Has your company embraced content marketing? Still need some conviction? These four stats prove its utter importance.
- Content marketing costs 62% than traditional marketing and generates about three times as many leads. (Demand Metric)
- 64%of B2B marketers outsource content writing. (TopRank Blog)
- 61% of consumers feel better about a company delivering custom content and are more likely to buy from that company. (Key Difference Media)
- 78% of consumers believe that companies delivering custom content are interested in building good relations. (Dragon Search)
Eight-six percent of highly effective organisations have someone in charge of their content strategy. This means highly effective CEO’s and experts excelling in their respective field value time over money. Hence, they outsource content creation, distribution and analytics to a skilled person.
Image : Helloquence
Hire a freelance content marketer or a writer to start with. Both free up your time to concentrate on what truly improves your scalability. Here are the four reasons why outsourcing content marketing boosts your growth.
#1. Freeing up your capital for growth – Saving money is not just clever, but a necessity for most businesses. Why? The saved money can be used as capital to be invested in another division of your company.
Avoiding large expenses is beneficial in early stages. Luckily, this is where sourcing content marketing comes to your rescue. Companies building a product never attempted before generally prefer outsourcing the content marketing. If the product is another mousetrap, such as an Uber for X, it depends on your ability to sell the product to the users and iterate accordingly. The salary of an in-house content marketing specialist team including content writer, editor and graphic designer would cost around Rs 1 lakh. Outsourcing the content to a freelancer or an agency would cost between Rs 20,000–Rs 50,000.
The same can be applied when you’re looking for funding. Investors are more likely attracted to a company with cash flow being used for revenue generating activities. Failure to grasp this has lead successful businesses to struggle and ultimately fail.
#2. To focus on what you’re best at doing – Engineering new products, developing and improving service and concentrating on scalability are worthy of your attention. Producing, promoting, curating and editing content and managing the SEO of your website are not.
If none of your core team member is knowledgeable or an expert in content marketing, the first thing you should do is hire a content marketer. Why? Firstly, they are far better at strategizing, writing and marketing content than you’d ever be. Secondly, and more importantly, it gives you free hours that would otherwise be wasted in understanding the rules and trends of content marketing and mastering it. That, by any measure, is time not spent efficiently.
Entrepreneurs need to focus on tasks that make the company grow and drive the greatest ROI. This needs time.
Not just limited to startups, this applies to every business. We need to focus on things we’re best at doing. If you’re running short of time, delegate activities to other team members to create that time.
Mastering this task is the secret to faster growth.
#3. Instant access to experts – The most important business lesson I’ve learnt – surround yourself with the right people.
In early days, this is a task in itself. While the budget is limited, you need to solve the million dollar question of finding the right people to take your business to the next and highest level.
The best option is to outsource your content. Start on a part-time basis. Like creating and executing a monthly content strategy. Outsourcing allows you to work with the best content marketers at a fraction of the cost it would otherwise take to hire them in-house. You can either hire content specialists from Upwork, communities such as The Rodinhoods, personal references or by contacting them through major publications where they contribute as guest authors.
Gone are those days when large companies with in-house teams had the monopoly to appear professional. Technology has enabled the smallest companies operated by remotely working teams to rival their larger counterparts.
#4. Greater flexibility of scaling up and down – While the needs of every business are different, one thing that remains common in startups is that things can change quickly.
Building an internal content team involves the risk of hiring quickly while scaling and having to layoff the staff while scaling down. With outsourcing, your budget is the only limiting factor. So if the cash flow tightens, you can cut back the hours or the amount of work. Alternately, if business picks up, the work can be increased. Most content contractors understand this, helping you concentrate on your business and preventing you from dealing with unhappy employees.
After understanding the benefits of outsourcing your company’s content development, here are the different roles for which a content marketer is needed. Based on your requirements, you can choose anyone from the above.
#1. Creator – Content creator writes website content including landing pages, blogs, guest post articles, white paper, ebooks and social media content. Look for traits such as actionable writing style, creating a buyer persona, in-depth research, and storytelling ability.
#2. Curator – A curator researches, collects, organises and publishes content relevant to your brand or your target audience is a curator’s task. They deliver content to social media platforms, blogs and newsletters on a daily, weekly or monthly basis to grow your following. This content is published on another publication and tweaked according to your branding. It is not unique, original or bylined by you.
#3. Editor – Minor errors such as typos, spelling mistakes and bad grammar can ruin a great piece of content. A professional editor ensures that your content is interactive, relevant to the article and easy-to-understand. Acting as the second pair of eyes, the editor runs your content marketing calendar like a well-oiled machine.
Concentrate on doing what you do the best and outsource the rest.
This post was originally published on YourStory.
About me: I’m a writer, content marketer and PR and thought leadership consultant. Catch me on LinkedIn, Twitter.