Content marketing is one of the most important marketing techniques for small business owners. Not only is it relatively inexpensive when compared to pay-per-click, sponsorship and offline marketing tactics like newspaper advertising and cold calling, but it’s easy to do.
However, as businesses invest more money into their content marketing than ever before, some have decided that outsourcing is the most effective way to see results fast. Below, we’ve put together six reasons why you should outsource your content marketing in 2017.
You’ll save time
The average blog now takes more than three hours to write, while some bloggers admit to spending more than six hours on perfecting their content. Think about what you could be doing with that time if you weren’t worried about your blog – finishing off accounts, attending a networking conference, spending time with your family.
If your time is worth more than what it would cost to hire somebody to write your blog for you, then it makes sense to outsource. The Content Direction Agency suggests that you could avoid outsourcing your content marketing to a content factory on Fiverr, or using a freelancer without prior experience or recommendation, as “you could get a great piece of work or a really bad one”. Finding the right content marketing agency is down to you.
Outsource your content marketing: time is everything
You’ll benefit from their experience
Let’s face it – we can’t all spend our time researching the latest trends and producing things such as infographics, white papers and expert round-ups. When you outsource your content marketing, you can be sure that your brand will be up-to-date with the latest trends and that your marketing buck will go further because of your marketer’s expertise.
You could, of course, follow a small business marketing blog and learn the ins and outs of content marketing yourself, but decide whether or not this time and energy could be better invested in other areas of your business that will make you more money and more efficient.
Your content will be researched
Granted, you’ll probably know more about your business and your industry than any content marketer, but what about research? Any good blog entry will be packed with statistics, resources and opinions from industry figures. If you don’t have the time to research before you write, then the content you produce could be one-sided, business-focused or even factually incorrect. When you outsource, you know research will be done.
If you’re new to blogging and want to learn more about how to research for a new post, read this step-by-step guide on researching from HubSpot. RankWatch has also put together a guide on researching your subject and industry before writing a new blog entry.
Your writer will be accountable if something goes wrong
Content marketing is a relatively inoffensive form of marketing. Come up with a title, do some research, create a piece of content that answers a question or sparks a discussion and you’re done. Sometimes, however, content marketing can go wrong. Perhaps a piece you’ve published was badly researched, factually incorrect or even outright offensive. By outsourcing, you can be sure that controversial content (if this is a content marketing tactic you’re considering using) is dealt with accordingly. If it isn’t, they’ll have to explain why and risk losing you as a client and damaging their reputation as a content marketing agency.
They’ll post it for you
This one’s not as important as some of the other points we’ve raised in this article, but it’s good to mention nonetheless. Carefully formatting your article, including links back to other parts of your website, uploading images, writing an effective meta description and choosing the right focus keyword is important for both usability and search engine optimisation. When you work with a content marketing agency, they’ll most likely offer to upload the content directly to your website so you don’t have to, which will save time and ensure that HTML codes, SEO tags and image descriptions are used in their correct manner.
Here’s an alternative if your content marketing agency won’t upload for you, or charges extra for this service. Ask for blog posts to be delivered in Microsoft Word, and you can set up remote publishing and a connection with your blog so your new posts are published immediately. This way, you won’t need to log into WordPress and fiddle around with complicated options.
Everyone else is doing it
Outsource your content marketing: a great quote
According to research, 73% of marketers are planning on spending more money on content marketing this year. As the internet becomes overloaded with new content (more than two million blog posts are published every day), you’ll need to up your content marketing efforts if you want to stand out from the crowd. While we’re not saying that you need to spam your website with a new blog every day, publishing a single piece of content a month isn’t going to be enough to help you rank well on Google, no matter how well-researched or in-depth it is.
Simply put, if your competitors are publishing high-quality, long-form content on a regular basis and are beating you in search engine results pages, you need to do the same. And, because content writing is most likely not your area of expertise, you should hand over the work to a third-party company who can produce content that will help you rank.
Summary: outsourcing makes sense
Content marketing can be free if you have the time to learn and have a natural flair for writing, but outsourcing to a marketing agency doesn’t always have to be expensive. If you want to fill your website with in-depth, keyword-rich content that will increase your chances of ranking for key terms in your industry, then it makes sense to outsource.
What are your experiences of outsourcing content marketing? Let us know on social media.