"Content Marketing is 3 times more effective than outbound strategies. 

It can increase organic search traffic, grow your brand, and boost your conversion rates six-fold. Most importantly, it can establish your organization as an industry thought leader that offers genuine value to your audience – while providing a welcome relief from the 5,000 plus ads (as per a study) consumers are trying to ignore every day".

So says the leading pitch in this somewhat biased but also pretty accurate blog from a 'Content Marketing Agency', their objective to convince you to put your brand voice in their hands because they can do a better job than you around talking about your company, its brand message, and products and services, and for many companies this seems to be the easy cop out to get 'stuff out'.

I have said it many times in previous blogs, outsourcing your content creation, production, and even strategy to an agency is nothing other than a quick fix to a downward spiral in the credibility, and authenticity of your brand and company.

Content for the sake of content isn't a strategy, its just adding to the zillions of other content noise that's out there in the digital ether, all content should be aligned to an internally agreed set of objectives.

Simply writing blogs, producing Vlogs, cleverly shot video's and other tricks an agency will entice you to do is of no value unless you have also nurtured a tribe of people who are also aligned to the stories you want to tell them, and to be honest, if not done in the right way its all just seen as your corporate diatribe and advertising wrapped up as non-authentic storytelling.

You should focus on content about your customers and prospects, tell stories from their point of view, stuff they can relate to, not just stories that are all about you.

The best people to deliver engaging, authentic content isn't an agency, its you, your team, and as many enterprise wide employees as you can get involved, and with the right training, support, mentoring, and framework you will start to own the voice and the message, this is what we call 'employee advocacy' because no one knows your company like they do.