The number of businesses who don’t utilize content marketing is in the minority. Most companies know that quality content will grow their business. According to MDG Advertising, 70% of consumers prefer learning about a product through content rather than traditional advertising. If companies understand the value of content and consumers love content, then why aren’t all businesses using it to grow their audiences?
Less than 40% of businesses have a content marketing strategy. They publish volumes of content but without a plan.
Haphazard published content to populate a website, blog and social media platforms won’t bring the same success as publishing with a strategy. Content should engage the audience. Producing engaging content is time-consuming hard work. The two main challenges are to generate leads with the content published and to publish high-quality content consistently.
Outsourcing work to the experts is the solution many businesses follow to overcome these challenges. There are pros and cons to hiring both freelancers and employees, but in this article we’ll consider the value of working with freelancers on your content.
5 Content Marketing Strategy Freelancers You Need Today
Freelance content and copywriters can boost your content marketing strategy in 5 main areas.
Freelance Blogger
An average high-quality blog post can take 3 hours to write. In-depth blog posts of 2000 words or more can easily take 6 hours or longer to produce. Blogging is a process that involves planning, research, writing, editing, and publishing the post. With all the content online, well-thought-out and written blog posts will help you stand out from the crowd.
It takes time to publish a blog post. Even with user-friendly platforms like WordPress, your post requires formatting, images, embedding videos, as well as researching relevant, low-competition keywords and creating meta descriptions. Freelance bloggers have the skill to write the blog posts and format them on your blog as well.
An editorial calendar that sets out the blog posts for the year is another benefit of hiring a freelance copywriter. This is just one more example of how content marketing can help scale your business. Content writers look at the overall content marketing strategy and will assist you in creating an editorial calendar for the blog posts.
Written blog posts aren’t the only format you can use. Vlogging is very popular. To have quality video and content, you can share other people’s videos or hire a freelancer to write the video scripts, shoot the videos, and manage video production.
Blog posts increase search engine ranking. The frequency with which the business publishes blog posts will influence how often search engines visit your blog. Most people don’t bother to search further than page 1 on Google. In fact, the top three results get the bulk of traffic for each search query. Blog posts allow for writing long tail keyword posts to improve rankings. Naturally, using keywords requires a professional content writer.
Social Media Manager
According to the Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trend 2017 report, 76% of B2B content marketers use Facebook, 77% use Twitter, and 89% use LinkedIn. To manage three social media platforms is challenging if the desired skills and time are lacking or constrained. Hiring a freelancer who spends even just 1-2 hours per day managing the various social media platforms will save you 5-12 hours per week.
Instead of using social media separately, integrate the social media plan into the business’ content marketing strategy.
Blogs and social media are interlinked in engaging audiences and sharing content. Extracting tweets and potential Facebook posts from the blog posts is a great way to promote the blog post content and draw readers to the website.
Freelancers with social media skills will know which content is the right content to tweet or post. They can write posts, find appropriate images and publish the content on the various platforms.
Social media managers can also optimize profiles on LinkedIn, business pages on Facebook, Twitter, and publish relevant images to Instagram.
Instead of being partly active on various platforms, a freelancer can focus on the social media platforms where the specific target audience of the business is.
Interacting with the readers’ comments builds relationships. Freelancers can assist you here as well so that you maintain a stable, helpful presence.
Content Marketing Researcher
All aspects of content marketing require a specific type of research. A freelancer who specializes in research will save you time and the effort required. Why should you spend time researching if a freelancer can present a compiled report for you with all the necessary data?
A few areas where content marketing research is required:
- Articles and blog posts need research before you should write a single word. At least a third to half of the time spent on an article or blog post is research.
- A content or copywriter cannot write anything that increases sales without knowing everything about the product and the target market.
- Research is needed to find the keywords buyers use to search for the products and services your business provides. The right keywords combined with quality content will direct buyers to your website.
- To create a content marketing strategy, you need to create a persona of the potential buyer the content is a target at. It requires research.
- The social media platforms the business should be actively participating on are the networks their potential buyers use. Someone needs to find out which.
- Testing the results of content marketing strategies requires gathering data and information to interpret and base changes on.
Lead Generation Freelancer
Consumers and buyers don’t suddenly appear. Initially, they may visit your website with casual interest. With the right content, these visitors become leads who convert into customers.
Free downloads with subscriptions and opt-ins gather the email addresses of people who are interested in the products or services the business offers. These email addresses become part of your funnel that steers your leads to sales.
At the beginning of the sales funnel, marketers use lead magnets to draw these leads to the business. Special reports, case studies, white papers, eBooks, checklists, and guides are common lead magnets.
A freelancer experienced in lead generation will take care of planning, implementing and monitoring all the areas needed to generate leads.
Email and Newsletter Copywriter
Email and newsletters are low in cost but highly effective in results. Emails and newsletters are great tools to build relationships with current and former clients. Clients receive this content weekly or monthly in their inbox. Therefore, fresh and new content is needed continuously.
Some freelancers specialize in writing newsletter editorials for specific industries. Others specialize in the various types of emails a business requires. Writing a confirmation email would be an example of this.
Email campaigns form part of the sales funnel chain as well as after sales follow-up. Depending on the goal of the email campaign, some email series need only be written once and periodically be revised. Intelligent email templating can help with this.
Irrespective of the kind of email, if it isn’t opened, it means nothing. Often a business doesn’t have an in-house expert. The global availability to freelancers through marketing platforms, however, allows the business to find copywriters who can write emails that convert and newsletters that produce loyalty and trust.
Takeaway
Almost half of your potential buyers will view 2-3 content pieces before they contact a sales representative. In other words, if the content on your business website doesn’t supply the answers to potential buyers’ question, they will move to a competitor; this illustrates the weight of having the right content published.
If you don’t have the time, inclination or skills to take care of content marketing properly, professional freelancers will solve that dilemma for you. With their expertise and experience in specific industries, it is possible to grow the business with a good strategy.
Blogging, social media management, research, traffic generation, and emails and newsletters are five of the main aspects of content marketing. These aren’t the only ones, however. Other areas of your marketing strategy can also leverage freelancers, such as:
- Website developers who create and maintain websites (like Squarespace or WordPress specialists) and landing pages.
- Freelancers who specialize in site audits to improve content and SEO.
- Graphic designers, or even a subscription to a graphic design service to take care of graphics and logos for all content published.
- SEO copywriters who write and optimize content for Google ranking and increased organic traffic to the website.
- Consultants who see the bigger picture and can help with creating the content marketing strategy.
It’s no longer strange to outsource projects to freelancers. In 2017 the global market size for outsourcing was 88.9 billion dollars. Content marketing has also grown over the last few years and will continue to grow. According to Statista, revenue derived from content marketing will exceed $300 billion by 2019. It, therefore, makes sense to have a content marketing strategy for your business and to hire freelancers to produce the content needed.
Comments: