Engaging and quality content is the in thing!
These days, it’s not enough to just have a business and a website, you need to do more with your website, you need to attract traffic, engage your visitors and convert them into leads and keep them permanently hooked.
From Blog Posts to Newsletters, Articles, Emails, Web copies and so, nothing gets people raving like interesting and engaging content.
Organizations that have keyed into this online marketing strategies are reaping the profitable rewards. If you don’t have a content marketing strategy in place, you are likely to lose out.
As an entrepreneur or business owner looking to take your business to the next level, drive traffic to your website and convert visitors to paying customers, you require the expertise of a content marketing writer to do the job.
Someone who is an excellent communicator and will be responsible for creating online content that best interprets your brand and builds trust and loyalty with readers while engaging and informing them.
The demand for great content is on the rise and it naturally correlates to a demand for expert content marketing writers. There’s a constant search for skilled individuals with the ability to craft and curate authority-driven, engaging written content.
The debate for who to use, then comes into play.
In-House Writers
Most large organizations with the funds to afford the costs of hiring full-time have In-House Content writers.
These individuals are salaried employees, trained about your particular business, your industry, your customers and they understand your organization’s culture. They are hired to create content for the organization alone. From written content like blogs, articles, ebooks, web copies, newsletters, emails, social media copies, and more they do it all.
It is their job to consistently produce content that conveys your company’s message and is targeted and tailored to the right customer. In-house writers are also available to discuss changes and edits and strategize the content message created.
Content Marketing Agency
A Content Marketing Agency consists of an entire team of creative individuals of varied skills, expertise, with the right training, working with quality standards and quality guidelines.
The dynamic world of a Content Marketing Agency seeks to consistently recruit skilled experts to handle any and all aspects of whatever job they take on. Their experience also consists of lots of completed projects under their belt.
As an agency that has worked with various companies from different fields, they will have a better understanding of your competition and benchmarks in place for quality assurance.
With a content agency, you have access to multi-talented professionals who work effectively and efficiently to deliver the quality marketing content you require with speed and ease.
Which of them would you choose to create effective, high-quality content and execute content marketing strategies?
An in-house writer or outsource and pay a content marketing agency to create content?
Here are a few factors to consider…
Delivery Timelines
Content marketing is fast-paced and requires research and efficiency to create the desired results.
An In-House Writer can only sort out one project at a time and this makes it a slow tedious process. Blog posts, emails, articles, and so on can only be handled one at a time, and requesting them all at once will put a constraint on the person’s daily responsibilities.
Although there is room for flexibility with workload and timelines for your strategies, and your strategies can be tweaked or modified, where and when necessary. On the flip side, you can get hit by unplanned disruptions like absence, or staff unavailability and fall behind with no one to take over the project.
The Content Marketing Agency can handle multiple projects of all sizes and time frames, provide uninterrupted services and delivery within the deadlines as their reputation is on the line. With a contract, they will offer a proposal and agree to a set of deliverables and a time frame. They have the resources, personnel, and infrastructure to handle various projects at once whatever they may be.
Cost and Scale of Expertise
One major downside to hiring an In-House Writer is the added expense associated with retaining an employee. Apart from basic salary, there are also additional fixed expenses like taxes, health insurance, pension, leave allowances, etc.
This is quite expensive for just one person who has a basic writing skill and this means you still need to pay for the services of a graphic designer, web developer, and so on.
With a Content Marketing Agency, you are getting expert services that include graphic design, web development, social media management, and marketing strategists that all work together to help you reach your business goals at the same proposed cost.
A content marketing agency consists of a wide range of individuals with different ideologies coming together to provide a number of services targeted at various marketing activities and aimed at increasing your leads and sales at no extra cost.
Flexibility and Workload Management
A Content Marketing Agency can accommodate any significant amount of change you require, tailoring their services to your needs without interruption. Added list of tasks, more work, regardless of the time relativity, they will adapt to the requirements they will deliver.
An added bonus of using an agency is more people equals easier and faster delivery, with a large number of resources at their disposal, the workload is easily manageable.
As the marketing strategies increase, their expert capacity expands as well and they are able to cope because they already have the right teams in place for the type and size of projects.
With an agency, you’re not worried about staff availability, there is always someone else available and this makes the work run smoothly.
An in-house writer is always available to regularly manage and create content and this means a few delays in fulfilling tasks as they arise. Regardless of the level of skill or experience, there are limits to the amount of work that can be handled.
An In-house writer is pressed for time and overwhelmed with multiple deliverables and projects. Inconsistent content production becomes a norm and unplanned changes can be problematic.
When the task increases, it can also put pressure on the remaining team members and the quality of content can be affected or the deadlines may be missed.
Each has a unique approach with its own merits and challenges as well.
If you still do not know which to choose, ask yourself the following questions:
- What is the size of your business?
- Can your organizational structure fit an in-house team?
- What are your content marketing needs?
- Do you understand content marketing?
- How well do you understand your competition?
- Do you have well-defined goals for your content marketing strategy?
You should consider outsourcing to an agency if you are a startup, or a small company and a limited budget and you’re new to content marketing. Using an agency allows you to focus on growing your business while the agency works on your content marketing strategies.
If you have a larger organization with the space to accommodate an in-house team that is producing good results and you already have an understanding of content marketing, you can also outsource extra work to an agency to scale up your strategy.
What’s your verdict?
Weigh the pros and cons of each and how their strategic content marketing plans meet your business goals and needs before you make a decision.