Content marketing will help boost your search engine rankings so that potential patients can find you but….
Have you then said to yourself that you don’t have the time and don’t know where to start to get the most “bang for your buck” when it comes to results?
This is where outsourcing comes in. Let an expert do your content marketing and you get to be the hero.
According to the 2018 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends in North America, 53 percent of respondents said a small or one-person marketing team serves the whole organization and 56 percent of those polled outsource one or more content marketing activities.
This topic was touched upon previously https://themedicalstrategist.com/blog/websites/what-you-need-to-know-about-outsourcing-your-blog-and-web-content/
Because this is such a helpful topic, we are revisiting it and adding information.
5 Steps to Outsourcing Strategies
1. Decide on the content you’ll outsource
Content marketing includes:
- videos
- podcasts
- GIF/animations
- teleseminars
- webinars
- blog posts ebooks
- whitepapers, guides
- article publishing
- newsletters
Some of the content may be aligned with your skills and you may want to do videos of procedures and techniques while outsourcing written content. You may feel the opposite. The thing is to play to your strengths and let someone else take up the slack.
2. Map out your goals for content marketing
Let’s look at the benchmark from organizations who took part in the 2018 B2B Content Marketing Benchmark, Budgets, and Trends:
What is it that we learned from viewing the list above? The “sophisticated” organizations are the most advanced, followed by the mature ones. If your business practice falls into one of the other three categories you should ask yourself these questions to help you determine how to deepen your relationship with your audience:
- Do we already have “share-worthy” content?
- Can we measure the impact?
- What kind of content should we develop that gives our audience value?
Those questions are best asked during a content audit to enable you to decide appropriate and realistic content targets or goals.
Your first goal in content marketing can be brand awareness, then creating and strictly following an editorial calendar.
You can see from these that a content audit is important at whatever stage of content marketing you’re at. Setting clear goals for content that will be outsourced, brings you one step closer to success.
3. Decide upon your analytics
Typically, the success of your content marketing will be based on KPIs (Key Performance Indicators):
- Social shares
- Brand awareness
- Website traffic
- Onsite behavior
- Leads generated
- Quality of leads
- Conversion rate
- Sales
As you progress, your priorities may change and that is fine because your marketing is an evolution to accommodate your needs and results.
4. Freelancer vs. Agency
An agency may take all the work out of your hands for choosing the people most skilled for the work you want done. However, agencies can be expensive considering their overhead costs. If your project is not a costly or large one too, the agency may not consider it as important as other clients, relegating your project to the least experienced and newest members of their company. You would not be the one choosing who does the job within the agency.
Selecting a suitable freelancer can be a time-consuming process. Then there’s the need to hire several freelancers to fully power your content marketing machine since one may not be sufficiently skilled in all areas of content marketing where you need help.When you find the freelancers that can speak in your voice and accomplish your goals, it is so very worth the effort!
I know some organizations who choose to work with several freelancers for different needs and others who work with both freelancers and an agency. That means this doesn’t have to be an “either-or” proposition but there’s room for a combination if it suits your needs.
5. How to Find YOUR freelancer
There are many ways that you can find the one who will be dedicated to you and work the best for your purposes.
Steps include:
- Getting referrals from friends, staff, or other businesses in your field
- Posting ads on job boards such as: Problogger Job Board, Indeed, Monster, LinkedIn et al. Alternatively, post it on sites like Upwork, People per Hour, or Guru and choose a suitable applicant from the flood of applications.
- Scour sites in your industry: Visit sites that accept guest posts in your niche. Read some posts, and if there’s any you particularly like, just contact the writer and ask if they’d be willing to produce such content on your site.
- Look at articles relevant in your field of expertise. Check the writer’s bio at the end of the article to see if there’s a way you can contact him or her for your content project.
This is not the only way to find freelancers but it will give you some ideas. Also check out a previous blog post that discusses this at:
It’s not a definitive list of ways to find freelancers, but it will surely give you ideas.
If you want to hire an agency, find out their core focus areas and if they have worked with companies in your niche before. Just because they offer a suite of services doesn’t mean they’ll be the right fit for you.
Outsourcing content marketing doesn’t have to be stressful
The initial process of outsourcing content to an agency or freelancer may stress you. But when you find the right one, it will all be worth it.
Call for a free consultation at 516-647-3002 and we can discuss your needs and what steps to take next.
