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Stop Wasting Money and Start Profiting From Content

Stop Wasting Money and Start Profiting From Content

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Last year alone, marketers wasted $958 million on inefficient content marketing, according to Gleanster.

I hope this stat makes your stomach churn as much as mine. It doesn’t have to be this way. But too many marketers insist on “doing content,” so they start investing resources with no strategy behind why, how, or even what they will write about. 

Luckily, there are a few solutions to this problem. One powerful tactic, in particular, is outsourcing your content marketing needs.

Think about when you hire someone to install hardwood floors in your house. It’s not because you can’t do it; the task just isn’t worth your time, and one wrong move could end up costing you much more than if you’d simply hired an expert. In the same vein, while you can write, edit, publish, and distribute your own content, if it doesn’t fall within your wheelhouse, you’re sacrificing efficiency and, therefore, losing money.

Outsourcing content creation can be a scary concept to some people, largely due to the misconceptions surrounding it. Here are the most common ones I hear:

  1. “No content firm could possibly know enough about my industry to create great content.”

  2. “The content won’t convey my voice or personality.”

  3. “It’s much more expensive to outsource because companies need to maintain profit margins.”

Now, here’s how working with a vetted content marketing firm that understands your goals can eliminate these concerns:

Myth No. 1: “No content firm could possibly know enough about my industry to create great content.”

The Argument: OK, so this one isn’t technically wrong — no organization knows as much about your company or industry as you. But it doesn’t need to.

The right content marketing firm will develop a process to extract your core knowledge efficiently, freeing you to focus on running your company. This firm should also thoroughly research your industry and ask intelligent questions — while accepting that you’re the true expert — and craft those responses into unique, engaging content that reaches your target audience.

At Influence & Co., we’ve developed an exclusive knowledge extraction process that gets to the heart of your expertise and transforms it into digestible content. Once that information is carefully crafted, we utilize our more than 800 publication relationships to ensure it’s reaching your ideal audience. 

Myth No. 2: “The content won’t convey my voice or personality.”

The Argument: If you outsource your content to a content farm or ghostwriting service, your voice and personality will indeed get lost. But if you outsource it to an experienced content marketing firm, you’ll be in good hands because that aspect is baked into the process. If you want to engage your target audience through content, it needs to be authentic. But to sound like you, it has to come from you.

To ensure we nail these down, our team interviews clients during the onboarding process and continues filling out their own guidelines throughout each opportunity. After we interview the client about a particular topic and write and edit a draft, the client reviews it to ensure it captures the right voice and tone. We even send our clients fun quizzes to uncover their writing style and read through their old articles, Twitter feeds, LinkedIn summaries, etc., to truly capture their unique personality.

Myth No. 3: “It’s much more expensive to outsource because companies need to maintain profit margins.”

The Argument: Do you know how much it costs to hire an in-house content creation team? We wrote about it — the total cost is about $221,000 per year. If you hire a firm like ours, we can do what your in-house team could do and more starting at $60,000 per year. To truly do content well, you need to fill a few different positions — a content strategist, a writer, an editor, and the experts on your team with the knowledge to shine through the content. When you work with an experienced content firm with a tried-and-true process, all you need is your internal experts and about three hours each month.

As a content marketing firm, it pains us to see $958 million go to waste on shoddy content creation efforts each year. Consider what your content creation efforts could truly be costing, and avoid adding to this grim statistic by seeking help from a trusted content creation firm. New Call-to-action

Picture of Kelsey Raymond

About Kelsey Raymond

Kelsey is the COO of Intero Digital.

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