4 Signs It’s Time to Outsource Content Writing

Running a business today requires a lot of content writing. You’ve got your website, your blog, your social media posts, your email marketing, your sales copy, the occasional white paper or e-book and the list can go on and on. Who’s going to do all that writing? Why not someone outside your company? Just because you outsource content writing it doesn’t mean that you don’t control it anymore.

Quite the opposite. If you outsource content writing (to the right agency), you can retain control of your strategy and even improve it with the help of seasoned content marketers and copywriters.

If you’re still not sure about this, take a look at the reasons below. After working with hundreds of clients at Idunn, I’ve managed to identify the major pain points that determine business owners to outsource their content writing.

1. You Don’t Have the Time

Content writing is much more than simply churning articles. Keyword research, search engine optimization, publishing and distributing are also part of your content strategy. This strategy may take more than 20 hours per week to implement successfully. Do you have that time?

If not, it may be time to outsource content writing to someone who has.

When you lack the time to focus on writing, you may be tempted to reduce the volume of the content you publish. This is a terrible mistake! In fact, according to HubSpot, companies that publish 16+ blog posts per month get 3.5 times more traffic than those that publish 0-4.

Before you dismiss this as a vanity metric of little importance to your business goal, take a look at another statistic from the same source. It turns out it’s not just about traffic. Publishing 16+ blogs per month also gets you 4.5 times more leads than if you only published 0-4 posts.

Stop saying you can’t afford to write so many blog posts; the truth is you can’t afford not to. Just look think about all the leads you are missing.

2. Your Notice Your Content Is Getting less Engagement and Traction

If your traffic and social shares are dropping and the same is happening to the leads your content used to generate, this is a clear sign of trouble. Take a look at the evolution of your content on a period of three months around the date when you started to notice the drop.

What happened? Did you post less frequently? Did you change channels? Or did you simply drop the ball and produced poor quality content?

The last reason is usually the most frequent one. I’ve heard it time and time again from people who chose to outsource content writing for their business to Idunn.

This is also closely related to the lack of time. As your business grows, your content strategy should keep up with it. But you find that you can’t spare the time to scale both your business and your content. And it’s not just about quantitative growth. Quality is also paramount here. As you acquire more and bigger clients, they will be expecting more and more from your content. And it’s up to you to deliver.

When you hire a content writing agency, quality never drops (again, if it’s a good agency). Keeping their standards up is what keeps writing agencies in business, so you should expect consistency, timeliness and no unpleasant surprises.

3. You Don’t Like Writing

I’ve met countless brilliant marketers who could come up with flawless strategies in a matter of hours, but would spend days looking at a blank page. That’s OK; not every marketer is a copywriter.

And, let’s face it, writing is hard.

Aside from the mandatory ingredients in the recipe of a perfect blog post, you also need to have a native flair, a knack for that kind of writing that keeps people engaged and converts them into paying customers. You can be an awesome marketer; but if you don’t like writing, it’s going to show in every phrase you write.

One of the first writers I hired for Idunn was someone who knew very little about marketing. You could see that he enjoyed writing, but he had trouble changing his tone of voice to match various audiences. After seeing going over the test articles I assigned him, my first thought was that he didn’t have what it took to be a marketing writer.

But I couldn’t help notice that his copy was flawless (in terms of grammar and punctuation) and passionate. So I decided to start mentoring him. In the beginning, I would rewrite almost every phrase in his articles. I sent him tutorials and discussed every little aspect that needed improvement. I gave him tone of voice guidelines and even tips and tricks on how to find the best sources.

After a few weeks, I was editing less and less of his copy. He now submits articles that keep even me engaged throughout them. But only because he has that natural flair for writing and was willing to work on improving his marketing skills.

I tried the same type of mentoring with writers who had a marketing background and I must confess that I failed miserably. All the right things were there: they had headlines, CTAs, they even tried to emulate various tones of voice. But the spark wasn’t there. I was bored when reading their articles and I didn’t even know where to begin editing them.

Now let’s get back to time management: if you have what it takes to write great copy, you can produce a 500-word article within 1 or two hours, depending on the volume of research needed. If you don’t, you can spend days trying to edit it and make it engaging. You may succeed, but is it worth wasting all that time if writing isn’t your speed?

If you outsource content writing, you can still have a say when it comes to the marketing part of it. You can give directions regarding keyword research or distribution, but the actual work is done much quicker and better.

The main trait of a smart marketer is to know when and what to delegate. Knowing your limitations doesn’t make you weak; it makes you efficient.

4. You Want to Keep Costs under Control

Yes, when you outsource content writing you have to pay for it, so it may sound like an extra expense that you add to your existing ones. But will you pay your content agency as much as you pay a full-time copywriter or a marketer? The answer is usually no.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should flock to freelancing websites and hire the lowest bidder. That’s a big no-no. You could get articles for $2 or less, but you won’t be able to publish them. You get what you pay for and the era of poor quality one-dollar articles is long gone (even Google hates them!). I wrote more about fairly priced copywriting here.

When you outsource content writing, your team has time to focus on the core business. They no longer have to allocate a good chunk of their schedule for coming up with new topics, researching them and doing the actual writing. They can work on client acquisition instead.

Ready to outsource content writing?

If you recognize yourself in any of the situations above, then it’s high time you took content writing off your plate. Luckily, we know just the right agency to help you with ROI-centric content writing: