In the digital era, producing content is not optional for businesses. In fact, in order to drive success with marketing and customer experience, most businesses are required to produce a massive amount of content.
Since content is either entertaining or information (at least good content is), this trend is superb from a customer’s point of view. However, if your core competency is not producing content, you may find yourself struggling.
The easiest way to succeed with content is to seek professional help. Professional content producers can deliver both the volume and the quality of content you need to drive your business to success.
However, outsourcing business processes, especially something like the production of content that will represent your organization, is risky business. The wrong outsourcing partner can cause a lot of headache to business owners, especially when content production is involved.
To avoid such a situation, make sure you keep these tips in mind while outsourcing the content development for your business:
Look For Content Specialists
Not everyone can write everything. While one writer may be great at writing landing page content, others may be proficient with social media posts and ads.
Similarly, if your organization is engaged in employee training, and requires training content, you will need specialized writers and instructional designers for eLearning content development. For instance, if you are looking for content for workplace safety training, you should find an instructional designer that has worked on similar projects before, preferably in your industry.
This may mean that you will have to work with multiple writers. That, in turn, means testing out multiple businesses and writers until you can find the ones that are right for your business. Doing all this will require more time and effort than simply outsourcing all your content to a single company or freelancer.
However, doing so is well worth the effort as the resulting content will be purpose-driven and engaging.
Create A Style Guide
Communicating instructions clearly is one of the most important aspects of working with freelancers and outsourcing partners. While it is strongly advisable to share clear instructions with each assignment, it is also a great idea to pair these instructions with a set style guide.
This way, you can save yourself from the trouble of writing down the most basic instructions about grammar usage, tone, and other aspects of writing every time you send out an assignment or start working with a new freelancer or outsourcing partner.
If you are struggling with creating a style guide, it is a good idea to find a freelancer for this as well. There may be a little back and forth, a few rounds of edits, but you will get a professional-grade style guide to share with other freelancers quickly.
Define Metrics To Measure Performance
One of the biggest challenges with content is measuring the ROI of the content. Calculating this ROI becomes even more important when outsourcing is involved.
The most effective way to do this is to define performance metrics or key performance indicators before starting work with an outsourcing partner.
This way, you will be able to efficiently set expectations and make sure your ROI on your content production investment is positive.
Conclusion
Getting outsourcing right may require a surprising amount of effort. However, rest assured that once you have put in this effort, found the right writers, and defined the right performance metrics, your business will be able to share high quality, engaging content with its audience.
