Regardless of what industry you are in, content marketing should always be a central part of your digital marketing strategy. However, a lot of businesses neglect content marketing because it is time consuming and more expensive than alternatives like social media marketing or PPC campaigns.
You’ll need to pay a professional writer to create that content, and that can put stress on your marketing budget. But if you want to see a good ROI on your digital marketing campaigns, you need to find a way to utilize content marketing.
Why Is Content Marketing Important?
Content marketing is there to educate your audience, which is an important step in the sales process. Before buying a product, consumers will spend more time researching it and learning about the different alternatives.
Online shopping gives consumers more choices, so they are more likely to spend time educating themselves, and that is where content comes in. The right content on your website can outline the benefits of your product and explain to customers why it’s better than any of the competing products out there. With good quality content, you can boost sales directly.
Providing informative content about your business area also lets consumers know that you are an expert in your field. Your content marketing campaigns give you an opportunity to present yourself as an industry leader, and that helps to generate trust. They will assume that your expert knowledge translates to a good quality product, and they will choose your business over your competitors.
Search engine optimization is another incredibly important aspect of your digital marketing that is directly affected by content creation. The algorithms that govern SEO take a lot of different things into account, but they give a lot of weight to good quality content.
If you create content with the right keywords, it can improve your search engine rankings and drive traffic to your website. For example, if you run a business that sells kitchen equipment, you could create content that contains keywords like ‘knife,’ ‘kitchen knife,’ and ‘chef knife.’ When people search for those terms, your site will appear higher up in the rankings.
Good content is also shared by people on social media, which does two things for your business. Firstly, it helps to boost your social media following and expand your online reach. Secondly, there is more chance that other online content will link back to your articles if they are more visible, and that gives you more SEO advantages.
Outsourcing Writers Vs. In-House Content Creation
Content marketing requires a team of people, not just a writer. You need a marketing manager to decide on a strategy and give writers an idea of what they should be writing about when creating content. Knowledge managers are an important part of the process as well because they help writers to access any company that they might need to help write articles. Then you need the writers themselves, and potentially a graphic designer to create more visually interesting posts.
The most obvious option is to fill all of those roles with full-time employees, but that is not always cost-effective. There may also be skills gaps in your marketing team, which means that the quality of your content will suffer. If that is the case, you may be better off outsourcing writers instead. You can still manage the overall direction of the content marketing strategy and come up with ideas for articles, but leave the writing to a freelancer or a third party company.
A lot of businesses make the mistake of thinking that they’re better equipped to handle their content writing in-house because they are experts in their field. But good content requires two things; a good knowledge of the subject matter, and good writing skills. The second part of that is where you are likely to fall down. You may have employees with a good knowledge of the subject, but that doesn’t make them writers. But when you are outsourcing writers, you can ensure that the quality of the writing itself is good, which is so important.
Professional content writers have good research skills, so they will take the time to understand the subject matter (it helps to provide them with resources in some cases), which means that you can be sure you will get the same breadth of knowledge in your articles.
Outsourcing Content Writers and Finding The Good Ones
There are two main directions to go in when outsourcing writers. You can hire freelancers or look for a content writing service.
There are some great websites like Freelancer, Upwork, and Fiverr where freelancers can advertise their services. If you post a job on Freelancer or Upwork, users can bid on the project and you can choose which one to go with at the end of the bidding period.
The price will vary greatly, based on the experience of the freelancer. They work on a rating based system, and so you will get new users that are willing to do jobs for a lower price in order to build up reviews. However, you cannot be sure that the quality will be good.
If you go with a more experienced freelancer, you can see their reviews and check whether they have completed similar projects in the past and what the quality was like. Most freelancers will charge somewhere between 10 cents and $1 per word, depending on how experienced they are.
The other way of outsourcing writers is to go through a content writing service. They will have a team of experienced writers that they have assessed before hiring, so quality is guaranteed. They tend to be a better option if you have a long, ongoing content writing strategy and you are outsourcing writers for all of those articles.
The pricing varies depending on the company, but most content creation services will charge between $30 and $100 per 500 word article. You can usually get a lower price on sites like Freelancer and Upwork, but the quality of the writers may not be as good.
Maintaining Quality
Maintaining quality is one of the biggest challenges when outsourcing writers. If you hand control over to a freelancer you have never met, you can’t always guarantee that they will meet your standards. But there are some simple ways that you can maintain quality when using freelancers for your content creation.
The easiest way to guarantee quality content is to pay the right price for it. If you choose freelancers based on price and always go for the cheapest option, the quality of the writing will reflect that. You may believe that you are saving money but in reality, you are not. The ROI on those low quality articles will be next to nothing. But if you pay a bit more for an experienced writer, you will see a big increase in your ROI.
Keep projects small to start with, so you can see how a writer gets on. Give them one or two articles to write and then assess the quality, then you can decide whether you want to move forward or not. It may take some time to find the right freelancer, but it’s important that you do.
Finally, you need to stay on top of the current content trends. The kind of content that people engage with is changing all of the time. You need to ensure that your business does not fall behind the curve because your content will not benefit you if it is no longer relevant.
Content creation is essential to your digital marketing campaign, and outsourcing writers is often the best way to handle it. If you find freelancers online or go to a content creation agency, you can have expert writers generate quality content that drives traffic to your website and boosts sales.