Content creation is an important part of marketing for technology companies. With longer buyer journeys than most B2B products, the need for educating those buyers with helpful content is more important than ever
While the need for content in technology companies is great, your time and budgets are under increasing pressure. Additionally, hiring for industry expertise and content writing skills don't often go together.
Here are seven reasons why outsourcing content creation can save you time and money while getting you higher-quality content to meet buyers' needs.
Key Takeaways:
- Businesses save time and money by outsourcing content creation
- Content creation agencies offer niche talent and fresh perspectives
- Outsourcing content creation frees up talent to work on core business tasks
Should You Outsource Content Creation?
A surprising 84% of consumers expect brands to create content. Therefore, 91% of B2B businesses now have content marketing as part of their strategy. Outsourcing means using a third-party freelancer or agency to perform IT content creation tasks to help keep up with consumer demand. Common B2B tech content creation tasks include:
- Tech Content
- Whitepapers
- Blogs
- How-To Guides
- E-books and Gorilla Guides
A tech business might consider performing the tasks in-house when employees have one or even all these skills.
However, outsourcing saves money because businesses don't have to hire new employees to keep up with growing content needs. This also frees up your employees' time so they can focus on core tasks that your business can't outsource.
Saving time and budget are only some of the many reasons that 84% of B2B businesses outsource content creation.
7 Benefits of Outsourcing B2B Tech Content Creation
Learn seven reasons why your tech business should outsource content creation.
1. Save Money
Cutting costs is the second most popular reason why businesses choose to outsource.
Hiring new talent to create content is a time-consuming and costly process. For example, one Glassdoor study found that hiring a new employee (including recruiting and training) costs $4,000. In addition, the business has ongoing costs of employee benefits and salary to consider.
Employee costs are just part of content creation. Businesses may also need to invest in research, design, and content management software, which can vary from a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars a month.
Tech businesses that outsource content creation can also save money by foregoing investment in expensive keyword research tools and collaboration software.
2. Get Content for Every Stage of the Buying Journey
The average B2B business should strive to post three to four weekly blog posts to maximize organic traffic. But the main goal of an effective content strategy is leads and sales.
In order to convert early-stage tech buyers, companies need to produce content for every stage of the buyer's journey, from lead generation to conversion, which marketers distribute across multiple channels.
In addition to regular weekly content, content marketers also need content such as e-books and whitepapers, webinars for lead generation, and email campaigns to nurture and convert those leads.
Internally, creating content for all stages of the buyer journey can require multiple full-time strategy, project management, and copywriting roles that many organizations simply don’t have. This lack of resources means that you don’t have the content mapped to each stage of the buyer’s journey that’s required to maximize leads.
Content outsourcing allows marketers to create the right content for each stage of the buyer's journey because marketers aren't limited by in-house employee skills and availability. Marketing teams can keep up with the heavy demands of content marketing with a longer buyer's journey. In addition, marketers can expand content strategies beyond in-house limits to generate more demand, leads, and conversions.
3. Build a Scalable Strategy
Content creation needs vary throughout the year. For example, when a B2B business launches new software, the marketing team will be on hyperdrive creating content and campaigns to promote the new software. However, at other times in the year, the marketing team might scale back to create content that addresses key campaign messages and IT buyer challenges.
Outsourcing allows businesses to conveniently scale up or down depending on the business's needs. In addition, the marketing team can grow its marketing strategy without worrying about hiring new team members and purchasing content marketing technology tools to scale up.
For example, outsourcing agencies have subscriptions to the top keyword research tools, editing software, project management apps, collaboration tools, and content design software that allow them to create content at scale.
4. Access Industry Expertise
Outsourcing gives businesses access to talent the company might not have on its marketing team. For example, the tech niche has several branches, from security to cloud software.
So while the in-house content creator might understand one or two areas, content creation agencies in the tech niche will have writers, content creators, and IT influencers for every area within the tech industry.
These content creators allow businesses to create authority niche IT content on all topics with equal expertise.
5. Create Content from a New Perspective
Content agencies provide a fresh perspective on a business's industry. Consistently creating new content with unique perspectives helps businesses to reach a broader audience with wide interests and needs. In addition, the content creators might have advice on new angles to keep the current readers interested.
For example, a B2B tech business might publish third-party e-books on tech topics related to that business's services.
Sharing content from outside sources that support that business's technology helps build customer trust. In addition, third-party content offers well-rounded research on topics instead of only addressing tech topics from one business's perspective.
6. Maintain ROI Through a Steady Budget and Consistent Quality
Content creators should constantly monitor and measure the return on marketing investment (ROMI) of their content strategies. Measuring ROMI tells marketers what strategies are working to bring in a high return and which efforts are failing.
Outsourcing content creation allows tech marketers to manage and maintain consistency in their budget, content quality, and deliverables.
This way, tech marketers have a predictable monthly cost while maintaining content quality, which helps track spending compared to marketing outcomes.
7. Focus on Core Business Tasks
The internal marketing team knows the products and business best. However, when marketers are wrapped up in writing content, they can't perform core business tasks requiring expert knowledge. That doesn't mean cutting out content marketing since that's a cornerstone strategy.
Instead, a company should evaluate what jobs require niche-specific talent and knowledge. For example, the business might want to focus on contacting potential buyers personally to answer questions about the product.
Then knowledgeable content creators in the business's niche can create marketing content just as high quality–if not more so–than what the company can produce. Therefore, the internal team can perform jobs that they can't outsource. Freeing up staff is the top reason most businesses choose to outsource.
Outsource Your Tech Content
Future B2B offers content creation for tech businesses to save money, time, and to free up your team resources for the core business functions they were hired to manage.
Allow our tech experts to create articles, e-books, videos, and whitepapers for your content strategy so you can focus on converting the leads the content brings in.
Contact us to learn about our content creation services and how to use marketing content for lead generation.