Content brings color, enthusiasm, and spark to your brand. It’s also one of the most valuable ways to engage your audience, build trust, and capture leads. But creating the type of content that accomplishes these vital business goals presents many business owners with a challenge:
How to get it all done.
Writing good content is more than artful phrases, beautiful metaphors, or charming antidotes. It’s about intentionally capturing your brand’s voice and communicating that to your audience in a clear way with every post you publish.
Some business owners find it too demanding to maintain strong content consistently, which could indicate it’s time to outsource. How do you know if you’re ready to outsource your content? Take a look at the top signs to find out.
You have too much on your plate.
An overworked entrepreneur is like a hot day in August, you can always count on it, but it doesn’t make it enjoyable. Nearly every business owner juggles hundreds of tasks per day, which can leave little time for writing and posting blogs on a consistent schedule.
When you scramble for time, you might notice slipping quality, erratic posting, and a general lack of engagement with that arm of your business. If you want your content to succeed, you need to give it the right amount of time to flourish.
Studies show that the average blog takes over 3 hours to write. That’s 3 hours you could be doing client work, engaging prospects, and accomplishing other tasks you love. If you are trying to maintain two or more posts per month, that is over 6 hours to simply create the content, let alone editing, posting, and promoting it.
Your time is valuable, and you should spend it doing tasks you love that enhance your business, not ones that you feel drag you and your organization down.
You don’t enjoy writing.
Some business owners love to write their own content. It gives them a channel to communicate their thoughts, ideas, and perspectives directly with their audience, plus they have a knack for keeping readers engaged.
If that sounds like you, keep your content internal.
But for many business owners, writing becomes a time-suck weighing down their weeks. While you may want Thursday’s to be your writing days, Thursdays become funneled into client work, internal meetings, and your blog content gets pushed to the back burner, again.
Let’s face it; writing is hard. It isn’t easy to craft compelling, thought-provoking, high-quality content week-to-week. This task is especially true for people without formal training or a zealous passion for words. If you find yourself dreading the blank screen or actively avoiding your dedicated writing days, it is likely time for you to find a different solution.
You can’t nail down a specific strategy.
Compelling content doesn’t come out of thin air, and it can’t rely on random spouts of inspiration. If writers only wrote when they were inspired, we would have far less content in the world.
To get content that drives results, you need a clear and actionable strategy in place. Building a custom editorial strategy requires a sophisticated understanding of your audience, a clear set of goals, proper time management, as well as consistency and follow-through.
Working with a team that specializes in planning and executing the right strategy for your business can save you time and help drive the leads you want and need.
Your posts are losing traction.
Have you noticed a significant drop-off in engagement with your posts? A downturn in your blog activity could come from a myriad of sources, from topics to delivery to quality to promotion and more. It’s essential to take note of this shift and try to determine the root cause and how to solve it.
Floundering engagement can happen so often when your content stops speaking directly to your audience. It’s critical to create content that grows as your business does. What worked for you a couple of years ago might not work for you anymore, and you need to alter your content to mirror that shift.
Or maybe you find that you have a lot of great content, but aren’t getting it in front of the right people. In this case, you might need to take another look at your social media strategy, email marketing, and other lead generation tactics. A dedicated marketing team will help you brainstorm ideas to keep your content fresh and your audience engaged.
Are you in a writing rut?
After reading this post, you might be convinced that it’s time for you to look at outsourcing your content. But what does that mean, and how would it look for your business?
Before you rush to get blogging off your plate, think about your broader business goals and what you want from a marketing team. Once you have a clear idea of what your business needs, then you can find a team to help accomplish those goals.
Our team loves to use content marketing as a method of connection and communication. Hop on a call with us to learn more about how we can serve you.
