Is it time to fire your content marketing agency and move on? Here’s what you need to weigh and consider before making this big decision.
You hired your content marketing agency in good faith.
You had every hope they would soon start producing fantastic content for your brand or your clients’ brands.
That content would help build awareness around the brand, pull in more traffic, and generate more leads.
But your hope started to fizzle as months passed with little to no changes in awareness, traffic, search engine rankings, or conversions.
What gives? Is it time to fire your content marketing agency and move on?
Hold up. Not so fast.
It might be time to say goodbye. But you might also need to take a step back and pause before you leap. (Content does take longer to work than traditional or paid marketing methods – but it’s also more sustainable.)
Here’s exactly what to weigh and consider.
When is the right time to fire your content marketing agency?
1. You’re not seeing results in the expected time frame
Content marketing does not and will not work in a week – unless you have exceptionally rare or specific circumstances. It won’t work in one month or a few months, either.
To see the full ROI from content, it will take anywhere from multiple months to a full year or more.
That said, the needle should start to move before then. You should start seeing gains within a few months – incremental ones, but gains nonetheless. If you’re seeing absolutely no movement of any metric and six months have gone by, you may want to start asking questions.
And, by the way, your content marketing agency should have set accurate expectations for results from the beginning.
You should have set goals, staked out KPIs (key performance indicators) to measure, and strategized about tracking them. They should have given you an outlook about when to expect ROI and what it will look like.
If none of the above happened, that’s a good reason in itself to question the content agency you’re working with.
Remember, marketing for the sake of marketing is silly. You can and should expect ROI from it, and your agency needs to be accountable for moving that needle.
2. The agency makes repeated mistakes in your content
Everyone makes mistakes. The important thing is whether you learn not to repeat them.
For example, say your content marketing agency creates content for your brand with a few glaring errors (like links pointing to low-authority pages or worse, competitors).
Say this happens during the first few months of your relationship. That’s something that can be quickly pointed out and corrected so it never happens again.
If your agency keeps making mistakes in your content, even after corrections, that’s a good reason to dump them.
The entire point of hiring an agency is to take content off your hands so you don’t have to worry about it. It’s their job to:
Nail your brand voice.
Link correctly in your blogs.
Use correct grammar and spelling.
Use keywords appropriately.
And generally, produce content you can be proud of.
If they’re not paying attention to details, they may not be the right agency for you.
3. You’re dissatisfied with the content quality overall
Content quality is an organic search ranking factor. That means you absolutely should be concerned with the quality you receive from the agency in charge of writing it.
Bad content can have a domino effect on your brand reputation and visibility. Poor content won’t rank well in searches, if at all, and thus will drive zero traffic from Google. (Click-through rates drop off a cliff beyond page two of a Google search.)