RSS 2.0Five Reasons to Outsource Content Management
The web is a hungry beast.
1. The Web is a Hungry Beast
Online, content grows stale fast. Whether you’re trying to maintain a blog, a company intranet or a simple website, your content needs to stay fresh.
Many marketing professionals are eager to establish aggressive publishing schedules and schedule monthly content reviews. Unfortunately, these same marketing professionals are quickly pulled astray by the numerous other demands of their day job.
By aligning yourself with content management experts, you set yourself up for success by ensuring that the work gets done, no matter what else is thrown at you by your boss, your colleagues or other departments within your company.
2. Quality Assurance
Of course, the other route you could take would be to empower others in your organization to assist with ongoing content development efforts. Rather than one blogger, let’s spread the work load around to five or 10 folks in the marketing department. Sounds brilliant, right?
The problem, as you may have guessed, is that 10 distinct voices are more likely to dilute your brand and weaken your message than alleviate your workload.
Where you may have imagined a symphony, you have a cacophony instead.
With a trusted partner, you can rest assured that all of your messaging is on point and supports your marketing objectives.
3. Convenience
We manage online content for a variety of clients across a number of industries. Consistently, the overwhelming feedback I receive regarding our services is how convenient it is.
Quite often, you’ll have an idea: an event you want to promote across your company intranet or a relevant study you want to link to and put a spin on your blog. But you may not have the time to craft a well-written post or piece of content that adheres to the best practices of online publishing.
In those instances, you can just jot the idea down and send it to your content management provider and let them do the work for you.
Because, let’s face it; otherwise, it just doesn’t get done.
4. Flexibility
Other clients we work with like the ability to send us the kernel of a content idea via email, phone or fax, and then just provide approval before the new content goes live.
Others desire an advanced workflow so that internal employees have an avenue to write and post material that can be edited by us.
Regardless of your needs, your online content management partner can work with you to determine what works best for you and adapt to your logistical needs.
5. You Can’t Do it Alone
Finally, there’s a great myth that says you can cut costs by bringing a lot of your marketing initiatives in-house.
The truth is that you can’t do it alone. There are a finite number of hours in a day and, ultimately, demands from your own team as well as other departments are going to pull you away from the job of creating new content for your digital communications.
One of the greatest compliments we consistently receive from our clients is how easy we make things. Let us know how we can make managing your online content easier for you.
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Great points, Matt. To expand on the convenience factor, one real road block when companies are looking to outsource content is what I call the “hand-holding issue.” That is, any company looking to have an agency create content should make sure that agency has the experience and expertise to hit the ground sprinting. Otherwise, they’ll wind up hand-holding so much that they might as well be doing the work themselves. Fit is critical – and needs to be part of the due diligence process.
As head of a small (10-person) virtual content agency, I also find that, early on, many prospective clients don’t understand the time and energy it takes to do these things properly. This leads to a four-point process: 1) They ask us for a quote, and think the price is too high. 2) They take it in-house. 3) The process fails because it takes much longer than they thought – their people don’t have time to do it right. 4) They come back to us and say, “Ok, now we understand where your numbers are coming from.”
Best,
Pat
As for your first point – I think you’re absolutely spot on above. We have a ton of experience in health care, for example, and it just makes sense for a lot of our clients to use us because they don’t have to worry about educating us on the nuances of the business.
As to the second point, I agree, but I’d add that your four-point process isn’t unique to online content management and/or content marketing. The same could be said for most activities in a vendor/client relationship.
Our clients are experts in their fields, but they may not fully understand the scope of different activities involved with content marketing, custom publishing or web development, because that’s not their job.
Lastly, thanks for swinging by!