To outsource or not to outsource content marketing – should that be a question?
At some point when the dependence on content marketing goes up, every company asks the question – should I outsource content marketing or should I hire our own content team. This article is meant to help those clients make the right decision, since it’s not as easy at it sounds.
Content Writing is not Content Marketing:
Content Marketing is a process. A process that usually requires a focused and dedicated team. Creating content is just one of the many processes.
Step 1: Research and Insight:
The process starts with consumer research, insight gathering and understanding consumer pain points or areas of queries with respect to your product and service or even identify potential opportunities and gaps. This needs a trained marketing mind and can easily be provided by the internal marketing team. But you will still need the help of a trained SEO professional to provide keywords with search volumes to build your strategy. However, it can be argued whether both these resources are available internally and have the bandwidth and willingness to take on additional work for the content team. In our experience cross departmental functioning is one of the key challenges for most companies and becomes a huge hurdle in execution.
Step 2: Goal setting:
At this stage the marketing team needs to sit with their editorial and content team and workout deliverables and goals of the content marketing plan. This is ideally a collaborative process between the marketing and the content teams where the marketing team lists the key problem areas and the content team helps identify those areas that content can help overcome eg: If something requires education then the content team identify those tools and methods that can best deliver that education. This is the first place you will probably feel the need for a professional content marketing professional if all you have is a content writer. Most marketing professionals will also believe they are experts at this, but this requires a good grasp of consumer insights and content creation.
Step 3: Content Strategy:
This is the stage at which the Editor or head of the Content Team works out the entire content plan with the content team and builds the content approach note, the content guidelines and the content calendar keeping in mind the marketing deliverables. This is the role an Editor plays in a publication and it takes experience and domain knowledge to get right. I seriously doubt that content writers with just 3-4 years of experience will be able to do this for any company.
Additionally, They need to take inputs from the SEO team about keywords so content can help build organic traffic. A dedicated SEO resource/team is needed to constantly feed content team keywords and search trends and consumer insights related to search behavior. Your internal SEO team may or may not be able to dedicate a resource specifically for this.
Step 4: Content Creation:
Content Comes in various forms. Articles, infographics, memes, videos, visuals or GIFs and even audio files. Each of these requires a specialization that goes way beyond the capabilities of a simple content writer. Ideally, the editor decides what information is best presented in which format. They also have to keep in mind budgets and the entire content calendar. Which is why this process also requires experience, an overall understanding of strategy and specific expertise relevant to the format the content will be created in. It takes a full team to get this in place; a team with specific skills, led by an editor that knows and understands the overall objective of the content marketing plan.
Step 5: Content Curation:
Not all content needs to be created from scratch by the content team, curating content from experts and influencers can also give a lift to your overall content marketing plan. Ideally the editor chooses this content or commissions it through the domain experts. This requires a good understanding of strategy, the writer’s capabilities and the overall objective with the specific content. The writer could also need assistance from the design team to choose visuals or design the images for the article.
Step 6: Distribution:
It’s all good creating the right content but if you can’t get it in front of the right target audience the effort is all for nothing. This means a qualified digital marketing team that has the expertise to place the content in front of the right audiences, be it through social media, social directories, mailers, newsletters, subscriptions, RSS feeds, native advertising or content alliances.
Step 7: Engagement:
So you have created the content and also got the targeting right eventually but is your TG engaging with this content? Are they reading the content, how much time do they spend on the content? Are they clicking the links? What’s the bounce rate? Are they compelled to consume more content on your website? Do they share this content with their friends? Do they leave a positive comment? All these are important questions and it takes constant analysis and trial to get this right. This is the job of a good analyst who then feeds the content performance data back to the editor and content team and gives them pointers of which competitior content worked and didn’t work. This helps the team better their performance and make adjustments to achieve the goals better.
Domain Knowledge:
Does your content writer have a domain specialization? The likelihood is that they won’t, they would have written articles for various categories and never really specialized. Can you imagine not JK Rowling but a content writer writing on her behalf? I only make this exaggerated point to drive in the point about specialization. All good publications have edit teams that focus on only one area or page. A person specializing in jobs writes for the jobs page, a person knowledgeable about the medical field writes for the medical page and the business team specializes in and writes for the business page. Imagine the chaos that would ensue if that was all mixed up. Then why would you expect a content writer to write about your category if they were writing for some other category before? Writing is about passion (domain expertise), craft (language skill), awareness (domain knowledge) and reader understanding. It takes years to become a domain expert and write with passion. The best content marketing companies, like www.digitalbait.in, will get you writers with domain grasp or expertise so your content will not just be content stuffed with Keywords, but content that helps make a passionate point with knowledge behind it.
Grasp of Language:
The content you put out represents you and your organization in front of your potential clients. Basis the knowledge shared, the problems solved and the crafting of the content your potential clients judge you and your organization. What do you think your client would think of you if your content were full of grammatical and continuity errors? 95% of content writers I have interviewed in my life have below par language skills. They could barely speak English let alone write. In a professional content marketing agency, like www.digitalbait.in, writers are experienced and usually published writers who also have a full edit team and desk team that they work with to fact check, proof read and truly edit the content before it goes live. Are you sure your content writer is the best option to enhance your organizational reputation?
Focus:
The job of a content writer is to focus on creating compelling content for the company website or blog and keep abreast with all the on-goings in the company, the industry and the category, so that they are knowledgeable enough to create content that handles the most difficult customer pain points succinctly and in the most erudite way possible. However, driven by budgets and compelling deadlines everyone is forced to work beyond their defined roles. So the writer hired to focus on the company blog is soon writing PR releases, editing the notes that need to be circulated internally, even writing ad text and letters from the department head. I even know of a client that got her content writer to do her PPTs because she was “too busy”.
Eventually the content writers focus lesser and lesser on what they were hired to do and start focusing on other writing assignments, sometimes forced by the bosses and other times to just win a brownie point at work. This impacts content delivery and performance. The content writer who was otherwise tasked to churn out 8-10 articles a month sees content going down to just 3-4 a month and eventually even lower. These are realities and unavoidable in stressed times in your organization, which is why you need an external focused team that keeps up the pace, quality, vigor and energy in your content marketing plan.
Analysis:
Probably the most important part of your content marketing plan is the analysis of what it delivered and how. Which keywords drove the maximum search queries? What was the reading time? What was the bounce rate? What was the time spent? How did the social media audience react? Did they post positive comments? Did they share the article? Did they like it? How mush organic traffic did this article generate and continue to generate months and even years after it was published? Does it need to be updated? Will new links enhance the results? So many parameters to assess and just one content writer? Or maybe 2? But do they have the expertise? As I said before, content writing is not content marketing. Trust the professionals. We know what we’re doing.
Costs:
In the end, let’s also just do the arithmetic. Setting up a professional content marketing team means hiring the following people at the following per month costs:
| Editor | US$ 1800 |
| Domain Writer (2 nos) | US$ 1500 |
| SEO expert (dedicated) | US$ 1000 |
| Designer | US$ 1500 |
| Data Analytics | US$ 1000 |
| Social Media Specialist | US$ 1200 |
| Image Subscriptions | US$ 200 |
| TOTAL | US$ 7200 |
If you are not spending this much and hiring all these resources you are compromising.
You could also just hire a professional content marketing company and probably get access to all that I have mentioned above at half the prices.
You probably went in-house to save money and have better control but lost both eventually.
It’s never too late, call us today and make the better choice.