Hey everyone, Araminta here.
Today I want to talk about an issue that is a big reason I started our agency: too many content agencies are essentially glorified writing services.
And in the age of AI, this is a model that no longer works.
What sparked the idea for this newsletter edition was a prospect who reached out to us who only wanted help with content creation, not strategy.
We turned them away because I don’t believe content agencies can really add value that way, and I want to explain why.
(I’ve borrowed the term “glorified writing services” from Grow & Convert who first coined the term and I think works as a great phrase to describe exactly what we don’t want to do!)
What are glorified writing services agencies and why do they not work?
I saw these types of agencies a lot when I was in-house and then when I was a freelancer. They essentially operate as freelancers, but more expensive.
They would put together a “strategy” (essentially putting a competitor’s website into Ahrefs / SEMRush, sorting keywords for highest volume and ta-da, strategy), and then they would put together briefs and outsource the writing to freelancers.
Freelancers were still doing most of the work, the only thing in-house was managing the client, creating briefs and doing the “strategy”.
There are two reasons this model no longer works:
1. This process isolates the writer and hinders them from writing great content
With a situation like the one described above, the freelance writer is so far removed from the client that it’s no wonder the content isn’t great.
Reading a brief and doing a bit of research isn’t really enough to understand the deep pain points of what leads a revenue leader at a SaaS to seek an alternative to Stripe, or why the client’s product is especially good for marketplaces, or why it’s unnecessary to write “What is a PSP” because the reader already knows.
These briefs are often high level and focus more on getting the grammar right and hitting a certain word count, rather than “does this actually help the reader?”. Even if the writer specializes in that industry, they won’t have a background on the company’s pain points or the product’s unique selling points.
This process is how you end up with publishing a lot of beginner type content. Which as we’ll see below, may have been fine when you were optimizing for as much traffic as possible, but no longer works when you really care about conversions.
I mainly believe the content in these situations turns out subpar because the process of using a “content brief” is flawed, and also that the expertise should come from the company, not the freelance writer or even the agency.
That’s why we advocate for using a questionnaire that the writer fills in (rather than the agency), and for interviewing experts at the company. We go into more detail here: Are Content Briefs the Spawn of Satan? | Mint Studios
2. Traffic is no longer the best metric to measure the success of content
With this model described above, you’re stuck with beginner type content, which means you can only really create content for the Top and Middle of the Funnel content, in other words, more general, high level educational pieces.
This may work when the “strategy” is to grow traffic as much as possible.
But this doesn’t work in 2026, where AI overviews answer most of the high level generic questions for the user and every website gets fewer and fewer clicks. Traffic is no longer a metric worth optimizing for.
I can get an accounting SaaS tool to rank for “What is accounting”, but what is the use in that? Not only will AI overviews answer that question quickly and succinctly (and therefore no one will click on my article and I won't get any brand awareness that I may have had before), but the people researching this are clearly not accountants. There’s not much point in creating this type of beginner content anymore.
A lot of these agencies, however, have not updated their strategy and are still focused on traffic. I really believe content agencies should be held accountable for the metric that truly matters: new customers and revenue.
But to do that, you really need to get deep into the organization. A light SEO audit won’t do. You need to spend time understanding the product, interviewing salespeople, researching, and understanding customer pain points. Without that you can’t create an effective strategy that actually helps with growth.
The glorified writing services model is focused on creating as much content as possible to increase traffic. It is not built for optimizing for conversions.
With AI, focusing on conversions is more important than ever
A lot of these glorified writing services companies are now struggling in the age of AI. The content they created was quite average, and now AI can do pretty much just as good a job. With AI overviews eating up clicks, people are no longer obsessed with traffic as a metric. Conversions are what matter now.
And this is why a content agency that can focus on what really matters – conversions – is more important than ever.
All of this is to say: if you’re looking to invest in content, make sure to understand your goal. If you just want to have some brand awareness, a freelance writer is probably good enough (although you want to make sure you have the right processes in place, which we explain in an article linked to below).
If you want brand awareness and to acquire more customers, make sure to work with an agency that knows how to create content that will actually drive conversions, not just traffic.
The middle ground is an agency that only focuses on brand awareness, and I’m not sure there is as much a need for those types of agencies.
I’d only work with one if I was very certain of my strategy, and I knew they would spend the time to really understand our company, product, target customer pain points to create genuinely good content.
Mint Studios Recommended Reads
- I wrote a similar article on the topic of why freelance writers aren’t the best model for many companies (mainly due to using the wrong process, once you have the right process it’s a model that can work): Why We Believe Hiring Freelance Writers Doesn't Work for Most Companies
- If you’re new to Bottom of the Funnel content, here’s a good place to start: What is BOFU (Bottom of the Funnel) Content and Why Is it Important?
- Interesting article from Ryan Law, Director of Content Marketing at Ahrefs, on why AI is good enough now: AI Content Wasn’t Good Enough. Now It Is.
Thanks for reading,
Araminta & the Mint team 🎉
We help financial services and fintech companies acquire customers and position themselves as experts with content marketing. Learn more about what we do.
