Content marketing is a must-have strategy for any business in 2019 for big corporations and personal brands alike. Your positioning in the niche and your reputation depend on it greatly. There is just one pesky downside – maintaining a blog takes a lot of time. Now, delegating some of the most time-consuming tasks to the professionals sounds like a good idea, yet will it work for your business?
Another issue is value for money. Services of a good writer can be costly, and if you are a small company or an individual webpreneur, your budget might be limited. Of course, you can always use a paper help discount code and order content from a service that matches you with content writers on a budget. Yet that’s a one-off solution for emergencies. What about long-time strategies, then?
To decide whether hiring an external freelance writer for your business, you must consider the following:
Personality and consistency
You want all your content and all messages to your audience from your brand to be consistently written in your brand’s tone of voice. That’s why hiring a freelance writer is tricky, since inconsistency in style will be apparent at first glance.
If you are a big and established brand with a style handbook, this issue can be navigated, since you have guidelines, recommendations, and a comprehensive portfolio of text that your ghostwriter can study and take as an example. Plus, there is a chance that your style is already known to them.
Still, even the most skilled and experienced writer does not possess the personality of your CEO or whoever they are tasked to mimic. So for content intended for the upper segments of the sales funnel, when you want your audience simply to see and read you, hiring freelancers makes sense. However, for the authoritative content with which you plan to build your reputation as the opinion leader in the niche, it’s better to use your own resources. Same goes for the strategic content that will make your visitors into leads and, subsequently, customers.
Hire an in-house writer or editor if you think that your writing skills need some polishing, but write the content yourself. Who else but you has the expertise and authentic experience your audience came here for?
Consider the right balance
Working with freelance writers can be a good investment for your company when you begin positioning yourself. After all, they are professionals and their strong skills and abilities are something to learn from. Working with a writer can even help you to develop your brand’s tone of voice and your own writing style, which is a great investment in your business and the quality of the future content.
However, content writers usually lack technical and background expertise, even if they work in the same niche or with similar companies as yours. It isn’t really fair to expect it from them. Still, you can have the best of two worlds. You can jot down your ideas in a first quick-and-dirty draft and task your freelance writer with polishing it. This way you will present your audience with valuable insights in a sleek readable form.
Platforms
Another thing to consider is the intended platform. If the blog is hosted on your website, it gives you more flexibility with style and format. It’s a good place for both in-depth contents that requires an understanding of your brand and for entertaining stuff that hooks the passers-by and attracts a wider audience.
However, if you intend to win the social media game, you must play by their rules. To be the best on Facebook or Twitter you must hire a skilled SMM manager rather than a talented copywriter. If you seriously relying on social media for your success, you need someone who knows the subtleties of these channels, their audiences and ways to engage them.
All in all, it’s a decision that you make based on your company’s needs, available budget, and costs and benefits ratio. Either in-house or freelance – a writer is certainly not a must-have even in a content marketing game.
