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Creating content is hard.
Many business and the CMOs who lead
their marketing efforts struggle to consistently create high-quality content
that engages their target audiences and achieves their organizational goals.
But struggling with content doesn’t have to stop your team from creating and
distributing it — or seeing substantial returns from it.
Outsourcing
your content marketing efforts is a
great solution for business to business (B2B) marketers across the spectrum. In
fact, the Content Marketing Institute found that, on average, 44
percent of B2B marketers outsource content
creation, and up to 57 percent of B2B technology marketers outsource content
writing, design, editing, and even distribution efforts when necessary.
Outsourcing content to the experts at
an agency that specializes in exactly what you’re looking for has some major
benefits:
1. You can scale your efforts quickly and in bursts.
When you build an internal content
team, you risk being forced to hire quickly when it’s time to scale up your
efforts or make major layoffs when you want to scale down. But if you’ve
outsourced your content to a trustworthy agency, your ability to scale is
limited only by budget, not your team’s time or personnel resources. And for a
fast-growing startup, this ability is helpful.
2. Custom technology can empower your team.
Hiring an agency focused on effective,
collaborative content creation and management means you can gain access to that
agency’s tools rather than use general software that doesn’t meet your specific
needs or build your own tech, which requires significant time, talent and
financial investment.
For example, Influence & Co.’s
clients have access to CORE,
our proprietary content technology, that allows them to access their content,
view their content’s analytics and even showcase their published content on
their public profile, which makes the entire process easier, more enjoyable and
more transparent.
3. You can save time and money.
No matter how much confidence you have
in your marketing team, if it’s already focused on executing 10 other marketing
initiatives, content creation, management and distribution won’t be as timely,
as high-quality or as efficient as an outsourced firm that specializes in
content marketing. If you're in a time crunch, consider using a knowledge management template to
streamline your content creation efforts.
Now that you understand a few key
benefits of outsourcing content, it’s important to really think through what
type of agency relationship you’re looking for. Here are three kinds of agency
relationships to help you decide what you need to make outsourced content
marketing work for your team:
The curator
Content curators collect, organize and
deliver published content that’s relevant to you or your audience to help you
grow a following. They’ll usually deliver content for your social
platforms, blog and email newsletter on a weekly or monthly basis. Normally,
this is content that’s been published before in online publications and may be
tweaked a bit to fit your branding, but it’s not unique to you, exclusive to
you or bylined by you.
The implementer
Implementers take your documented
strategy and execute the content creation. It’ll normally be a network of
freelance writers who turn around articles based on your parameters, such as
cost, quality and time. This is a good option for companies looking to churn out
high quantities of average-quality content very quickly.
The partner
Content marketing partners handle everything from strategy development to content
creation, editing, publishing, distribution and analytics, and they act as true
partners in your team’s marketing efforts. Partner agencies often assign teams
of account managers, content strategists, writers and editors to work with you
to understand your company, your audience and your goals and to create content
in collaboration with you.
While I’m biased toward a partnership
firm as the best kind of outsourced agency relationship (as my team and I built
Influence & Co. to act as a content partner), only you and your team know
what type of relationship meets your needs.
Outsourcing your content means you
understand your team’s limitations and want to be confident that your content
marketing is as high-quality and effective as possible. And delegating it to
the experts at an outsourced content marketing agency can achieve just that.
This article
originally appeared on www.inc.com
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