Turn the Challenges into Gold

Content marketing generates upwards of 3x more traffic than traditional marketing, among a gazillion other benefits. Maybe a gazillion is a bit of an oversell. If you’re still hesitating to jump on board because of the potential failures, here are some ways to turn the potential Cons into advantages. Because telling your story the right way will captivate the world, build your brand, and grow your business. 

Develop a Winning Strategy for Your Brand

Creating effective content is a critical component of any successful content marketing strategy. 

What you want is for your partner to achieve the following: 

• Define your brand's unique voice and messaging.
• Identify your target audience and build the relationship in a measurable way. 
• Determine the types of content that will resonate with your audience (blog posts, videos, infographics, social media posts, etc.).
• Establish a consistent publishing schedule.
• Track performance, adjust to data, keep what succeeds, experiment with what doesn’t.

Getting Your Feet Wet

But maybe you’re uncomfortable with the kinds of problems you’ve heard arise from outsourcing? That’s fine! Of course, not everyone will find the best partnership or have the most effective content marketing experience. 

So, how do the Cons of outsourcing your work provide an opportunity for solutions that help guarantee success? 

Cons:

• Lack of control: You do give up some creative and brand messaging control. 
• Solution: Try a trial order to test out a company’s communication, process, professionalism, and product. Giving up control can lead to better results. 

• Communication challenges: Everyone communicates differently. You need to know that when you talk to your content creators, they understand what you want.  
• Solution: Ask them for at least five very specific actions and see if the results match your expectations (deliver on a specific deadline, use specific branded terms, metrics on the keyword research, etc.). If they didn’t execute or didn’t understand, how do they work to better communicate with you or resolve the problem? Sometimes, the best relationships come out of initial challenges because extra work is put in to deepen communication. 

• Quality concerns: It’s hard to know what you’re going to get when you’re starting out with a new partner, there’s always a concern that your perception of quality isn’t the same.
• Solution: Always ask for samples before starting and make sure the content was produced at a similar rate to your package. Every company produces certain quality for a certain price point. You can always decrease word count or number of deliverables in a given package if you want to increase quality.

• Lack of brand understanding: Sometimes, a marketing team is not going to understand your brand like you do, and this can result in misbranding. 
• Solution: If you have branding guidelines, content marketers can use them. But if not, both parties should work together to develop them. Paying for their development ahead of time can avoid initial branding mistakes. Always ask what kind of strategies a company would apply to your brand. This gives you insight into your own methods while seeing if they have a grasp on who you are. 

• Security concerns: Outsourcing can raise security issues with sensitive business information.
• Solution: It’s easy to ask a company how they protect sensitive information. If you need to go above and beyond because you’re sharing proprietary information, use an NDA. And always make sure you have your own download copies of the content. 

Measuring Success

Once you’ve tested the waters and jumped in, you’ll want to make sure key metrics like website traffic, social media engagement, email open rates, and conversation rates are being tracked. Set up quarterly meetings to discuss these with your partner. 

With the right approach to measurement and analysis, you can continually improve the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy and drive long-term success for your brand. When 60% of top-performing B2B businesses have a content strategy, and 80% of lowest performers don’t, don’t let the cons keep your head in the sand.

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