Right from website to blog writing to social media writing, content writing plays a crucial role. Your content defines your brand and the services you provide. It makes your business more recognisable and influences your potential customers.
But how to choose between DIY and outsourcing?
There are benefits and drawbacks to writing your own content compared to hiring professional writers. Let’s understand what will help you better!
Content
What Is Content Writing?
Who drives marketing?
DIY in business makes your business a “makeshifter”
Expand your auContent investment V/s Content Value dience
Final Thoughts
What is Content Writing?
Writing referred to the process of planning and writing content for online marketing purposes. There are various types of content that include writing blogs and articles, video and podcast scripts, as well as content for social platforms like Reddit or LinkedIn.
Who drives Marketing?
We’ve heard it many times – “CONTENT IS KING”. Marketing across digital media is all about content. Captivating content paves the way for potential audiences to reach your brand.
Increasingly, brands are beginning to see content as a form of currency, hence the growing importance of blogs, videos, and influential marketing across businesses. The market acknowledges the value of content that sells. The reason why there is now a wide variety of tools like Grammarly, Hemingway, Ginger, etc, is to help writers with proficiency.
It is up to the writers and marketing specialists, to create content that is worthy of sharing. Remember, it’s the content that will persuade your potential customers and help your business grow.
DIY in business makes your business a “makeshifter”
Have you ever been lost in thoughts such as,
How to hire a good content writer for your business? What is the right KPI for content & the writer? How well can a writer talk about your business technicalities? How much value can content writing add to your business? Or probably you just settled down by thinking. Let’s DIY writing!
Many businesses find themselves stranded in this very place after engaging in content marketing. And this issue can quickly become a dilemma.
This brings us to why indulging in writing for your business by yourself can turn out to be a bad idea. Out of all of our interactions with new SMEs in India, more than 30% of companies agreed that writing, blogging & SEO is something they cannot afford to outsource.
This has catapulted many conversations that we’ve had with these companies. While it may seem like DIY writing for young businesses is a good idea, we differ (strongly!). And here’s why:
Asking your Orthopaedic surgeon to also check your heart might not be a good idea.
“The work suits best in the hands of the one skilled to do it.” Although you may know the voice of your business and industry best, writing for the target audience is different altogether. You need to post fresh content that is creative and can also perform. Websites today approximately have 7 seconds before a potential user decides to commit or skip your content page. And that’s where creativity plays the lead role. Your content must be compelling enough to briskly capture your audience’s attention. Without it, the content will be just a pile of information. Anyone can write but not all are writers…
It is recommended not to email, call or message while driving. Stay focused!
You surely know a great deal more about your brand and your business than a freelance professional. And writing your own content may even sound like an obvious and affordable choice.
But, the time you will invest doing an unspecialized job will not only be proportionately much longer than a professional but also a huge compromise on your brand growth.
To add on, many companies focus on their strengths more while forgetting their weaknesses. Such lack of judgment frequently results in content that does not meet its marketing goals. Moreover, writing effective copies is time-consuming if it’s not your area of expertise. Thus, investing time in it will keep you away from focusing on your business.
To a growing business, there is not enough time to waste. Often at this stage, either content is abandoned or content marketing is postponed to a later time(a major opportunity lost).
Starting content marketing early increases your chances of penetrating any new market. You can never stop your competitors from being out loud in the market. This is why you need to be vocal as soon as possible and make your audience.
Pablo Picasso trying to write bug free software is really imaginative.
Content marketing isn’t limited to writing and modifying information. It requires to-the-mark curation, keyword research, structure, voice, and search engine optimization (SEO).
Apart from just being creative, content writing also requires technical skills. One cannot just take your product/service and load it with some keywords and post it.
You need to understand the question your audience might be asking, Hence your need to be rigorous with research, detailed curation, understanding and identifying keywords, easily understandable structure, following brand voice and finally making everything work on search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing with a grip on the latest publishing regulations, shortcomings, etc.
You won’t be able to do all this without expertise, hence the entire purpose will be defeated and you lose out time (which you don’t have) & along with that lost opportunity of growth.
Usain Bolt is not the best swimmer.
The golden rule here is to understand how your content is different from others and create content that works. Writing requires extra use of your resources, as time and money are necessary to create marketing messages that resonate with your target audience. Writers who have good knowledge of SEO and are professionally sound write content that tailors all your business goals and brand growth.
Your services/products, geographic location, and target market are only a few elements that need to be taken into account when developing your website content. There’s more to what covers content writing. While writing is better than not writing at all, financially it is not in the benefit of business owners to spend time and not generate returns.
If the party is yours, then everything is on you.
A single employee dedicated to writing might be a good option to look at, but you essentially end up spending the same costs for a lesser value.
An individual is limited with time to research, curate, write, optimize and deliver at the end of the month the cost-to-company for a single writer turns out to be of a lesser value. In such a case, some businesses try to produce content in-house with many employees trying to pitch into blogs & other content. This might seem like a good initiative to start but soon will lead to management chaos.
Managing, researching, writing, suggesting, editing, proofreading, coordinating between multiple writers and publishing can be a handful for top management with much more vital roles in their hands. And all while maintaining the same brand voice for your audience.
Content investment V/s Content Value
If you ask anyone, they would say that producing content on your own is the solution for new or growing companies. But if you look at it from a larger perspective you will see that investing time instead of money could not be profitable to any company.
If you are confident about your business then it is very important to look at it as what gives you the best ROI in the long run than what saves you some cost today. A new luggage brand offering specialized bags for adventure enthusiasts came into the market. The founders decided to write their own content, thinking no one can understand their product more than them.
Keeping this as a priority along with their regular responsibilities it took them about 15 days to finalize the type of content needed. And then took another 12 days to write the first draft. It took about 23 days more to make changes and fine-tune it.
At face value it may seem business as usual but here’s what really went down– It took them 50 days to write the content and the website was live but what gets missed out from the best of the best is what did it result in?
Any work that a founder does automatically increases its importance as an entrepreneur has many more vital tasks to be accomplished. In the case above, not only did the founders miss out on a window to contribute further to their product but also did nothing to add value to their website ranking.
The founders were passionate about their product, so that was communicated in their writing as well but there are many other factors that play a bigger role like writing format, brand language consistency, SEO, HTML tags, etc.
In order to get a good response from the search engine, one is supposed to hold a grip on how these machines work, and when it comes to audience choice that is very different from how a founder would like.
When a growing brand is competing with other established brands in the market, communication with the audience is the biggest game-changer. The writing needs to be convincing and converting, any communication hiccups lead to more bouncing off the website.
In the end, they invested about 10 months in this chaos, full of disappointment, and had to bear other financial losses. An alternative way could have been hiring a dedicated content writer in the house. An experienced content writer with SEO knowledge would cost a minimum of ₹40,000 on a monthly payroll.
It would have taken about similar time for this professional to research, write, edit & optimize which is two months of work (equal to what founders took just to write the content), and CTC would be 2*40,000= 80,000/-
The big question is what would you choose?
Investing time and increasing your chances of failure or investing 80,000/- and start getting results.
Content writing isn’t just limited to conveying the message; it consists of both technical and creative aspects. But more than that, content writing aims at marketing your product or service. The value you get out of content goes far beyond simply writing and posting.
It is a responsibility that can be difficult for a single person to manage all alone and hiring an entire department in-house for content writing and production is something large enterprises can do and take the worth out of their investments.
But it is not a practical approach for SMEs owing to the costs involved as compared to the scale of work at hand.
Acknowledging this, Teamic content writing services are a lifesaver for growing businesses. We include solutions as basic as writing a comprehensive product description to advanced long-length articles for content marketing.
The same content cost them less than 50% on investment and just about 40% of their time to write the professional content from scratch and the result was seen within 70 days of publishing.
Our workflow is equipped with technology and experienced professionals to create various types of content by understanding your audience. Catering to smart entrepreneurs gives them the freedom to focus on their business while having full control over their content. Assuring 100% performance content for their business needs.
Final Thoughts
Outsourcing content writing services can be daunting for some companies. The most common confusion is if outsourcing content will meet their expectations and help in their business growth. So, how do you make the choice? There are pros and cons to writing your own content compared to hiring a professional writer or an agency. Finding which option is right and suitable for you gives you better marketing results by using your resources more effectively. Any advice would be to hire a result-driven content marketing firm. Even though outsourcing is an additional cost, it adds a lot of value which is the biggest strength to any growing business. If you are a business looking to produce content that helps you reach out to your potential customers in the right way but have been struggling all this while. See what Teamic can do for you. Drop us an email at info@teamic.in