But we’re not talking about outsourcing to machines in this post. Additionally, even if you’re outsourcing written content, you’ll still decide what types of written content you’ll outsource and what types of content an employee or employees in your organization will handle. Decide what types of content you’ll outsource. To help you decide your organization’s level, you can use this benchmark from organizations who took part in the 2018 B2B Content Marketing Benchmark, Budgets, and Trends: First steps: Doing some aspects of content, but have not yet begun to make content marketing a process. From the list above, the “sophisticated” organizations are at the most perfect level, followed by the mature ones. If you’re still “young,” your goal can be measuring what’s working and doubling down on it. You can see from these that a content audit is important at whatever stage of content marketing your organization is. No one is saying that a “sophisticated” organization should track only leads generated or that a “first steps” organization should use traffic as their only measure either. 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. Outsourcing content marketing doesn’t have to be stressful The initial process of outsourcing content to an agency or freelancer may stress you.
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. Often, that’s not enough and that’s why 56 percent of them outsource one or more content marketing activities.
Nowadays, at least one of several types of AI technology can produce some form of written content. Some media companies use them these days to reduce costs and time spent in producing content. In fact, Gartner predicted that by 2018, nearly 20 percent of content will be produced by machines.
But we’re not talking about outsourcing to machines in this post. We’re addressing the steps you can take to properly outsource your content marketing to humans like you and me. Here they are:
1. Determine which type of content you’ll outsource
When the term content marketing is used, most people readily think of written content. Maybe you’ll easily think of blog posts, articles, ebooks, email newsletters, and whitepapers.
But as I believe you know already, content involves much more than written words. Because videos, podcasts, software, infographics, memes, animation, cartoons, and webinars are also content. Of course, there are many other different types of content for either camp – written or non-written.
The point is while understanding that we have a variety of content types out there, this article is primarily talking about outsourcing written content. However, the principles here can help you, whether you’re outsourcing infographics, videos, or software.
Additionally, even if you’re outsourcing written content, you’ll still decide what types of written content you’ll outsource and what types of content an employee or employees in your organization will handle. For example, some companies outsource writing blog posts, while they handle content like case studies and email newsletters. Other companies outsource practically everything.
It’s your choice. Decide what types of content you’ll outsource.
2. Set your content targets and goals
Depending on how far off you are in the content marketing game, you can set goals and targets commensurate with your content marketing maturity level. To help you decide your organization’s level, you can use this benchmark from organizations who took part in the 2018 B2B Content Marketing Benchmark, Budgets, and Trends:
- First steps: Doing some aspects of content, but have not yet begun to make content marketing a process.
- Young: Growing pains, challenged with creating a cohesive strategy and measurement plan.
- Adolescent: Have developed a business case, seeing early success, becoming more sophisticated with measurement and scaling.
- Mature: Finding success, yet challenged with integration across the organization.
- Sophisticated: Providing accurate measurement to the business, scaling across the organization.
From the list above, the “sophisticated” organizations are at the most perfect level, followed by the mature ones. We can say that for both, setting content targets or goals is a breeze. Nevertheless, if your organization falls into one of the other three categories, you need different content targets, but you should still 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. So perform one first, to enable you to decide appropriate and realistic content targets or goals.
For example, if you’re taking your “first steps” in content marketing, your first goals can be brand awareness, then creating and strictly following an editorial calendar. If you’re still “young,” your goal can be measuring what’s working and doubling down on it. And so on.
You can see from these that a content audit is important at whatever stage of content marketing your organization is. When you establish clear goals for content that will be outsourced, you’re one step closer to doing it…
COMMENTS