard to explain. When prospects ask us this on sales calls, we have a very simple explanation: we prioritize content topics that indicate people searching that topic have buying intent for the product or service our client sells. 

For example, if our client sells remote executive assistant services, we’re likely going to write about topics such as “best executive assistant services,” “how to hire an executive assistant,” “executive assistant vs. virtual assistant,” and other topics that indicate people are on the market for an executive assistant.

The story of how these topics would bring in new leads or customers is simple. People are either searching on Google for the exact service they offer, or indicating that they’re close to being on the market for that type of service, and we show up with a piece of content that explains:

• The pain points that prospects are likely experiencing

• How our client’s product or service solves those pain points

• How their product or service is different or better than other solutions on the market

This is the type of clear and concise story you should be looking for. This is in contrast to a typical explanation of how top-of-funnel content helps bring in customers that involve multiple conditional steps like a visitor landing, reading, remembering the brand, coming back, maybe downloading an ebook or whitepaper, opening nurture emails, and eventually when they need that product, reaching out. 

Remember: The longer the explanation, and the more steps required for the content to achieve your goal, the less likely it is that the content topics the candidate is presenting will get you results.

Step 3: Ask them to explain their content creation process (and how they go about expressing product and domain expertise through content)

Regardless of what your content marketing goal is, it’s important for whoever is producing your content to be able to express domain expertise in a way that feels native to your brand. 

This is especially true for B2B businesses whose target audiences are often advanced industry experts who need to be communicated with at an expert level. If you don’t speak to them at their level, you risk reputational damage and turning off potential customers.

Particularly if you choose to optimize your strategy for leads or sales, the topics you’ll write on will be very product or service-centric. As explained in our article on Pain Point Copywriting, this means the person doing your content writing will need in-depth knowledge of your product or service, the nuanced pain points that they solve for customers, and how your product is differentiated from competitors.

Most outside writing services or freelancers will not have this product and domain expertise and therefore need to have a process for getting this information out of the minds of the experts at your company and expressing it through your content.

With that said, what we’ve seen in the market is that many agencies and freelancers end up doing what we call “Google research papers.” Like a high school student doing a research paper, they Google around the topic they were given and regurgitate what everyone else is saying on a given topic.

This results in undifferentiated and generic content. So, particularly if you want to produce conversion-focused content, make sure you ask them: 

• What is their process for being able to write and convey your value props, benefits, messaging, and differentiators in a way that feels native to your brand? 

• Do they even have one? And if so, how does it work? 

Is it a one-off interview at the beginning of the engagement? Is it a few one-hour calls? Do they regularly interview experts at your company on a piece-by-piece basis? 

We have found the latter approach — doing interviews on a piece-by-piece basis — to be extremely rare when working with outside agencies, yet the most effective approach for expressing product and domain expertise through content. This is the approach we take at our agency, as we’ve demonstrated in this in-depth case study. 

Step 4: Ask them how they would drive traffic to your content (i.e. What’s their process for content promotion?)

For content marketing to work, someone needs to drive traffic to your articles. So, another key thing to understand is what the candidate offers with regard to content promotion. Is it included in their service? Sold separately? And what exactly do they do?

For example, do they just share the content they write via your own brand’s social media marketing channels (tweet it out for you, share it on your LinkedIn page, etc.)? Because that’s something you could easily do yourself. 

Or, if they rely strictly on SEO, is there anything they do in the short term to help drive traffic to articles during the time it takes for them to rank? Or do they help build links to speed up rankings?

This is a key issue to address because what an agency offers for promotion will determine how much you’ll need to do on your end to drive traffic to your articles.

At Grow and Convert, we use a two-pronged promotion strategy to drive both short and long-term traffic to your articles as we wait for them to rank in Google. Specifically, we use paid ads to drive short-term traffic and conversions to content, and manual link building to support SEO rankings which drive long-term organic traffic that grows over time. 

We do all of the above from our budget, with no extra spend for our clients, making us a truly full-service agency. This is markedly different from other content marketing agencies and something we’re very proud of offering our clients. 

Step 5: Ask them to explain how they measure and report on results

Finally, it’s important to ensure that whoever you hire has a way to track and report on metrics that align with the goal of your content initiatives. 

Most commonly, companies and agencies track and report on traffic, keyword rankings, and email marketing signups. Fewer track and report on conversions from content, despite conversions being the key metric that most companies actually want to drive from their content efforts. 

At Grow and Convert, we track and report on the following for our clients:

• Conversions: We track and report on conversions using the Model Comparison Tool in Google Analytics. 

• Keyword rankings: We use Ahrefs rank tracker to monitor rankings progress for each article’s target keyword. 

• Overall pageviews and organic traffic: We set up traffic dashboards in Looker Studio that measure overall pageviews and organic traffic to our articles.

In tracking multiple metrics, particularly keyword rankings and conversions, we’re able to double down on the topics that produce the best results for our clients. 

How Much Does It Cost to Outsource Content Creation?

A natural question that companies have when considering outsourcing content is: how much does this cost? And how would the cost compare to hiring someone in-house?

The answer to these questions will vary depending on your business context. For example, do you have some resources to manage parts of the content marketing process in-house, and just need a writer to write the content? Or do you need someone to do your entire content marketing strategy, keyword research, content interviews, writing, etc.? Obviously, the latter is going to cost significantly more. 

In terms of ballpark numbers, if you’re hiring just a content writer, our stance is you shouldn’t pay less than $200 per piece of content. In our experience, we thought professional writers charging high rates would be really good, but that hasn’t been the case. We’ve paid more than $1,000 for a piece that we weren’t able to publish. Grow and Convert writers get paid $500 per article, and we have pretty high standards for content quality. 

If you’re looking to hire someone to run content marketing for you more broadly, including strategy, writing, promotion, and measuring results, this cost would be more akin to hiring a full-time team member that also hires contractors such as writers, designers, and developers to execute your content marketing.

In terms of how much you should expect to spend, it’s not going to cost you $50k per month, nor is it going to cost you $200 per month. Depending on what the makeup of your team looks like, you should expect to spend somewhere in the mid to high thousands per month. The most popular plan for our SEO content marketing agency, for example, is $10,000 per month.

How We Hold Ourselves Accountable

For every one of our clients, we create an ROI graph like this one (a live graph from a B2B SaaS client we’ve been working with for over 2 years):

Each month, we plot the number of leads from our articles on this graph (green being a particular product signup metric and blue being another one further down the funnel). The red and orange horizontal lines represent the number of leads this client needs per month to break even on their monthly spend with us. This lets us and the client see progress in relation to that break-even number, so clients can see when they begin to have positive ROI. 

We’ve written extensively about how we do this here and here, including more case studies and client data. Before we started our agency, this is the type of thing we were looking for but could never find. And we feel this is the number one differentiator of our agency.

Learn More About Our SEO and Content Marketing Agency

• Our Agency: If you want to hire us to execute a content marketing strategy built around driving lead generation and sales, not just traffic, you can learn more about our service and pricing here. We also offer a PPC service for paid search, which you can learn about here.
  
• Join Our Content Team: If you’re a content marketer or writer and would love to do content marketing in this way, we’d love to have you apply to join our team.
  
• Our Content Marketing Course: Individuals looking to learn our agency’s content strategy and become better marketers, consultants, or business owners can join our private course and community, taught via case studies, and presented in both written and video content formats. We include several details and examples not found on this blog. Our course is also built into a community, so people ask questions, start discussions, and share their work in the lesson pages themselves, and we, along with other members, give feedback. Learn more here.