When weighing your options for creating content marketing pieces, don’t overlook the significant benefits outsourcing your workload to an agency can have. While onboarding content writing staff or working directly with a freelancer can both be viable options, they barely scratch the surface of what a content marketing agency can offer.
When working with an agency, you have the ability to dramatically upscale the quality, quantity and overall reach of the content created for your digital marketing campaigns.
For instance, a content writing services provider can give you a set cost for creating a high-quality asset like an eBook that includes all the services you need like graphics and a paid social media promotion budget. When managing such a campaign in-house, each of these services and the tools required to make it happen are an individual cost.
Working with a content writing company therefore upgrades your capabilities while helping you achieve efficiency and streamline your content creation processes. Even if you have your own talent in-house, outsourcing even just a portion of content creation and content promotion to an agency can cut your costs and help you achieve far better campaign performance.
To help you understand what an asset a content marketing agency can be for your business, consider the following six biggest benefits below.
High Quality Professional Work With Writing Expertise
The most immediate benefit to using a dedicated digital marketing agency to write your content is a high standard of quality. Professionals who write full time have familiarity, expertise and a high level of comfortability with their craft.
In other words, they can create highly polished and engaging pieces with far less effort than your staff ever could. Professional writers have also learned hard lessons over time, such as how to insert stronger action verbs or how to structure sentences that have crystal clear meanings.
An agency-level expertise also applies to more than just the writing of the pieces themselves. They also understand long-term content strategy. Their knowledge can encompass the timing of publication, for instance, or the best way to format your pieces for optimal presentation. They may also be able to provide advice on how to select or mold topics so that your pieces always provide value and satisfy an established audience need.
Outsourcing your work can therefore significantly improve overall quality and performance compared to what can be produced in-house.
Quicker Output Potential and Scalability
In addition to quality, content writing services provided by an agency give you access to scalability. You can potentially go from a regular content load of four blogs per month, for example, to six blogs plus a premium white paper at the drop of a hat.
Because content agencies have access to a stable of qualified writers who dedicate their schedules to writing, they almost always have the capacity to take on more work. Making a dramatic content project change, such as the one illustrated above, can be accomplished quickly.
You also don’t need to develop permanent resources that you won’t have use for later. For instance, you won’t have to hire three employee writers for a special project who then have nothing to do once the project is complete.
Stop Paying Opportunity Costs, and Reclaim More of Your Labor Hours
No matter how talented you or your employees may be at writing, getting your content writing done still requires a time commitment. Employee hours that could go to things like researching business opportunities or measuring your overall marketing performance is instead spent writing and editing.
If you’re currently handling a lot of writing duties yourself, you understand just how time consuming it could be. Other projects and things that need your attention get put on the backburner, and the tasks you do get to receive a smaller portion of your time.
Outsourcing content creation frees up the time for your staff, enabling you to accomplish more and focus on activities that help your business grow.
A Content Writing Agency Can Augment Your Capabilities at a Fixed Cost
Content agencies bring a lot to the table. They often have their own tools for managing content publication, monitoring content marketing performance, or jazzing up the content itself.
For example, a content marketing agency will typically have a subscription for a stock photo service as part of their budget. Rather than you having to spend $40 to $400 or more a month on just using a few photos, you can have them built into your budget.
Likewise, a content marketing team assigned to your account will be able to help you track more campaigns and stay organized better than your in-house employees could manage on their own.
In a sense, they become a peripheral part of your staff that is highly experienced and knowledgeable. It’s kind of like having a superhero squad at your disposal. Kind of.
Create Targeted Content That Appeals to Your Audiences, Not Just Your Business Goals
Businesses that create their own content can run into one surprising and unexpected flaw: they care too much about their brand to think like a typical reader.
Because of this limitation, even the most talented in-house staff may end up writing copy that sounds more like a commercial than a blog. Over-promotion indicates bias, which breeds mistrust in audiences and can cause them to lose interest in what you have to say.
Someone embedded in an organization can also tend to forget what sorts of concepts need to be explained or kept in mind when speaking to a non-expert audience.
Content writers bring objectivity and a razor-sharp focus on audience needs with them. They are often familiar with multiple subject matters and countless styles of writing. Being well-versed helps them share expertise and explain concepts to a layperson while sounding like one of them, not some overeager marketing person.
An experienced writer can also bring with them outside perspectives a business may not have considered, such as a handy metaphor or a relevant resource they stumbled upon during another project.
At the end of the day, a seasoned content writer wants to meet the needs of their audiences above all else, which helps propel business goals without sabotaging performance by being over-eager.
Reduce Risks of Full-Time Employees
The final aspect businesses should consider when outsourcing is the sheer amount of overhead and risk full-time employees bring. Onboarding and training take a significant amount of time and a hefty financial investment. If the employee doesn’t work out — or they decide to leave their job within a few years — the business may not have fully recouped its investment in talent development.
There’s also complicating factors like additional HR overhead, benefits, employee taxes, the need for management and countless other things. Working with an agency streamlines all of this into one fixed, predictable cost that you can adjust practically at-will.
In the end, you get the work you need done more efficiently, more flexibly, and with a higher level of polish when outsourcing to a content writing services provider. Because of all the advantages they offer, their services are indispensable for businesses of all sizes no matter how many great writers they do — or don’t — have on staff.