No time to write copy? Consider outsourcing your content strategy

5 core elements for your content marketing strategy and best practices for content outsourcing

According to Content Marketing Institute, more than 80% of B2B marketers and more than 70% of B2C marketers used content marketing for their online businesses last year. The results of this investigation have been published in B2B Content Marketing: 2015 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends ? North America and proved the fact content marketing tactics become a significant part of successful marketing strategy.

More than 50% of B2B marketers plan to increase content marketing spending in 2015; they are ready to accept the challenge and start awesome content creation, distribution, optimization, analyzing and managing. It often happens that content creation and development is not a core skill for a marketer, and it can be quite difficult to cope with. The solution is obvious: outsource content writing services to fill the gap between the need to use content marketing and your ability to create and manage it.

Of course, there is a lot more to content marketing than copywriting as suggested by the Smart Insights Content Marketing Matrix. However, for many businesses, especially in B2B copywriting for blogs and whitepapers is a core part of content marketing.

Content marketing elements

Before choosing and hiring a good outsourced writer to help your online business with content, decide what content marketing elements your brand needs. As far as you understand, content marketing is not a simple text writing for your business website's blog or social media profiles: if you want to generate leads, set your brand apart, generate more traffic and boost sales, you should pay attention to all core elements of content marketing and take them all into consideration.

Depending on your content strategies and organizational goals, your online business may need:

1. Content creation and curation
2. Content amplification or distribution
3. Content optimization
4. Content analytics
5. Content management

To get a clearer idea of what each above mentioned element includes, check the table from Third Door Media Content Marketing Tools 2015: A Marketer's Guide:

Best practices to find outsourced writers

Hiring a good outsourced writer or an outside agency to help you with content creation is not an easy task indeed. Before you choose one, several aspects should be kept in your mind. They are following:

• 1. Do not chase the cheapest deal. As a marketer, you remember about your budget of course, but it does not mean you should choose the cheapest writer at the market to create content; low prices do not equal quality. Build relationship with writers you can trust.
• 2. Make sure a writer understands what you want from him exactly: always ask if he has experience with content writing and if he understands what B2B content means.
• 3. Check writing samples of all candidates to get the idea whether their knowledge, skills and styles meet your needs.
• 4. Give your writer clear instructions, make sure he is able to do this job for you.

Where to find copywriters?

It will depend on what you need from them (check all content marketing elements again). Hundreds of great authors are waiting for you online, but it does not mean all of them will give you what you want. Freelance websites, students and academic writers, professional vendors ? they all can be good options for a marketer:

• Upwork (now part of elance) is among the largest online workplaces that helps you find and hire a team or individual writers, as well as designers, web developers and consultants.
• ProBlogger Job Board is a perfect place to find experienced authors who can write for your blog and/or handle outreach (guest bloggers).
• Copify is an online service to enable you to rapidly get a quote, source writers and manage the producing of copy
• Contently lets you find tools for publishing your brand and contact pro writers directly.
• Witmart is the largest crowdsourcing website with over 7 million registered freelancers that gives a chance to post your projects and create writing contests.
• Krop is a creative industry job board and portfolio hosting website, experienced in working with big brands.
• At Scripted you can get video scripts, Tweet or Facebook posts bundles.
• Studentgems makes it possible to hire talented students or graduates who look for a job and leave feedback about their work for others to know if they are worth hiring.
• Bid4papers helps you find academic writers, contact them directly and rate them to work with the best ones
• Newscred gives a chance to use their platform for covering all elements of content marketing and building relationships with other professionals.
• Content creation, distribution and management becomes easier with Percolate - it lets you increase productivity and generate more sales with the help of their software.
• Rallyverse - this professional vendor makes it easier to succeed in social selling, content optimization and analytics.
• Fiverr - cheap and dirty, writing services from $5 per order.

What are the benefits of outsourcing your content marketing?

Content marketing is an integral part of online business strategies today, and it becomes more and more complicated for marketers who want to succeed, stand out and beat their competitors. Outsourcing content creation for your online business can provide numerous benefits, such as:

• Decrease costs for your marketing campaign: outsourced writers cost cheaper than in-house ones as a rule.
• Increase the content effectiveness: hiring a writer who has good skills in writing texts in particular, you will get professionally written content that meets your consumers' needs.
• Grow social sharing and engagement: professionally written and relevant content has more chances to be shared across social networks and make your brand recognizable.
• Reach all marketing channels: having high-quality content from outsourced writers, you will have time to concentrate on its spreading.

Importance of content marketing

Times change, relations between brands and consumers change too. Today, marketers should pay much more attention to all aspects of content marketing and automate the processes involved in their content marketing strategies.

Your business's official website is no longer the only one resource a consumer will use to learn about your product: he will come with information gathered from different channels (social media, enewsletters, interactive infographics, videos, webinars, online presentations, research reports, case studies, etc.), and your task is to make this information eye-catching, informative and relevant to turn visitors into clients.

Content writing outsource can be a very good practice for your online business: professional writers will create relevant content, various content marketing tools will help you automate your marketing strategies and tactics, and outside platforms will let you optimize and manage your content effectiveness across different digital channels.