Are you struggling to attract new customers to your business? Hiring a content marketing agency can help bring more traffic to your website and increase customer conversion rates. Here is our list of the eight best digital marketing firms, as well as some helpful tips to help you choose the agency that best suits your business.
What do Content Marketing Agencies do?
Whether you are selling a service, software, or physical product, people need to know about your company or brand to be successful in the modern business world.
In the “olden days” of marketing, much effort was needed to launch a successful ad campaign. Cold calling, flyers, and billboard ads were all essential tools required to attract new customers. In 2023 however, the marketing game has drastically evolved.
According to a recent study conducted by the US Census Bureau, 2020 alone saw nearly a 33% increase in e-commerce sales over the previous year, accounting for a grand total of 791.7 billion dollars. Clearly, as we advance further into the “digital age,” online business transactions will continue to increase, creating a competitive online market.
So how do you attract potential customers to your brand and keep up with the competition? This is where content marketing agencies come into play.
Put simply; a content marketer has two essential jobs:
- Determine what your company needs to attract more customers.
- Address those needs by creating high-quality digital content.
First, a digital marketing agency will analyze all available data and current analytics such as website ranking, traffic, and customer conversion rates. From there, the firm can help you identify your target audience and create a strategic plan to reach your specific goals.
Once your marketing strategy has been established, the agency will begin to produce content to increase traffic to your business organically. The average person spends roughly 2.5 hours every day on Google, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Digital marketers take advantage of these platforms by creating engaging content that funnels consumers to your website, increasing brand awareness and overall profit.
The Best Content Marketing Agencies in 2021
There are thousands of content marketing agencies who are all fighting for your business. However, not all of them function in the same way or produce the same level of quality content. A company that produces impressive business-to-consumer (B2C) company results might not do the same for a business-to-business (B2B). To help narrow down your search, we’ve picked eight of the best digital marketing companies to fit the needs of eight specific niches.
Responsify: Best Overall for Fast and Consistent Growth
We may be a little bit biased putting ourselves down for the overall best content marketing agency, but hey, why wouldn’t we be? We stand behind our services and the results that we produce. We take a unique approach to web marketing. Our team believes that a successful company should center around people, not just business.
Here is Responsify; we realize that our work affects you, your organization, and countless others in the community. Our principal goal is to accelerate innovation that improves the quality of people’s lives. We have helped dozens of healthtech, edtech, and cleantech companies do just that.
We are able to accomplish this goal by utilizing a variety of different digital marketing strategies, including:
Content & Inbound Marketing – This process helps us to identify your target audience and develop personalized social media and SEO (search engine optimization) content that resonates with them, in turn drawing them to your business.
Responsive Website Design – In this “internet age,” the overall design, style, and flow of a website are just as important as the information it contains. Our developers adhere to the latest and highest coding and web design standards to maximize your site’s performance, security, and compatibility on both desktop and mobile platforms.
User Experience Design – We create and combine “beautiful photography, icons, typography, layouts, and other design elements to create elegant and engaging user experiences that reinforce your brand.”
Brand Identity Design – Brand identity is all about standing out in a crowd. Our team can help you build a reputation, attract new customers, and keep them coming back to your business.
Business & Customer Alignment – Get to know your customers even better. Weekly review calls and customer profile maps will provide you with “in-depth insights to develop better products/services and marketing, and drastically improve their product/market fit.”
DIJGTAL: Best Low-Budget Marketing Agency
If you’re the owner of a start-up company or you simply don’t have the budget for a full-scale marketing campaign, you probably have modest expectations for a content marketing agency. The good news is since there’s such a high level of competition among digital marketers, there’s no shortage of firms that can provide you with great “bang for your buck” service. One such company is DIJGTAL.
From the moment you enter DIJGTAL’s website, you know that it’s not your traditional marketing firm. This international agency is all about “the experience.” Their team knows what it’s like to launch a start-up company, and they want to help you enjoy every step of your brand transforming journey.
What makes DIJGTAL an excellent choice for businesses on a budget is its flexibility. Not only does the company handle the “usual” marketing content like SEO, website creation, and social media management, but it also designs and develops software and mobile apps in-house. DIJGTAL can tailor its services to fit your individual needs and budget, making them the ideal choice for start-ups looking to gain some momentum.
Communications Strategy Group: Best for High-Volume Content
As a company grows in size, so does the need for additional content marketing strategies. Large corporations and fortune 500 companies have already established a name for themselves. However, maintaining a positive public reputation is easier said than done and requires far more than just vast amounts of marketing content.
Specializing in public relations, social media management, design services, and brand/corporate communications, CSG (Communications Strategy Group) is one of the top content marketing agencies in the United States. The Denver, CO-based firm has provided services to massive corporations and organizations, including Wells-Fargo, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Crayola, and even NASA. Clearly, the talented minds at CSG are more than capable of keeping up with the needs of a growing business, regardless of its size.
Even though Communications Strategy Group is comprised of a relatively small marketing team, they’ve developed a formula that’s undeniably effective and produces incredible results. For example, one case study shows that when CSG teamed up with NASA to “to increase awareness and engagement in its GLOBE Program” in just a short period of time, “total referral traffic to the website via social networks increased by 37 percent”, and “Teacher sign-ups for GLOBE’s programs increased by 25 percent.”
Impress!ve: Best for Data-Driven Niches
Data-driven marketing is an effective tactic that a business can use to ensure its content ends up in front of its target audience. A data-driven system works by collecting information about potential customers and creating a sort of “mini profile” for them, giving you insight into when, how, and why they will view your content.
If you use social media, you’ve probably come across an ad for a product or service that you searched for earlier that day. This is a prime example of a data-driven marketing tactic.
One content creation firm that understands all the ins and outs of this revolutionary technique is Impressive. The marketing consultants at Impressive promise results by combining “your own database with industry data around customer engagement, taking a scientific approach to your campaign that predicts the way customers will act so you’re there to sell when they’re ready to buy.”
Impressive has helped companies such as White Bohemian see up to a 648% increase in SEO sales, 254% increase in overall online orders, and 328% increase in Facebook Sales.
If you’re looking to streamline your next content marketing campaign, Impressive can help you take the guesswork out of the process and directly target your intended audience.
Wallaroo Media: Best Agency for B2C Companies
B2C companies are all about connecting with a target audience, and few agencies know more about customer resonation than Wallaroo Media.
Wallaroo Media is a Utah-based full-service digital marketing agency that specializes in:
- Social media advertising management
- Paid search advertising management
- Search engine optimization
- Content marketing
- Email marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Website design and development
Since its creation in 2012, Wallaroo Media has worked with all sorts of companies, including start-ups like Casper mattresses, all the way up to multi-billion dollar corporations such as Disney, Ikea, and the NBA.
Wallaroo’s achievements speak for themselves. One of the firm’s most successful projects was the launch of the mobile investing app: Acorns. Acorns approached the marketing firm with the goal of spreading the word about their new mobile application that allows users to invest spare change. However, no one could have predicted how successful Wallaroo’s marketing campaign would prove to be. For nearly a week, Acorns was the number one most popular finance app. In 2014 Mashable named the Acorns app #1 App of The Year. Additionally, both Twitter and Facebook each conducted their own case studies on the explosion of the Acorns app to highlight the power of social advertising and Wallaroo Media’s work.
Earnezt: Best Marketing Agency for B2B Companies
In theory, B2B marketing tactics should be nearly identical to those used for B2C. In practice, however, it’s not quite as simple. B2B marketers have the challenging task of not only attracting other businesses but also convincing them to purchase your product or service. Accomplishing this feat takes creativity, something that Earnezt has plenty of. In fact, the firm was awarded “Best Use of Creative” at the 2020 B2B Elevation Awards.
Earnezt’s research team has gathered some interesting statistics (or “shockers,” as they call them) about modern buyers. According to the Earnezt website:
- “58% of buyers don’t trust vendors’ claims (even those they buy from).”
- “69% don’t trust ads, which may explain why the average click-through rate of an online ad is just 0.05% (that’s one click for every 2,000 views).”
- “50% of business buyers say the content they receive is useless.”
For many digital marketers, these stats can create some serious roadblocks. However, the creative thinkers at Earnezt have gone back to the drawing board to develop a system that takes a more psychological approach to B2B marketing. Clearly, their strategy is working as they have partnered with major tech companies such as Samsung, Canon, and Oracle.
SimpleTiger: Best for SAAS Niche
SimpleTiger is an SEO company that focuses primarily on SAAS (software as a service) companies. Their entire “ethos” and business model is based on a very straightforward yet effective 80/20 strategy, meaning that the firm focuses its efforts on the 20% of optimization that will yield 80% of the customer’s results. This first 20% always begins with a detailed analysis of three key SEO factors:
- Rankings – According to SimpleTiger, “rankings are the first indicator of growth and future success in SEO. We make sure you know exactly where you rank for your most important keywords and constantly give you the strategy to grow your rankings further.”
- Traffic – Once your company starts to see growth and your digital content begins to appear on the first page of search engines, organic traffic tends to increase as well. Organic traffic is typically considered one of the most crucial reporting metrics, as it’s a clear indicator that your climbing rankings are positively affecting your market growth, leading to conversion.
- Conversion – Customer conversion is the ultimate goal when utilizing a content marketing agency. It shows that the firm’s efforts are working and proves ROI (return on investment).
While this simple formula may not exactly be revolutionary, it has helped SimpleTiger clients NBC, LG, and ETRADE gain serious software recognition.
Grow & Convert: Best for Conversion-Focused Content
Grow and Convert didn’t start out in life as a content marketing firm. The company’s founders Benji Hyam and Devesh Khanal, “specifically did not want to start an agency.” Instead, they “wanted to sell products and training” that would teach others about “content creation, promotion, and distribution.” But as time went on and Grow and Convert amassed a substantial following, plans changed. According to the firm’s website: “something happened when we tried to sell our training and courses: marketers inside businesses kept asking us if we could just do their content marketing for them. They preferred to just hire someone they trusted rather than train in-house employees.” So in 2017, Grow and Convert became a full-fledged content marketing agency.
From years of experience dealing with content marketing services, the guys at Grow and Convert realized there was a major problem with SEO and content production agencies: the vast majority of firms weren’t being held accountable for lead generation. Instead, they were promising to deliver “X” amount of articles with “X” amount of words. Essentially what these companies were saying was that “if our content doesn’t produce results, that’s not our problem. We held up our end of the deal.” So Benji and Devesh “set out to build the best content marketing agency.”
Grow and Convert promise the following when commissioning their services:
- Your entire content strategy and execution outsourced, start to finish
- Extensively researched content ideas that attract your target customers
- Exhaustive, customized content promotion
- High quality, high volume link building
- Customized plan to convert blog traffic into conversions
The Secret Recipe to a Good Content Marketing Firm
After you’ve identified a few firms that you feel can fulfill the marketing needs of your growing business, it’s time to take a closer look at each company and decide which one will be the best fit for your style and vision. Here are a few key factors to look for in an agency that will give you the best overall experience with them.
An Organized Website
A marketing company’s website is an excellent indicator of whether or not it will be a good fit for you. A firm’s home page often provides a list of past clients as well as customer reviews that can give you insight into the quality and scale of work they provide.
Additionally, a careful examination of their site will give you a feel for their overall style and alert you to any potential red flags, such as grammatical mistakes or unfinished parts of the website. If a marketing agency can’t fulfill its own internal marketing needs, how can you expect it to fulfill yours?
Tact and Quality
“Quality content” is a term that gets thrown around a lot in the digital marketing world. Whether it’s a blog article, Instagram post, or Youtube video, your content needs to be beneficial both to you and your potential client. It’s easy to tell when a piece of content was created solely for marketing purposes.
For example, to maximize organic traffic to a website, SEO (search engine optimization) writers utilize specific keywords that a search engine looks for to recommend a website. However, inexperienced writers often focus more on cramming these keywords into a blog post than creating quality content. This type of writing comes across as unnatural and distracts from the subject of the article. You’ve likely seen a similar tactic on social media posts with unusual captions and paragraphs of seemingly unrelated hashtags.
It’s crucial to find the right balance. The best content marketing agencies view your consumers as actual human beings and not just potential sales.
Your content should:
- Be attractive
- Be informative
- Be entertaining
- Teach something
- Motivate your audience to act based on your content
- Encourage the consumer to share the content
Before hiring a digital marketing firm, be sure to analyze examples of their past work carefully. If what you see comes across as forced or unnatural, move on to the next agency.
Organization and Analytics
It goes without saying that you’ll want to know if the company you hire is producing results. Fortunately, any reliable digital marketing agency will have tools that can show you customer conversion rates, sale closing statistics, and exactly how much organic traffic they are generating.
When inquiring about an agency, it’s vital to ensure that they’re willing to meet with you periodically during the project to discuss their progress and which strategies are working the best. The entire process of creating your content marketing should feel like a team experience.
Good Communication and Cooperation
Communication is an important aspect of any business, but it’s absolutely essential to creating content. As a business owner, your website and the content within it represent your brand, so it should be exactly as you envision it.
The best content marketing firms will prioritize your vision and combine its extensive knowledge and experience to maximize growth potential. This, of course, requires excellent communication, not only between you and the project manager but among every team member involved in your project.
It’s best to avoid agencies that have a “know it all” attitude. While it’s true that they are familiar with internet trends and know how to use branded content to attract the most attention to your business, you still want your voice to be heard and your opinions to be respected. After all, “the customer is always right,” so a good agency should produce results while catering to your needs.
Choosing the Best Content Marketing Agency for Your Business
Choosing a digital marketing firm is one of the most important decisions you can make for your growing business, so don’t rush it. Be patient and take your time to weigh the pros and cons of each company.
Remember, if there are any red flags, or you feel skeptical about an agency, move on to the next. There’s an ever-expanding supply of digital marketing firms, so if you’re willing to wait and do your research, you’ll eventually find the perfect one.
