"Before you start waving wads of notes at anyone, it might be worth running a DIY trial... You may be able to take care of the whole thing without outsourcing at all."
Content marketing has become an incredibly popular way for businesses to make promotional matter widely visible in the long term, without any display fees. It can comprise text and/or rich media, but it most typically harnesses the medium of a blog to build an ever-increasing library of useful and engaging reading, which will serve as a series of potential responses to Web-surfers' queries. When interested parties search Google and other search engines, they find the content, and then visit the source business's site. That's the goal.
Whilst the function of content marketing is promotional, its format is editorial. If it looks or reads like an advert, it's an amateur job, and it almost certainly won't work. Professional content marketing fulfils four roles…