Content Marketing Consulting

Struggling to develop a real content marketing strategy? Having a hard time proving the ROI of your content marketing efforts? Investing more in digital and just getting started with content marketing? A content marketing consultant can help navigate you through all of these challenges and initiatives.

I’m Ryan Morgan, an experienced digital marketing strategist, consultant, coach, and instructor. I’ve spent most of my career developing content marketing strategies to drive quality website traffic and conversions. In fact, I wrote a book on it and teach a cohort-based class on SEO (more about that below).

Interested in making content marketing a big part of your organization’s marketing efforts? This page will help you learn more about what a content marketing consultant can do for you.

What Does a Content Marketing Consultant Do?

Develop a Content Strategy and Content Marketing Plan

Only about 40% of organizations actually have a defined content strategy. Even less actually follow that content strategy. Most of the time these documents sit on a shelf (or a drive) collecting dust. That’s why I use a simple-to-follow One-Page Content Marketing Strategy that allows organizations to quickly and easily document their strategy in an easy-to-share format. The content marketing strategy starts with an organization’s goals, not just their marketing goals. This allows the whole organization to rally around the strategy, not just the marketing team. And the strategy is based on the reality of the organization’s resources and capacity — not every organization can produce 10 blog posts and 50 social media posts a month, nor do they need to. Together, we’ll take the following steps to ensure your content strategy is aligned with your organizational goals:

Define your target audience and document their needs, goals, and initiatives
Set measurable goals that can be tracked and evaluated
Determine the type of content you will produce and the channels you will use to distribute it
Create a content calendar
Evaluate and adjust your strategy as needed

Increase the Quantity and Quality of Website Traffic

As you probably know, good SEO is essential for any website that wants to increase traffic. Quality content is one of the most important factors for ranking high in search engine results pages (SERPs). In fact, “high-quality content” is one of the main factors that Google looks at when ranking websites.

Creating valuable blog posts and other pieces of content will help you attract more visitors from organic searches, connecting your audience directly with your content. These visitors are more likely to be qualified leads, meaning they are more likely to become customers.

Develop a Content Strategy and Content Marketing Plan

The first step to producing high-quality content is having a strong understanding of your audience. A content marketing consultant can help organizations gain a deeper understand of their audience. Audience research can be done through:

One-on-one or group interviews
Analyzing organizational surveys and customer data
Analyzing analytics and past performance
Third-party research using audience intelligence tools

Through this research, a consultant can help organizations create content that is more engaging and resonates with the target audience. Additionally, a consultant can help track audience engagement with content and recommend changes as needed to improve results.

Increase Conversions from Content

One-on-one or group interviews
Analyzing organizational surveys and customer data
Analyzing analytics and past performance
Third-party research using audience intelligence tools

What Does a Content Marketing Consultant Do?

Organizational Alignment

The most common reason for leadership and marketing misalignment is differing goals. It sounds simple, but too often a marketing team’s goals don’t align with the organization’s business goals. Simply put, marketing teams get caught chasing views, visitors, and followers while business leaders are looking for leads and revenue. Aligning a content marketing strategy so that it supports goals at each stage will build trust throughout the organization.

Right Resources, Less Overwhelm

If you’re like most organizations, your marketing team has multiple departments knocking down your door with requests. It can often feel like you’re drowning in work without making significant progress on your most important initiatives. As a content marketing consultant, I’ll help you prioritize initiatives and requests, giving you tools and scripts to work collaboratively with the rest of your organization, rather than feeling like your constantly fending off new requests. I’ll help you build an effective content team, which will start with your current resources. For successful content creation, you’ll need content writers, but you’ll also need resources to produce other content assets like visual content. I have a deep network of resources to help fill any gaps.

Increased Traffic

Awareness is the first step, but there’s little value in being seen if your audience isn’t coming to your site to learn more. A successful content marketing program will target high-intent topics aligned with your audience to drive organic traffic to your site. This type of program is a mix of content strategy, content development, and search engine optimization.

Marketing Team Alignment

Whether you have a large marketing department with a dedicated content marketing team, a smaller in-house marketing team, or you’re the “wearer-of-all-hats” marketer at your organization, it’s important that your team is all on the same page. As organizations evolve, “team” has taken on many forms, including in-house marketing teams, freelance content marketers or content creators, digital agencies, and anyone else involved in the strategy and production of content. Ensuring that all members of the “team” are aligned will support successful outcomes.

Increased Awareness

Before you gain prospects or clients, you need to build awareness. In a content strategy, helpful and original content attracts individuals and organizations that fit your target audience or persona. This can take the form of blog content, thought leadership on relevant industry websites, or content published through your social channels. Building your online presence will ensure that the right audience finds your content.

Increased Conversions

I see plenty of organizations who are showing up in search engines and social channels, they’re driving traffic back to their website, but they’re not generating conversions. Whether this is B2B lead generation or B2C e-commerce revenue, content marketing efforts that don’t lead to business results usually don’t make marketers or leadership teams happy.

In these situations, I help organization’s evaluate their current content and understand the reasons for low or no conversions. Sometimes they need to focus more on bottom-of-funnel content like product/service comparisons, white papers, or client testimonials and reviews. Other times, it’s a matter of focusing on conversion rate optimization to give visitors a clear and actionable next step from any given piece of content.

What Types of Content Does a Consultant Help With?

Company, Product, and Service Positioning

Before you can develop a strong content marketing strategy, you need to deeply understand who you’re talking to and what they care about. Positioning ensures a deep connection between your content and your audience.

Website Content

Whether your website acts as a “brochure” for your products or services, or it has deeper hubs of content on a variety of subjects, ensuring that it’s optimized and organized is crucial.

Blog Posts / Long-Form Content

Much of the ongoing content that you’re going to be publishing will likely live on a blog (and probably be published and repurposed elsewhere too). Whether you’re publishing short-form content on niche subjects or deep-dive long-form content, you’ll want to make sure the strategy is right.

Social Media Posts

Most organizations struggle to prove the ROI of social media. Social channels can be excellent for content distribution, on-platform engagement, and building an audience or even a community.

Email Marketing Content

Not sure whether you need a regular newsletter or one-off emails? Should you be doing email marketing at all? Make sure your email strategy is connected to your content strategy.

Ad Copy

Don’t think of your digital ads as content? Well you should. Your ads should be aligned with your overall positioning and create a seamless experience from ad to website.

What’s the Process?

Let’s be clear — this isn’t a pre-recorded, on-demand style coaching program. This one-to-one or one-to-team coaching that is personalized to your organization, team, goals, and challenges. You’ll be coached by me (Ryan). You’ll be able to bring questions and ideas to each coaching session, and you’ll be able to receive hands-on coaching and training.

Positioning Workshop

So much of your content will revolve around your unique position in the market and your unique audience. A positioning workshop helps us differentiate your offering and ensure that your content strategy is unique and adds huge value to your audience.

One-Page Content Marketing Strategy

I’ve seen so many organizations develop long, in-depth content marketing strategy documents only for them to sit around, never to be seen again. My One-Page Content Marketing Strategy helps organizations outline their strategy in a document that’s easy for all to follow.

Quarterly Content Calendar

Each quarter we’ll develop a content calendar that outlines what you’ll publish, when, and where. We’ll identify the resources needed, timelines, and a content publishing and distribution plan.

Ongoing Coaching Sessions

Depending on your needs, we’ll schedule weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly coaching sessions for accountability, to review and update your digital marketing plan, to discuss current challenges and opportunities, and for one-on-one or group coaching.

Who Am I?

Ryan Morgan - Content Marketing Consultant

If you’re looking for a content marketing consultant to help your organization with strategy, process, or resources, you’re likely going to find most have a few similar characteristics. So let me share with you a few that I think make me different:

15+ year Digital Marketing Strategist – I’ve spent my entire career building digital marketing strategies and teams, both on the organizational side and the agency side. I started my career on the organizational side, tripling the traffic of a leading HR company, then moving to the agency side where I’ve worked with companies in nearly every industry.
I wrote the book on website traffic – No really, a few years ago I published “Double Your Website Traffic: A Step-By-Step Blueprint Using Content, SEO, PPC, and Social Media,” and it reached #1 bestseller in the marketing category on Amazon. And I’m working on book #2 right now!
I developed the first SEO training cohort – Through about a year of curriculum development, I launched The SEO Cohort, the first cohort-based training program helping individuals go from beginner to SEO professional in just 5 weeks.
Speaker and thought leader – I’ve given 25+ presentations all over the country on content marketing, most recently at MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Boston.

Testimonials

“Ryan is a great source of helpful information! I am taking quite a few actionable items to implement right away.”

“This was the best session I attended. Very comprehensive, with valuable templates and other resources for attendees to use after. Very helpful information, presented clearly and in an interesting way.”

“An excellent speaker and presentation. Having run content at an organization for over 20 years, Ryan’s points are right on.”