In the past, content creation was considered a marketing extra. Hubspot’s 2020 State of Marketing report revealed that 40% of marketers believe content marketing is a significant part of their overall marketing strategy. Indeed, content creation is now clearly something that every business needs to invest in to stay relevant.
However, there are several ways you can address your content marketing needs. For instance, you can create content in-house or opt to outsource the services. In this article, we will look into the latter.
A 2020 Sitecore-sponsored study revealed that close to 84% of B2B (business-to-business) marketers choose to outsource their content development. As for B2C (business-to-consumer) companies, 55% of them opt for outsourcing content marketing activities.
This data is really interesting as it shows us just how popular outsourcing content making is becoming. Naturally, it also makes us curious as to why so many businesses prefer to work with outside content creatures. What are the pros of outsourcing content? What could be the potential drawbacks? We’ll explore everything you need to know about hiring a trusted digital marketing company for your content creation.
What are the pros of outsourcing?
Today, almost every business in almost every niche needs content. Websites, blogs, social media, and email updates all require regular high-quality content that is also error-free and search engine optimized. There are several scenarios for how this can be handled.
If you are running a small operation, you may try to develop all the content yourself. However, quite soon you will probably run into problems trying to juggle this with other business responsibilities. Of course, having an in-house content team is a more comprehensive solution. Naturally, this will depend on how much budget you have, but keeping a full-time content team on site is a costly undertaking.
If managing and supporting an in-house team is too demanding for your business, content outsourcing can be the ideal solution.
Here are just a few advantages of this approach:
Time-Saving
It may seem easy to create a simple blog post for a specific topic. However, the task involves more than writing—it also requires research and editing. So, if you do choose to create content yourself, be ready for it to take up a lot of your time away from other business tasks. Outsourcing content, on the other hand, can take the writing off your hands and free up the time for bigger managerial concerns.
Cost-Effective
In most cases, hiring a freelance content writer will be less expensive than hiring someone to take care of your content needs full time. You don’t have to worry about government-mandated employee benefits. What’s more, you won’t have to organize a workspace, pay extra for maintenance, supplies, electricity bills, etc. All you need to provide are a few tools for working from home, like a time tracker. This type of arrangement also offers you more flexibility. You can outsource and pay for content when you need it and limit your spending when you have to.
Adjustable
When you outsource your content development, you can quickly adjust to your business’s changing needs. You just need to know how to choose an outsourcing agency wisely to make sure it can meet your business’s needs and requirements. You can hire more creators when you need to, purchase content in bulk, easily switch between different writers and writing styles, and more. This gives you space to fine-tune your content strategy to achieve the best possible results.
Diverse
Having more writers means having more different takes on the same issue. No matter how great a business may be doing, you probably won’t be able to have a lot of full-time writers onboard. However, it is quite possible to work with many different freelancers who can help you keep your audience interested.
Prompt Delivery
Content creation is a highly competitive market. This is why freelance writers and digital marketing companies are extremely motivated to deliver quality content on time. They are typically used to working with strict deadlines and are themselves interested in submitting work as soon as possible.
Professional
Hiring writers remotely gives you a much bigger pool of talent to work with. You can hire people from different countries, with various specialties and approaches to content creation. This is sure to benefit your overall content strategy and diversify your online presence.
Easy to Manage
A decade ago, working with content partners remotely may have been quite inconvenient. Today, however, we have all the work-from-home tools at our disposal to manage a remote team.
Although nothing will ever really beat the convenience of having an in-house team, lot of it depends on the nature of your business, your niche, your management style, and more. A as we can see from the above, there are quite a few strong factors speaking in favor of outsourced content development.
Also Read: Scaling Marketing: Outsourcing for Growth
Now, what are the cons?
There are several situations where outsourcing content making may not be in your best interest.
One of them is related to confidentiality concerns. If your company works with confidential information that you won’t want to be accessible to third parties, outsourcing may not be for you. For information-sensitive companies, it is best to keep your content development internal.
The second thing to take into account is that when you outsource content, you will be missing out on in-house talent development. This means that you won’t be able to grow in-company professionals who will know all the specifics of your business.
Another issue that you may encounter when getting content externally is that freelance writers may not know much about your business. This can be especially true if you work in a very specific industry that requires concrete knowledge. This type of knowledge may not be easy to acquire as a result of a simple research session. One way to address this is to that will take the time to study the information deck for your business niche.
How Do You Outsource Content Creation?
Your company’s voice is an essential and very important part of its identity. If that voice isn’t strong, consistent, or relatable, your clients won’t be able to “connect” with your company.
Outsourcing content marketing is generally a workable solution for a lot of businesses. With that, you can follow some useful tips for managing remote teams consisting of digital marketers.
One of these steps is creating a written style guide. This can help your business maintain a consistent and recognizable voice even when working with different content makers. Naturally, you can use one of the already existing time-tested writing guides like the AP Stylebook. However, this comes with the risk of making your brand sound generic and somewhat automated. If you want your company’s personality to come through, it’s best to work on a custom writing guide.
Outsourcing content marketing is definitely not a one-fit-all solution. How you approach content making for your business depends on a lot of factors. Moreover, you know your company better than anyone and probably have a clear vision of how its voice should sound. However, what content outsourcing can do is give you more options. You will have the flexibility to tailor your marketing strategy and keep content output consistent even with a limited budget.
Thinking about outsourcing your content marketing needs? Contact the experts at Spiralytics for a free assessment today!
