For modern CMOs, the pressure is a familiar one. Marketing budgets are, at best, staying flat against a backdrop of tougher landscapes and trickier goals. In a nutshell, today’s CMOs and senior marketing leadership need to be creative about how to drive “better” results with the same or fewer resources. Whether this means increased revenue, elevated brand perceptions, higher brand awareness, or something else, there is one solution that’s both simple and easy to deploy.
The solution we propose — a copy agency of record — runs counter to traditional marketing structures. Who’s ever heard of that?! Yet the results we typically measure soundly demonstrate significant savings — along with powerful visibility, strong brand consistency, more impactful messages, and yes, higher ROI.
Think of it as “generative” copy and content written by humans, in an era when generative AI has fallen short of marketing goals:
- To be differentiating
- To be humanized
- To fully account for the way people process information and make decisions
- To be reliably on-brand and on-message
- To keep what’s proprietary firmly under wraps
- To meet objectives, right out of the box
A copy and content agency of record furnishes a team that scales across your company — and collaborates with marketers, agencies, and leadership to fulfill the one need that all initiatives have in common: messaging.
The Issue: Piecemeal messaging
With in-house writers typically in limited supply, the default copy and content sourcing method for an enterprise company is one or a mix of the following:
- Find freelancers and onboard them, per initiative or need
- Enlist staffers to write, whether or not it’s part of their job
- Ask an existing agency to fulfill on the writing piece, even if they lack proper copy/content infrastructure
- Eliminate or table initiatives for lack of appropriate messaging — sitting on the sidelines as others own your great ideas
- Use an AI method like ChatGPT, then rely on a staffer, freelancer, etc. to revise the result
The Solution: A copy agency of record
In contrast, a copywriting agency of record provides brands with instant access to a reliable, brand-savvy team poised for immediate activation. The benefits are numerous. Brands can:
- Rapidly activate messaging opportunities, speeding campaigns to market
- Eliminate the endless writer sourcing cycle, complete with its wasteful stop-start cadence (matching capabilities, chasing availability), trial-and-error vetting, replacing writers who have left, etc.
- Systematize creative ideation and strategic content production, so that content successes are no longer left to chance
- Replace the exhausting resourcing step with foundational confidence, growing trust, and rapidfire campaigns
- Keep brand tone and key messaging steady and clear across every audience, every department
- Repurpose campaign ideas to achieve greater visibility and powerful brand cohesion
- Effectively dissolve silos within your marketing and revenue center
- Gain a more impactful shelf life for every campaign
- Consolidate spend with a single effective team
- Transform all efforts — e.g. onboarding, SME calls, market questions — into long-term investments
- Preserve institutional knowledge — rather than watch it leak out with every initiative
- Keep leadership firmly focused on higher goals, i.e. their strategic and creative responsibilities
How to onboard a copy and content AOR
Step 1: Explore the concept of a copywriting agency of record.
- A call is always a great way to discuss your needs and cadence. After learning more, we’d share ways we develop “in-house” sensibilities — minus overhead and management.
- At this stage, we’d also answer your specific questions, explore a pilot scope, and recommend exchanging NDAs, if we haven’t already.
Step 2: Move forward with a pilot project, complete with a (light) brand kickoff.
- Ideally, this is something you need that can also demonstrate a range of capabilities.
- Past pilots have included:
- Batches of product pages
- An audit of your social channels, website, or other platform
- A long-form content piece (e.g. an ebook) written, then repackaged into short, shareable items (landing page, blog(s), social posts, webinar, video).
Step 3: Develop ongoing scope — and relax into newfound ease.
- Your pilot team is your team going forward, with adjustments to scale (or scale back) as needed.
- Let them get to know you. Every net-new insight we receive — be it market knowledge, brand insights, a peek into a SME’s thought process — gets shared across our team, and preserved for future work.
- Even if there are small shifts or changes on your team, the knowledge we hold is already institutional. No need to repeat yourself. We are paying close attention.
Step 4: Explore usefulness across other departments.
- We ask for intros to colleagues and coworkers who will enjoy our pre-onboarded state — and will thank you.
- We meet with your procurement team to develop any “volume” packages.
- The more your company spends, the better the investment. Dollars, time spent, and brand and market knowledge: all pay off now and in the years to come.
Proof that it works
We are proud to say that our clients consistently achieve high ROIs on our work. One example is the 39,900% ROI measured on a retail email campaign; another is a marketing guide that resulted in 125% higher-than-average closed wins compared to the client’s other campaigns.
These results aren’t accidental. They are in fact baked into a process that was developed to be freeing, to be highly systematized, and to leave no stone unturned. ROI is assured, as a result of:
- Rapid subject mastery
As a copy agency of record, we don’t view our job as finding out “just” the information we need to write a specific piece or campaign. We view our role as delving deep, prodding thoughtfully, and becoming brand specialists. We are interested in gathering and synthesizing all possible insights, so we can have these on call for any errant marketing or sales request. Because of this, and because of sheer industry prowess, we’ve learned how to master extremely complex subjects in brief time windows. For instance:
- Getting to know the intricate audience pain points, features, and benefits of a company that simplifies international money transfers. Learning curve: 3 weeks.
- Becoming well-versed on a vast product portfolio of connected lighting, shades, and controls. Learning curve: 2 weeks.
- Carving out a unique brand voice that simplifies the complex environment of insurance, annuities, employee benefit programs, structured settlements, broker relationships, and investment management for a global insurance company. Learning curve: 3 days.
- Reinvestment in core responsibilities
Think of a copy agency of record as a “forever” solution across all marketing asks. When brands work with an agency of this ilk, they can let themselves off the writer resourcing treadmill, no longer needing to:
- Find, vet, or test new writers (ever)
- Hand hold through the onboarding process, answering an onslaught of fresh brand, market, and audience questions
- Provide extended feedback, replete with explanations
- Solve the frustration of misaligned work product
- Work long hours to rewrite misaligned work
- Acquaint themselves with a revolving door of new writers
- Coordinate writers—chasing rates, availabilities, or skill sets
- Replace departing personnel
- Generally stress and agonize
Case in point: MarketSmiths-penned articles on LinkedIn’s corporate blog made the top 5 list of most-read blog posts each month—and the top 10 list of most-read blog posts each year. After that, a collection of articles and guides we wrote became their #1 all-time SEO campaign, delivering 9,000+ sales-qualified leads (SQLs) to field sales teams, over time. The upshot? Successful “done for them” content, with every client contact across two marketing departments able to redouble their energy on big picture strategy, creative strategies, promotional tactics, agency management, and measurement.
Similarly, all of our Content Catalyst clients realize months of time savings across years of future work. They can focus on their core responsibilities: managing other agencies, generating campaigns and other creative work products, weighing in minimally with us, and looking ahead.
They become blissfully, gloriously free.
- Consistently high-performing content
Consistent, cohesive content performs better than disjointed, off-brand content. Not only does it better capture audiences’ attention—it’s also usually easier to find. This is because Google’s “Helpful Content Update” rewards “original, helpful content written by people, for people” by bringing it to the top of the search engine, positioning it to do what it’s born to do: illuminate.
With these natural benefits comes consistently premium work. The writers drawn to our staff are the cream of the crop: people passionate about producing challenging brand-to-audience “translations” across complex industries, solving tricky content “problems” multiple times a day.
What’s the key message? How best to deliver it? In what voice? Using which structure? How to title and open each piece? What are the best supporting points, appropriate to this specific audience journey? How do we make it appeal to our target humans, so they keep reading, recall it when needed, associate it with this brand, and act? What’s the cleanest, simplest, most effective way to get there?
There’s a lot more to “writing” than commonly presumed; at heart, it’s about solving communications puzzles, repeatedly and effectively. Past ROI includes:
- Schuler Shoes: 39,900% ROI on email campaigns.
- K12: 55% year-over-year increase in student enrollment; 18.4% year-over-year increase in net revenue after they rolled out their newly rewritten website.
- More visible, impactful campaigns
Take the ROI above, and compound it across your company. There’s massive synergy to using the same team to develop your copywriting for brand awareness, thought leadership, SEO, lead generation, sales enablement, partner marketing, event marketing, and other objectives.
Beyond the obvious—a brand-savvy team you don’t have to re-onboard—consider this. Your copy agency of record will take the messaging and campaigns generated by one department, and parlay them into messaging and campaigns for another.
In this way, one of the world’s leading digital contract platforms used our work to launch a popular ebook, then turned it into a webinar series, a fireside chat, and several blog posts. The ebook concept was effectively adopted by event marketers, then later boosted SEO, and led to 20% sales-confirmed leads. Rather than launch multiple campaigns in multiple vacuums, our client was able to connect the dots, effectively dissolving silos, gaining internal synergy, and amplifying visibility for a single idea across a broader audience, which could consume the same concept in a few different ways.
When a brand chooses a content agency of record, they’re choosing a content solution that is naturally built to amplify and reinforce results. It’s a simple solution with a huge impact.
Ready to get higher quality content while minimizing spend?
Meet Content Catalyst by MarketSmiths: a copy and content agency of record. Contact the MarketSmiths team to get started.
