Content marketing is the key to creating and maintaining your business’s online presence. Without content, your website, blog, or social media channels are like single grains of sand on an endless beach.
Content not only ensures the right people find your website but that they also find value in returning again and again. To provide your audience with a high-value return on the time they spend engaging with you, it’s essential to publish high-quality content consistently.
However, generating a continuous stream of inspired topics and then actually writing the content requires a significant amount of time and energy. As much as you might love musing, as a business owner, your time and energy are better spent on more important tasks like research and development, management, financial reports, operations, and business strategy. (Someone has to call the shots, right?)
With its myriad benefits, outsourcing content has become an increasingly popular choice for business owners. Whether you run a small business, manage a marketing team or department, or you are an independent entrepreneur, outsourcing content allows you to save countless resources while reaping the benefits of a killer content strategy.
Why Outsource Content Creation? Top 10 Benefits of Outsourcing Content
Remember those benefits I just mentioned?
Let’s go over 10 of the most important and impactful ways that outsourcing content creation can help your business benefit:
1. Save Time and Money
If you’ve been trying to maintain a blog or social media presence by publishing regular posts, then you already know how much time it takes to write high-quality content and produce it consistently. When you’re a business owner, your time is money and your money is time. The more time you have available to focus on actually running your business, the better chance you have at success.
Apart from saving money by saving time, spending money to hire a freelancer to handle your content needs will actually save you money. When you try to save a little by avoiding the expense of outsourced talent, you end up handling content writing yourself. As a business owner or manager, your time is often more expensive than a freelance content creator’s hourly rate. That means you end up spending more writing the content yourself if you take into account your hourly rate.
Plus, freelancers are less expensive than full-time employees and way less expensive than in-house marketing departments. They’re paid as contractors and earn 1099 income rather than W-2 income, which means your business is not responsible for payroll tax, unemployment insurance, benefits, or any other overhead expenses associated with in-house personnel. In fact, you’ll probably be able to deduct the cost of writing services as a tax writeoff against your company’s earnings.
2. Focus on Your Core Business Functions
If writing content is your favorite part of your job, you might be in the wrong business.
Let’s face it, if you were a writer at heart, you would have chosen to become a professional writer instead of running your own business. When you outsource your content creation, you can spend your newly found free time with your feet up or you can use it to focus on growing your business.
Outsourcing your blog posts, emails, social media posts, ebooks, and more to a content writer frees up your time. That means you’ll have more time to research new products, services, and avenues for expansion. Most importantly, you’ll have the time and energy to follow your true entrepreneurial spirit.
3. Improve Your Brand Voice and Messaging
Since we agree that writing is not your forte (business is your forte), let’s also talk about how much your brand voice and messaging stand to improve with the finesse of a professional writer’s touch.
Whether you want to capture a funny, playful, sincere, fashionable, contemporary, or professional tone, you can achieve exactly the voice you’re looking for with targeted messaging created by an outsourced professional.
Professional content writers or content creators specialize in style-flexing or adopting the brand’s style, tone, and voice when developing content. Whether you have an established style and tone or you’re still looking for your brand’s voice, you can benefit from working with a professional writer who understands the importance of creating content that is uniquely yours.
4. Find Experts Who Can Write, Too
Hiring a professional writer outside of your business doesn’t mean you have to settle for someone who is not an expert in your industry. Whether you’re a butcher, baker, candlestick maker, B2B business, lawyer, carpenter, doctor, perfume purveyor, or IT specialist, there are plenty of writers available who specialize in creating niche content for high-level audiences.
Finding a subject matter expert who is also a talented writer is not impossible. You can outsource your writing work to someone who understands your industry and niche and can also talk about your products or services in a way that appeals to your ideal audience.
5. Stick to a Schedule
When you’re creating your own content, it can be easy to get caught up in other business matters and completely forget about your blog, social media accounts, or other content marketing avenues. Outsourcing your content creation helps you avoid this issue as you have an expert content creator who is dedicated to creating content for your business and publishing it on time.
With an outsourced writer, you can easily agree on deadlines to effortlessly stick to a consistent publishing schedule. While an in-house writer may be likely to get caught up in the busy nature of your business, a freelance writer doesn’t have those same distractions. Good freelance writers are excellent at juggling multiple deadlines as their work often comes from many different sources.
6. Publish Different Types of Content
When you’re struggling to create good content on your own, it’s easy to get stuck in a rut with your content production when it comes to variety. You may not have time to research or test different content types to see what resonates best with your audience. Many business owners also just don’t have the experience or knowledge to change their tone, style, and messaging to fit a specific content type.
When you outsource your content creation process to talented freelancers, your business will have much more flexibility to publish a variety of content types. To reach a larger audience, you’ll be able to convert blog posts into social media posts into podcast transcripts and more.
7. Grow Your Content Strategy with Your Business
Outsourcing content creation allows you to scale your content marketing strategy along with your business. You’ll have the flexibility to select the services and volume of content that’s right for your business now and decide to scale back or add more when the time is right for you.
8. Achieve Consistency
Consistency isn’t just about sticking to a regular publishing schedule; it’s also about achieving a consistent voice, tone, message, style, and syntax. Your brand should always sound like your brand so that it’s immediately recognizable to customers.
A professional writer (or a talented writing team) can help you establish a high level of consistency to achieve strong brand recognition. This consistency in your content marketing efforts will have a big pay off when you start to see more leads coming in through your content.
9. Benefit from Several Perspectives
Even if, at first, you team up with only one outsourced writer, your business will benefit from having an outside perspective. A writer’s fresh voice will renew your creative energy, help you come up with original content marketing ideas, and might even make it possible for you to reach a broader, more diverse audience.
10. Increase Lead Generation and Conversions
Arguably, generating leads and increasing conversions are the reasons why we do content marketing, and better content means a bigger return on investment. (Plus, didn’t we already mention that investing in outsourced content is much cheaper than doing it yourself?)
Why Choose to Outsource Content Creation with a Freelance Writer Instead of Hiring a Marketing Agency?
Hiring a marketing agency could save you time, improve your content, and also increase your lead generation and conversions. So, why would you choose to outsource content creation to a freelancer instead of hiring a marketing agency with all their fancy content bells and strategy whistles?
Well for starters, outsourcing a piece of your content strategy – instead of the whole thing – is A LOT less expensive. When you hire an entire marketing agency to do your marketing for you, you’ll likely end up spending more than you want to, receiving more services than you actually need, and you likely won’t have the ability to hand-pick or communicate with your writers (the people responsible for creating your brand’s signature voice).
Hiring a freelance writer or a team of freelancers to handle your content creation is just like having a new person on your in-house team but without the exorbitant overhead expenses of actually hiring a full-time writer. You can communicate directly with the writer, maintain as much control over your content marketing strategy as you desire, and you’ll love how easy outsourcing is on your bottom line. Plus, you’ll be able to scale the services you receive as your business grows.
Ready to Start Outsourcing Content? Find Out How to Hire the Best Freelance Writers
First, you’ll need to think about establishing a process for working with outsourced freelance writers that can be incorporated into your existing workflow and also generate desirable results.
Next, begin the search for the perfect freelancer. When it comes to outsourcing your content creation, not just any writer will do. You need to find the best writers who also have sharp business sense and professional discipline to generate high-quality content on a consistent basis. You can look for freelancers working independently or go to a freelance talent marketplace, like WriterAccess, to search from a pool of highly recommended pre-vetted writers.
However you choose to outsource your content creation, you’ll love having more time, energy, and money to invest in achieving your entrepreneurial dreams.
A full-time freelance writer and editor, Jennifer G. believes that understanding each client’s unique business, brand, voice, passions, and goals is the true challenge of content creation. With every new client and project, she loves diving in, getting acquainted, and developing long-lasting relationships. Jennifer is also the author of our weekly content marketing trends report that hits the blog each Friday.
