Content marketing isn’t a one-way street.
Companies that work with outside marketing agencies get the best results when they show up as active partners, not just clients waiting for deliverables. That means staying engaged, collaborating openly, and being willing to pivot when the agency’s guidance points in a different direction. After all, agencies can only work with what they have.
Here are five habits to help clients stay active, collaborative, flexible, available, and honest.
1. Stay Active
Active means responding to requests quickly and treating deadlines as shared.
Picture this: the agency comes to you every month to pin down blog topics and interview sources. Instead of blindly adding the meeting to your calendar, take a look at blog topics they’ve pitched to you in the past. Which one is particularly relevant this month? Who would be a good team member for them to interview?
If you show up to the meeting with these things already decided, you’ll turn a 30-minute call into a 15-minute call.
Think of all the other productive ways you can use that extra 15 minutes in your daily work.
On-time posting is a shared responsibility—not just the agency’s job.
2. Be Collaborative
Without access to subject matter experts (SMEs) and in-depth industry knowledge, your content won’t resonate how you want it to.
Picture this: an agency schedules an interview with one of your engineers to write a blog post. The engineer shows up guarded—worried about being quoted, sounding unpolished, and unsure of how much they should share. Instead of treating it like an educational session, they treat the interview like an interrogation.
The result is a thin, generic interview and a thin, generic post. Content marketers aren’t experts in your industry and they don’t pretend to be. The credibility of the blog post depends entirely on what your SME is willing to share with them.
Want blog content that’s genuinely useful to professionals in your industry? Get your SMEs to loosen up and open up.
3. Be Flexible
You might have the technical expertise your audience craves, but your marketing agency knows when to share it with them and how to deliver it.
Picture this: One of your engineers wants to do a four-part series on pump station projects. Each article will be 1,000 words, and will be published over the span of four months. Your agency suggests doing a series of videos instead, so the language is clearer and easier to understand. You (and your SME) are on the fence, so you decide to move forward with the article series.
The clicks, shares, and impressions you were hoping to drive never appear. Meanwhile, your competitors share a series of short clips that appear all over your LinkedIn feed.
This could’ve been you, and the agency knew it. Let your agency do what you brought them on to do—and listen to their advice.
4. Be Available
Available means treating your agency’s deadlines as your own, so review drafts on time instead of letting them pile up.
Picture this: Your agency sends you a blog post for review on a Friday afternoon—not ideal. You decide to take a look on Monday morning when you sign on for work. Before you even have a chance to think about it, meeting invites and deadlines flood your inbox. You completely forgot about the blog post, and the agency is supposed to share it tomorrow.
The post sits in your inbox until the deadline passes. Your agency gives you a nudge, but the projects you’re currently working on feel more important. The blog doesn’t get reviewed until two weeks after the original deadline, delaying engagement and making your website look inactive.
Stick to your deadlines with the agency. You’re paying them to improve your digital presence, so don’t slow them down.
5. Be Honest
If you don’t love the blog post your agency wrote for you, be upfront about it—this will save you plenty of back-and-forth.
Picture this: Your agency turns in a blog post that doesn’t align with your brand voice. Instead of sharing your honest feedback, you make a few tweaks here and there and give them the green light to post it.
In turn, you’re disappointed by the post and don’t want to share it on your blog or your social media platforms. This could go all the way up to leadership—they saw the post, and they don’t think it reads like it came from your company.
The fix is simple: If a draft misses your brand voice, say so specifically. “This doesn’t sound like us” isn’t enough; point to what sounds off and why. It’s a five-minute conversation now instead of a leadership headache later.
Putting It All Together
Being an active, collaborative, flexible, available, and honest client doesn’t mean stepping back and letting the agency run the show. It’s about showing up prepared, reviewing drafts on time, giving your SMEs room to speak freely, speaking up when something sounds off, and trusting the strategy you’re paying for.
The clients who do this don’t just receive content from their agency. They receive content that performs.
