Marketing agencies face an incredibly high churn rate. This is obviously bad for the agency, and it’s bad for customers, too, who need to constantly pour resources into hiring new marketing helpers and educating them on the business. Long-term relationships foster efficiency and more effective marketing work, benefiting both parties.

So, why is churn so frequent? The number-one factor is that agencies aren’t optimally positioned, and they do not follow through on that positioning. In other words, they haven’t narrowed down exactly what they offer and whom they’re best positioned to help. On the other end of the equation, companies that buy agency services aren’t clear on exactly what they need from their marketing agency. 

In the content marketing agency universe, both parties can reduce churn and find more effective, long-term partnerships by solving this problem. The agency and client both need to narrow their understanding of their ideal service. 

Here are some of the questions content marketing agencies and agency service buyers can ask themselves — and their partners — to find the right fit.

Vertical expertise

Perhaps the easiest question for both agencies and clients buying agency services to answer: what verticals does the agency specialize in? Does the company’s expertise align with the client’s vertical?

Now, I got a humanities PhD and worked for many years as a journalist before starting a content marketing agency. So, I’m very open to the argument that great writers can learn any subject, and I also believe that great writers will write better content about a new vertical than middling writers will write about a vertical they know well.

But if you have two great writers and one is an expert in your vertical, you should pick the expert. They will communicate more like your prospects. They will not only understand the core issues in your business but also enrich your thought leadership with their own understanding and experiences. They will save you time because you won’t spend hours explaining the basics. 

By the way, some writers argue that writers outside your vertical can be superior because they know how to talk to your audience in a way that is free of jargon whereas industry insiders get lost in the details. I don’t find this argument compelling. If your audience speaks the same jargon you do — if you’re all a part of the same industry — you *should* hire writers who also know that jargon and can communicate like insiders. If someone tried to explain what a demand-side platform was to me, I’d think they didn’t understand adtech or were insulting me. Vertical expertise solves these problems. 

Specialty within content marketing

Content marketing contains a vast universe of offerings. Firms can focus on thought leadership, SEO, social, text or video, short-form or long-firm, owned or earned, etc. Figuring out what your agency is best positioned to offer at an elite level and what your company needs is key to determining an ideal match. 

For example, at Sharp Pen, we excel at long-form written content creation. We hire journalists and humanities PhDs with 99th-percentile writing ability and train them up on adtech until they’re experts in our vertical, too. But we aren’t SEO experts. We aren’t elite content strategists. We don’t do video. That may change, but for now, it means we’re best suited to work with companies that already have content strategies and want long-form written content (or have an SEO agency minding analytics and setting up a strategy and want writers to execute that strategy). 

I’ve written a lot about our struggle, like that of any growing business, to identify our core strength. When we started, we often made the mistake of trying to do everything in that broad content marketing universe for our clients. But when agencies figure out what they do best and lean into it, they can grow faster by positioning themselves as a category of one. And when companies hiring agencies determine what they need, they can find an agency that will deliver on those needs.

Ideal company size

Remember that category of one from a second ago? Our working definition of Sharp Pen’s category based on vertical (section one) and content marketing specialty (section two) was “long-form written content for martech companies.” Company size is another factor to narrow positioning even more and identify the ideal agency-company match.

Why does size matter? Well, it’s mostly an extension of factor number two: content marketing specialty. Companies of different sizes are a good fit for different services. For example, we’ve worked with companies of all sizes. But going forward, we plan to limit new clients to Series B+, mid-market ($100m+), and enterprise ($3b+) martech companies because long-form content creation is a specialized service that is typically too narrow to benefit the average early-stage or small company.

Small and early-stage companies typically need a content marketing provider who will generate leads and quickly become ROI positive to justify the expense of an agency, whereas larger companies can afford to hire specialists who are the very best in the market at the thing they do (be that long-form written content creation, SEO, video, or short-form social copy, to name a few). 

For example, we have a $24k/mo account with a large company that hired us just to interview their subject matter experts and write dozens of blog posts per month. This is what their founder said about us: “Sharp Pen’s journalists are top-notch interviewers and writers. They quickly learned about our business, deftly integrating the knowledge of our subject matter experts into blog posts to bolster the quality of the content on our site.”

What the client’s feedback reflects is perfect alignment between an agency and a client. The client already had an SEO agency and needed top-notch content to power that strategy and upgrade the existing, relatively low-quality content on its site. They didn’t want lead gen or content strategy. They didn’t want a content format in which we don’t specialize. They wanted long-form written content creation. And we delivered. Now both parties are happy. 

This is what happens when the agency and the client align on what the agency does best and what the client very specifically needs. The company’s size is not the ultimate arbiter of what the client needs, but it’s a good starting point to figure out what type of content marketing service will solve the most urgent pain points and foster a long-term relationship. 

Differentiating factors

The final factor to consider in agency positioning and client-agency fit is the agency's differentiating factors beyond vertical and specialty. For example, we are a long-form written content creation agency for Series B+, mid-market, and enterprise martech companies. But you’ll see on our site that we’re also different from anyone else in that already-narrow market because we hire journalists, PhDs, and veteran content marketers (i.e., unusually qualified writers) and actually contribute deep martech expertise.

Here’s the messaging I’m experimenting with to emphasize these differentiating factors: Unlike the content agencies that claim to do martech but also cover seven other verticals, martech is our focus and in our DNA. And unlike the agencies that sell mediocre content at a premium, we hire 99th-percentile writers with backgrounds in journalism and academia because great thinking, research, and interviews lead to business-critical content.

I use the example of Sharp Pen to illustrate the point that in addition to vertical, specialty, and company size, what informs agency-client fit is likely the special sauce or unique selling point that differentiates the company from others in its market. If you filter for the first three factors, you should already be choosing from a select few providers. Focusing on differentiating factors helps solve the equation.

Where a lot of agencies go wrong here is that they are extremely vague about what separates them from the competition (which, yes, should make you question whether they’re distinct at all). For example, here is some of the messaging on martech PR sites: “Drive growth with innovative B2B marketing. … We build unique, customized programs that challenge the status quo and help companies break out of the mold. … Through strategic programs tailored to meet our clients’ needs, we offer a full range of marketing expertise.”

Sound familiar? If I can be informal for a moment, it boggles my mind that so many marketing agencies survive on this boilerplate rhetoric, which doesn’t at all help me understand what is unique about them. This vague messaging does a disservice to the company, which would probably grow even faster if it were more specific. But it also undermines clients, who can’t use this information to choose the best possible service for their needs.

Tl;dr: Agencies should position themselves specifically by considering vertical expertise, specialized service offerings, ideal client size, and additional differentiating factors, including their unique selling point. This benefits agencies, which will grow faster and be able to charge higher prices if they attract perfect-fit clients. But it’s also a huge boon to clients, who need to identify the exact agency to fit their needs to eliminate churn and get the greatest return on their investment.