Everybody blogs. Across industries, marketers are realizing the significant benefits blogging brings to their marketing and sales efforts. But this increasing ubiquity also brings with it a significant problem, especially for businesses in competitive industries. How do you separate your brand from your competitors’?
The answer is deceptively simple: Don’t do it yourself. In fact, producing your own blog can hurt you both in terms of maximizing the opportunity and minimizing your risks. Here are three reasons why you should consider outsourcing your blog content instead:
1. Resource dedication
Maintaining a blog takes time. Maintaining an active blog that produces actionable results? That takes even more resources, which you simply may not have.
According to Forbes, 61% of the most effective B2B content marketers meet to discuss content either weekly or daily. For your in-house team, that’s a lot of time dedicated simply to planning out content. Add to that the need to actually research and write individual blog posts, and you’re looking at a weekly schedule dominated by the blog planning and writing process.
At the same time, dedicating that much time is necessary because of how crucial regular content is for your blog. One benchmark study found that companies with 16-plus blog posts per month achieved significantly higher inbound traffic and leads as a result. Most companies don’t have the necessary resources to keep a blog that active, which is why outsourcing makes sense.
2. An outside perspective
At first thought, blogging “from the inside” is a great idea. You want to give readers a behind-the-scenes look at your company, establishing both credibility and a personal relationship with prospective customers. But is that really what Web visitors are looking for?
The easy answer is “no.” To be effective, your blog should be focused on your audience, not on your company. In many ways, writing your own blogs may actually result in lower quality because you are simply too close to the situation. Before you know it, you slip into internal company jargon and oft-repeated “selling points” that don’t resonate with your audience.
Outsourcing your blog, on the other hand, allows you to provide a fresh perspective on industry topics and trends that you could not otherwise provide. Because the writers are outside your company as well, they will be closer to your target audience and better able to understand potential customers’ pain points and desires.
3. Actionable result tracking
As an experienced marketer, you’re no stranger to success metrics. But how much time do you actually spend tracking and learning lessons from the successes of individual blog posts? You probably don’t have the time to prioritize it, despite its importance to your business. And even if you do, the available metrics on most blogging platforms — visitors and click-thrus — are relatively basic.
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Working with an outside company on your blogs, on the other hand, can help get you more actionable results. Software like our ConvertAVisit tool helps to identify individual users and creates reports that make for more informed sales calls.
Not only can you identify and evaluate which posts generate the most leads (and eventually, customers) but you also have the opportunity to get in touch with individual readers for personalized follow-ups. Thanks to your external content partner, the process is automated, leaving you with visitors and more qualified leads.
Overcoming the outsourcing stigma
In many industries, “outsourcing” remains a dirty word. Why farm out tasks to external providers when we can complete the projects in-house? But as any marketer experienced in blogging knows, maintaining a consistent blog that attracts visitors and helps drive business success is not an easy task.
As Josh Steimle says in a Forbes article, “Outsourcing doesn’t necessarily mean losing control, nor being out of touch with what’s going on with your marketing.”
In the case of blogging, it means achieving and maintaining an edge over your competition.
