Want to Save Time and Money? This Tactic Could be the Secret Sauce to Your Success. While you may have limitless dreams for yourself and your business, you do have limited time. This key tactic could be your key to more flexibility, consistency, time and money.
By Carlos Meza Edited by Kara McIntyre
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According to researchers, the average entrepreneur spends a whopping 68.1% of their time working on daily tasks aimed at keeping the machine in motion. That leaves less than one-third of the work week open to dealing with business objectives like long-term goals, strategic planning and producing the content that fuels the machine.
While your dreams may be infinite, your time is not. Learning where and when to outsource could be the secret sauce you need to reach the next level of success.
Should that outsourcing start (or perhaps continue) with content production? Here's how you can decide for sure.
Related: Why You Should Outsource Your Content Creation
Why is content important to your business?
Content isn't just the thought leadership you display on the company blog. It's also your infographics, webpage content, podcasts (now used by 45% of marketers), videos, e-books, white papers, emails and social media posts, just for starters.
Content is what powers your content marketing, using information and entertainment to help increase your brand's visibility and engagement online.
Every piece of content created for or by a brand should:
- Offer value
- Pique interest
- Be in line with the brand's core mission, vision and voice
- Fit at least one stop on the typical buyer's journey — awareness, consideration and decision
Creating content that ticks all these boxes and still resonates with the reader can be difficult. That's where outsourcing to a professional comes into play.
Related: Why Your Company Should Consider Outsourcing Content Creation
The five main benefits of outsourcing your content production
Full-service content providers are dedicated to the art and science of producing content that serves their clients' needs while also appealing to the target audience. It's a delicate balance and a big ask, which is why 75% of large organizations are already outsourcing at least a portion of their content marketing tasks.
Partner with an experienced content platform for your content outsourcing and you stand to reap some impressive benefits.
1. Saving time
B2B content marketers spend an average of 33 hours a week on content creation alone. Add the thick layer of responsibility that comes with reviewing the content, chasing down deadlines, sending out and tracking revisions, communicating feedback and answering freelancer questions, and you'll find generating the content your company needs can take up a significant portion of your day.
Using a provider that combines content creation with project management whittles down that web of communication to a laser-focused thread between one brand representative and one content manager. This is true whether you're looking to augment your in-house content department or rely entirely on freelancers.
No more vetting writers and editors on your own and crossing your fingers that proper execution will follow. Your content manager — armed with an existing or newly created style guide and your specific requirements — oversees everything from recruitment, training and scheduling to editing, quality assurance and feedback. Think of it as icing on the content production cake.
Related: The Pros and Cons of Outsourcing
2. Saving money
Some jobs need to be done on-site. Content production doesn't have to be one of them.
Every time you hire a person to permanently join your team, you're taking on their salary as well as costly benefits and perks. And even if you can justify an additional salary or two, you're still on the hook for filling the gaps when a writer or editor is out sick or resigns. About to take on a new client and need a temporary mega-hike in output? You'll need to find short-term writers to help meet those goals, too.
By outsourcing, you pay only for the words that are actually produced. You're allocating resources as needed rather than spending resources on talent you may or may not use. It's the difference between living in NYC and owning a car you only use twice a year for a weekend jaunt upstate and renting a car specifically for those trips and saving on parking, monthly payments and insurance in the meantime.
3. Increased consistency
Every successful brand has its own distinct voice. A custom clothing company may become well-known for emails that ooze elegance and sophistication, while a Gen Z-targeting energy drink startup prefers a far more conversational tone peppered with slang only the "fam" will thoroughly understand. Then there are the nitty-gritty grammar and style details, such as the optional use of the Oxford comma and whether subheadings will be title case or sentence case.
Consistency in branding, including in how your content looks and reads, can influence whether buyers feel comfortable with your company. Studies show that consistent branding can increase revenue by an impressive 33%, underscoring how important it is to produce content that's consistent from day to day, writer to writer, platform to platform.
To ensure those standards are met, you'd need to field content submissions from freelancers spread across the globe and evaluate each piece for a laundry list of standards to ensure all are consistent in voice, structure and quality.
Freelance writers and content production platforms happily take those tasks off your plate. They use their experience with content creation and their track record for training teams under a shared style guide to produce content that hits the target every time. No matter how many cooks are in the kitchen, so to speak, they're all answering to a project brief and multistep review process that ensures all deliverables are up to par before they ever see the inside of your inbox.
Related: 4 Essential Tasks New Bootstrapped Businesses Should Outsource
4. More flexibility
Things change. A small project becomes a big one, and that large-scale product rollout you had on tap for Q2 is now on hold indefinitely. Adjusting your content needs always comes with some challenges, but the struggle is amplified when you're dealing with an in-house team that's suddenly the wrong size for the workload at hand.
With outsourced content production, you can adjust your content expenditures to match your actual content needs, often with little notice. You can also switch freelancers to suit a new subject matter or type of content — rather than hiring a one-size-fits-all freelancer to join your staff, you can change from a freelancer who specializes in product descriptions to one who's a master of white papers almost instantaneously.
5. Putting your content in the hands of people who truly understand content
When your entire career is dedicated to creating stellar, highly engaging content, you learn a few tricks about writing content that converts. A reported 88% of successful content marketers prioritize the audience's needs over sales messaging because they know through trial and error and research that this approach works.
Professional content copywriters learn how to write for algorithms while still remembering they're writing for actual people. They know how to tackle content decay/refresh projects, revitalizing stale blogs to boost key metrics.
Outsourcing content is a smart way to extend the reach and capabilities of your team without taking on the responsibility of overseeing additional talent. By delegating content production to the professionals, you free yourself to do the things only you can do while saving money, boosting flexibility and generating a more consistent and effective online presence.
