The definition of marketing has changed and, with it, the duties of a marketing agency. Marketing no longer means deciding which print publication or TV channel should get your advertising dollars or which products a company should give away in its next contest. That’s still part of marketing, of course, but today’s comprehensive marketing plan has other important components.

What should you expect from your marketing agency? You’ll want to find a marketing agency with expertise in the following areas.

Online content and SEO optimization: Online content encompasses a variety of media, from blog posts to white papers, news releases to videos. Your marketing agency should be able to advise you on the best strategy for employing all these different aspects of online marketing.

Social media: Once your marketing agency has helped you create all this useful, relevant content, how do you make sure people see it? The answer, in part, is social media. A content marketing agency should work with your company on its social media plan. The agency may not manage your Twitter and Facebook accounts (or it might), but a good marketing agency should be able to advise you on your social media marketing strategy.

Putting it all together: You want to integrate aspects of your marketing strategy that don’t take place online—such as store sales and new product features—with your online content. For instance, when InterCall, a teleconferencing, web conferencing, and Unified Communications provider, added new songs to its InterCall Lounge (conventional marketing), the company spread the word with both a news release and a blog post (online marketing).

Dawn Allcot is a freelance writer available on WriterAccess, a marketplace where clients and expert writers connect for assignments. WriterAccess is powered by ideaLaunch, a full service content marketing agency serving hundreds of clients and thousands of writers since 2000.

Image from laurenceborel.com

Tags: content marketing

This entry was posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Content Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.