Now Is the Time to Outsource Your Content Marketing Strategy
Your content marketing is a leading representation of your brand and one of the most effective ways to reach your target audience. However, consistency and quality are essential to success.
The challenge is that creating good content can quickly eat up your time. For example, surveys find that most marketers have to spend over four hours to create a good blog post.
Add to that fact that you should blog daily if possible and weekly at a bare minimum, and the task might seem practically impossible. So, how do you make your content marketing dreams come true?
Have you considered trying to outsource your content marketing?
Many successful brands find that delegating the work to experts is the right solution. Examine the benefits of outsourcing your content marketing and how to do it right.
Key Takeaways:
- Outsourcing your content marketing has an impressive ROI when you work with the right agency.
- Good content marketing will allow you to strengthen your brand messaging and improve search engine optimization.
- Outsource your content marketing effectively by setting your goals and your budget ahead of time.
- Create a good style guide to keep your tone consistent and provide clear and concise instructions to your writers.
- Establish a regular workflow and work closely with your writing team to maintain quality.
Whether To Outsource Your Content Marketing or Just Your Content Creation
If you’re going to outsource your content marketing, you have to decide whether you want help with marketing workflows or just the writing. What’s the difference?
You can easily have a capable freelance writer create high-quality articles on desired subjects. However, do you know if your content is making traction with the right audiences and drawing in traffic?
Do you know how to measure whether you’re getting a good return on your investment? What schedule should you follow, and what keywords should you target?
A lone writer or content creation agency won’t be able to help you craft and execute a well-rounded content marketing strategy. That’s why the small and mid-sized businesses we’ve worked with find it more profitable to outsource their content marketing as a whole.
Content marketing converts buyers in your target audience from mere leads to loyal customers. Content creation only involves writing good articles that may or may not have an impact.
The Top 8 Benefits of Outsourcing Your Content Marketing
Contracting with an agency to handle your content marketing delivers outstanding benefits. Consider eight reasons to get expert assistance.
1. Cost and Time Savings
Listen, we get it: You likely don’t have extra money in your budget to throw at the marketing department. However, if you don’t invest in attracting attention, especially the right kind of attention from the right people, eventually you won’t have a budget or brand at all.
Content marketing has long been one of the best expenses with a high ROI. In fact, content marketing can lower your cost per lead by 80% in a matter of months.
Granted, you and your team are probably capable writers. (Surely, you’re no dummies if you’re successfully running a business.)
Still, planning, scheduling, writing, editing, rewriting, and uploading blog posts may not be the best use of your time. The decision to outsource your content marketing can be much more practical.
Think of it this way: Even if you’re not a delivery company, you probably have a lot of people on your team who are good drivers. Despite that, you don’t deliver your mail and packages yourself because it’s not efficient.
Likewise, outsourcing your content creation and marketing is usually the right move. You’ll save time and money.
2. Become More Flexible
Another advantage when you decide to outsource your content marketing is your team becomes more agile. If you want to ramp content up before a busy season, you can easily do so without taxing your resources.
You won’t have to spend a lot of time calculating how to shift your efforts to meet content marketing demands. Just formulate a plan with your agency and let them execute it.
This flexibility is especially beneficial when the market shifts suddenly and your service or product gains high demand. You can boost your content to draw in even more sales and fend off the wave of surging competition.
3. Maintain a Stable Content Schedule
Content marketing only works when you do it consistently and give the process time to gain traction. You’ll acquire trust from your audience as a steady source of fine material and generate a snowball of positive SEO results.
However, what do you do when a legitimate emergency arises and you have to decide between “putting out a fire” and writing a blog post? It becomes way too easy to let producing content fall by the wayside and you lose your gains.
You don’t have to worry about that when you outsource your content marketing to an agency, such as MIG. Your great content keeps coming out like clockwork, making your brand look more reliable and giving you the ROI you expect.
4. Keep Your Style and Messaging Consistent and Effective
If you and your team are doing all of the writing, then keeping a consistent tone should be easy, right? Maybe not. An outside perspective helps you communicate what you really want to say.
What may seem organized and coherent to your internal team might not come across that way to your target audience. Professional writers and editors will be able to find where you can tighten up and improve phrasing and word choice.
Looking at your marketing from only your viewpoint is like trying to cut your own hair in the mirror. You’re much better off working with somebody who can see you from all angles.
5. Gain More Variety
Another benefit when you outsource your content marketing is you’ll be able to add more variety to your output. Those additional perspectives from your writers can help you laser focus on different niches in your audience.
Furthermore, you’ll find it easier to create different types of content. With the assistance, you’ll be able to give each category of customers the subjects and format they desire.
6. Build More Brand Value and Trust
Trust is critical to thriving as a brand because confidence makes buyers more likely to engage with you and recommend your offerings. How do you build that relationship?
Your content is a free sample of your thought leadership and provides actionable benefits to your prospects and customers. The consistently high-quality content you produce when you outsource your content marketing makes building your reputation a breeze.
7. Increase Leads and Conversions
Let’s be honest: this point is really what you’re here for. With content marketing, you attract the right kind of customers – those who are loyal, cooperative, and profitable, not fickle, annoying, and low-value.
Steady content guides high-value prospects through the sales and marketing funnel and keeps them coming back to you for more. Outsource your content marketing to see your conversions gradually soar.
8. Boost Your SEO for More Visibility
The modern marketing landscape is a constant fight for attention. If you’re not on the first page of search results, you might as well not be anywhere.
Content marketing helps you rank higher on Google and be the brand searchers see before competitors. Your agency partner will work with you to create and continually refine an SEO strategy, another benefit when you outsource your content marketing.
When You Should Start Outsourcing Your Content Marketing
You might already have a steady content creation process but wonder if it’s time to outsource your content marketing. The following circumstances are signs you need assistance.
You Don’t Have Enough Time
Are you burning the candle at both ends trying to complete content? Do the math and determine if the time you’re spending on researching, writing, and editing meets your personal per-hour rate.
You might only need help with a particular aspect of your content program to alleviate the pressure. For example, you could be killing it at short-form posts and social media but struggle with longer think pieces. You can’t add any hours to the day, but you can hire help.
Your SEO Is Not Delivering
Where do you rank on Google? Are you writing about the right topics? Do you have a strategy for getting easy-to-rank-for long-tail keywords?
Mastering SEO is another beast you may not have time to wrestle with, and you can’t just take a weekend course or watch YouTube to outdo the competition. However, you can outsource your content marketing to pros who understand what to do and will help you get a high ROI.
Your Team Doesn’t Have the Mix of Skills
Even if you like writing, the odds are that you really don’t want to expend your energy doing it for work. Otherwise, you’d be in that field, wouldn’t you?
Additionally, your employees and teammates might not yet have the right blend of communications and industry expertise to win at content marketing. Access professional-level content quickly by outsourcing your content marketing.
How To Outsource Your Content Marketing and Keep Quality High
One reason you might hesitate to outsource your content marketing is fear of a dip in quality. Success greatly depends on how you collaborate with your agency to manage your brand messaging.
Use the following pointers to guide you as you look for and work with a content builder service.
1. Prioritize Your Goals
Okay, we know you want more leads, customers, and sales, but how do you get there? Determine the exact conversions you require to get the specific customers you want.
If you don’t take this step, you’ll waste time and money with ineffective content marketing. Fortunately, you can have a free consultation with us at MIG to help you start on that.
Review the data and discuss things with your team to determine what you really need. The time-tested SMART formula in the image below can help you set actionable objectives in this regard.
2. Set Your Budget
When decide to outsource your content marketing, you should try to get the best you can afford. Cheaping out will get you comparable results.
For peak performance from your content marketing efforts, you should post every day. (We do it here and see outstanding outcomes.)
However, daily content may not be realistic at this point. Determine what gets you the best return and focus on that. Then, you can add features as possible.
Don’t forget that budgeting involves calculating that realistic ROI. If you have good reason to believe that $2,500 a month on content can bring in $3,500, then that expense is worth it.
On the other hand, if investing $4,500 a month quickly returns $8,000, going in that direction is a no-brainer. Examine the numbers to make the ideal choice for you.
3. Decide What To Outsource
We’re also strong believers here that you should continue to generate some content yourself while you outsource content marketing. Writing a few pieces on your own helps maintain the tone of your brand voice as you experience growth and keeps you authentic.
Determine what the agency should complete by watching the trends for what needs the biggest shot in the arm to gain traction. Farm those pieces out to the content team.
4. Find an Agency That Will Be a Good Partner
You have a lot of options for where you can outsource your content marketing. Pick an agency with a strong reputation, solid results, and many happy clients.
Above all, your content marketing agency should practice what it preaches. Do they have a regularly updated blog with loads of fresh content for their own site?
If you still need additional confirmation, request a test piece before contracting for a full-blown monthly service. A single 500-word article can give you an idea of what the prospective marketing firm can do for you.
5. Write a Solid Style Guide
Remember: Garbage in, garbage out. You need to give good direction to the team to whom you will outsource your content marketing.
Create a style guide that specifies the tone, style, and grammar rules of your company’s written work. This step ensures consistency, especially when you have to change individual writers and editors.
Be clear about your expectations and offer examples from your own writing. However, keep it concise.
The writer shouldn’t have to dig through too much information to understand what you expect. Use ample headings, bulleted lists, and short sentences for clarity.
6. Create Clear and Concise Instructions
Follow the same principles for your style guide in the instructions for each piece of content. Apply the ABC principle of good communication:
- Accuracy
- Brevity
- Clarity
Then, your writers and editors can deliver outstanding articles that meet your expectations.
7. Establish a Regular Workflow With Clear Communication
As we mentioned, content marketing can’t do much for you if it’s not consistent. When you outsource your content marketing, you need to schedule a workflow that allows you to get the full benefits from the agency.
Supply continual direction and schedule time to review posts and provide constructive feedback. Good writers (like most creatives) take pride in their work and want to get better.
To that end, make your comments specific and actionable. Isolate what isn’t cutting it for you and why it differed from your expectations (in a friendly way, of course 🙂).
At the same time, constant criticism with no commendation can get you fired as a client, and you might find that good writers won’t want to work for you. Remember to express appreciation for what does work and why so that your writers can keep doing the things you like.
8. Measure Your Success With Metrics
We preach ROI here because it matters. As you communicate with your agency, track everything to see how campaigns are meeting your goals.
Then, you can fine-tune your strategies accordingly. Remember that which metrics you use vary by your goal so continue to verify that you’re using the correct numbers to ascertain success.
Outsource Your Content Marketing To Improve Your Bottom Line
Are you ready to outsource your content marketing and get all of these amazing benefits? MIG can take the load off of your shoulders and assist you in achieving an impressive ROI.
Contact us today to schedule a free consultation and learn how you can get more traffic and leads for your business!
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