Why The Smartest Marketers Have External Writing Teams
Introduction
Content marketing plays a pivotal role in today's digital landscape. It is one of the most powerful tools for businesses to engage with their target audience, build brand awareness, and drive valuable customer actions. When you publish and distribute helpful, relevant, and actionable content to attract, educate, and entertain potential customers, you create long-term interest and loyalty in your brand..
One of the key advantages of content marketing is its ability to establish a brand's authority and expertise within a specific industry. By consistently producing informative and insightful content, businesses can position themselves as thought leaders, gaining the trust and respect of their audience. This authority not only enhances brand reputation but also increases the likelihood of attracting potential customers and driving conversions.
While content marketing has clear value in our ever-more digital world, it can be very laborious to create. Between strategic planning, research, interviews, writing, editing, rewriting, and quality-checking to ensure your content will achieve its goals, marketers can spend hours upon hours of time on work that doesn’t always hit quality minimums or boost lead generation.
That’s where the value of external writing teams comes in. Writing is one of the most lengthy and expensive processes of the content marketing lifecycle. To be effective and cost-conscious, you should consider the benefits of using external writers to keep your content pipeline flowing.
The High Value of Content Marketing
The value of content marketing has increased significantly in the past two decades and for good reason. Content has several advantages as a holistic method to connect with target audiences, communicate product benefits and company values, and contribute to company revenue. Did you know that 68% of consumers want to seek out a product after reading content about it?
Let’s look at the reasons why content marketing is so valuable to today’s companies.
-
Supports relationship-building - When you invest in consistent, relevant, high-quality content, you are starting a valuable conversation with your prospects. They will feel connected to your brand as they engage with your blogs, newsletters, and social media posts. In fact, 78% of people feel they've developed a relationship between themselves and a brand after reading custom content.
-
Establishes authority and propagates your brand voice - While your website should be the heart of your brand voice, content helps prospects see all the aspects of your company’s “personality.” It shows your sense of humor, commitment to your industry, and desire to give back. It also showcases your expertise so prospects know you can deliver on your promises.
-
Drive organic traffic - Content marketing is instrumental in driving organic traffic to your company's website. It improves your visibility in search engine results, driving relevant, low-cost traffic to your website.
-
Generates leads - Through a mix of SEO, account-based marketing, and social media engagement content, you can build a strong lead-generation engine that uses calls-to-action, paid ads, and viral content to bring you more leads.
-
Builds trust - Creating a trusting relationship with your target audience is more important than ever, especially now that consumers are more critical and analytical about their purchasing choices.
Building Efficiency into Content Marketing
Of course, just because you understand the value of content, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have efficient processes and procedures in place to manage. It’s very easy for content to become unwieldy, especially since writing in particular can be lengthy and laborious.
As specialists and leaders in content marketing, we stay on top of tools and techniques that shorten the content development lifecycle without sacrificing quality. Here are a few key concepts we’ve adopted.
Start with a strong content strategy
Everything you do in marketing should start with a strategy. A strong strategy with clear goals, key themes you want to address, target audience research, and established content formats resonate most with your audience will save you significant time down the road.
When your team doesn’t need to ask questions about why they’re doing what they’re doing or what KPIs their content is expected to achieve, you’ll reduce meetings, revisions, and poor results — which means you gain more leads and better brand awareness faster.
Create a content calender
Here’s the fun things about content calendars: They’re always wrong. It’s very rare to schedule a full quarter of content and have it play out exactly as you planned. Industries and trend progress and morph faster than ever these days and there will always be some campaign, topic, or event you have to adjust the calendar for.
That said, without a content calendar, your ability to execute your strategy will be greatly compromised. With a content calendar, better coordination among team members and ensures that content is produced and published in a timely manner.
Repurpose and refresh your content
One glaring problem we constantly see in our industry is a lack of content ROI; companies constantly create new content, rinse and repeat, and don’t fully get a stake in the value of each piece — even as it ages.
If you create a piece of content — particularly a long-form piece — you have way more than just one ebook or blog. You also have an infographic, email series, interactive quiz, video, etc. Take full advantage of each piece by repurposing your content. In addition, rather than creating new blogs, you can refresh old ones to reflect new information available, keep your brand voice fresh, and boost SEO.
Take advantage of the benefits of AI
While tools like ChatGPT and Bing have their limitations, they can be incredibly valuable in speeding up specific parts of the content development process. Here a few of our favorite uses of AI tools.
-
Research - using an online AI tool or ChatGPT plugin, you can get access to tons of research and in-depth information about your topic. Pro tip: Be careful about using these tools for topics you don’t understand well; they have been known to “lie” and you will need to fact-check them.
-
Outlining - ask your AI tool to provide several different versions of an outline for a topic you’re writing about. Pro tip: Never ask for only one outline. Let the tool do what it does best and give you a host of options to choose or brainstorm from.
-
Writing - while AI tools are not effective writers just yet, they can help you push through writer’s block by expanding on your ideas or giving you novel ways to introduce an article or topic. Pro tip: If you’re struggling with how to word a sentence, just write a poor version of it and ask your AI tool to rewrite it for you with proper grammar.
-
Editing - Grammarly is the leading AI tool for editing. It can catch all those tiny mistakes that our human brains skip over like extra spaces, a missed comma, or capitalization issues. Pro tip: Look into the upgraded version of Grammarly. It can give you good ideas for rewording, simplifying, and clarifying compound-complex sentences.
Outsource to experts in your field
Whether it’s writing, editing, SEO, or design, using reputable third-party sources to execute lengthy portions of content creation can save you tons of time — and often money, too. If you operate in a niche field, have a small marketing team, or simply want to keep your team focused on strategic objectives, you have a lot to gain by commissioning focused experts to supplement their team. Let’s dive into this a little deeper in the next section.
Top 5 Reasons to Use External Writing Teams
As we mentioned, outsourcing content development to outside vendors has many advantages. While there are many aspects of content marketing that are laborious, the most lengthy part of the process is writing. An ebook can take upwards of 8-10 hours to write and a long blog could potentially take 4-6 hours.
External writing teams can cut down on this time suck while also providing several other benefits.
-
Reduce costs
Maintaining an in-house writing team can be a significant expense for companies. In addition to writer salaries, there are also the associated costs of benefits, training, and overhead like equipment. Additionally, there are the hidden costs of recruitment, management, and potential turnover.
Hiring external writers through freelancers or an agency often involves a more flexible cost structure. You can hire writers on a project-by-project basis or on a long-term contract, depending on how much content you need and how often you need it. Because the external writers, agencies, or contractors are responsible for their own training, equipment, and recruiting, you save a lot of money that can be spent on lead generation or branding.
Finding full-time writers with experience, industry expertise, and quality skills can also get pricey. With an external pool of writers to choose from, you can strategically identify the content that can be written by a more novice writer vs. a skilled writer and break up your budget accordingly.
-
Access specialized skills
One of the significant advantages of hiring external writing teams is the ability to tap into specialized knowledge and skills for a particular industry, technology, or academic area. For instance, if you're a tech company, you might need writers who are well-versed in the latest technology trends and can translate complex technical concepts into clear, engaging content. If your company has a high-end fashion brand, you’ll want writers that understand the trends, language, styles, textiles, and pop culture of the target audience.
While some of this information can be researched online, much of it is gained with experience — either by those who have worked in the industry in a previous career or those who have been writing content for companies in that industry. An external provider can curate these individuals for you, bringing a wealth of writers that execute your content in more depth and detail than you could find elsewhere.
This is particularly important for organizations that have products and services that span multiple industries. You may need content for the construction industry one day, food & beverage another, and high tech another. That’s a broad range of industry expertise that is unlikely to be found in a single person. With an external team, you have all of these individuals at your fingertips whenever and however you need them.
-
Increase writing quality
Building on our previous point about specialized knowledge, a larger pool of writers also gives you access to higher-quality writing. Consistently delivering accurate, engaging, and SEO-optimized blogs and ebooks is not a simple task. If you are fortunate to have staff writers who are highly skilled, they are quickly and easy overloaded with projects, which can affect the quality of their writing. It can also lead to burnout — and you don’t want to sacrifice a good writer once you’ve found one!
Supplementing good writers with an external support team can give them peace of mind and a lower-stress work environment. The shorter, easier projects can go to your external team while the pieces that require tribal knowledge and in-depth skill stay in-house. On the flip side, if you’ve found a novice writer who is a great fit for your team, external writers can take on the more complex, difficult work while your writer learns and grows into their position.
High-quality writing enhances your brand image, engages your target audience, and drives your marketing results. It also improves your SEO rankings, making it easier for potential customers to find you online. With an external writing team, you have the resources you need to hit a home run every time.
-
Save time for your team
There’s no such thing as a bored marketer. Marketing teams are strapped with content and campaigns requests, hard-hitting KPIs, and expectations to boost and sustain revenue. In this environment, who has time to write?
Even if you have one or more full-time writers, your demand generation, customer advocacy, and account-based marketing teams have to share the writing resources — which often means pausing to wait for them to finish a previous project before they start a new one. But what if you could have external writers working on ten different content pieces in tandem with your staff writers?
One of the biggest advantages of an external writing team is that they simply save your in-house team a ton of time. They also provide a lot of flexibility for unexpected priorities. Have a business unit that needs to generate a blog post on a time-sensitive industry development? Check-in with your in-house team. If they have time to handle it, great! Hand their existing projects off to your external writers. If your in-house team already has a full plate, you have access to a large range of talent that can slip your content in a short amount of time.
-
Help your team focus on what they do best
Here’s the thing: If you’ve hired an internal writer and content manager, you’ve hired them because they have skills that go beyond putting words on a page. These individuals have deep knowledge of your corporate goals, marketing strategy, and primary tactics for building your business’s brand. Their skills are best applied to, industry research and trend analysis, determining the right topics to write about at the right time, strategic direction, content distribution tactics, and building better content marketing processes.
Your marketing team might currently be spending a considerable amount of time writing blog posts, social media content, case studies, and white papers. While the writing aspect of your content is undoubtedly important, it could be taking them away from these other more valuable activities that drive your success forward. By delegating the content creation to an external team, your internal team can focus on what they do best.
If productivity, consistency, and efficiency are a concern for your content team, external writers are one of the best and fastest ways to make major gains in output.
Consider Scripted as Your External Writing Resource
Whether you’re a small business, enterprise company, marketing agency, or media conglomerate, your marketing depends on high-quality content. But not all content or writing services are created equal. Effective content needs to do more than just exist; it needs to convert. It should rank high on search engine results, boost social media engagement, and elevate brand recognition.
The key is collaborating with a proficient and experienced writing team committed to helping you achieve your goals. At Scripted, we've taken the burden off your shoulders by handpicking the finest blog writers in the industry. We have a stringent selection process, that accepts only 2 percent of applicants.
In addition, we are the only platform that allows you to take advantage of the time and cost-saving benefits of AI. Our writers not only possess strong writing skills, subject matter expertise, and a solid understanding of marketing strategies and techniques, they have AI tools at their disposal to help them conduct research, build outlines, and deliver accurate, engaging, and helpful content. Sometimes you need AI-only content, and other times you need more thoughtful, high-quality branded content that stands out and can only be written by a seasoned expert. Why use either one when you can have both with Scripted?
Our AI tools also supplement our comprehensive platform to simplify the process of hiring content writers. AI matches you with writers that have expertise in your industry. You can interact directly with them within the platform, provide feedback, and much more. It's a hassle-free experience that allows you to purchase blog posts with minimal effort.
Hiring writers you can count on is easier than ever — and we're here to help you every step of the way, supporting you and your business goals. Scripted is the place businesses should use AI in conjunction with the top writers in a wide variety of industries. Access Scripted's free trial to optimize your content marketing budget today!
