Who Should Write Your Content?

Your team is fired up about content. You’ve got a strategy in place, you’re confident this content is going to help you achieve your business goals, and you’re ready to get this party started. It’s time to start creating content. But who’s going to do that?

You pretty much have three options: hire someone in-house, outsource to your agency partner, or work with freelancers. Let’s unpack the pros and cons of each of these so that you can make the best decision for your organization.

In-house hire

Depending on how much ongoing content you’re needing to create, hiring someone to do the job in-house can be a cost-effective option. However, if content creation also involves design work, photography, and/or videography, it could be cost prohibitive to hire all the roles you need filled.

The benefit, of course, of having someone in-house dedicated to ongoing content production is that they will be intimately familiar with your business and will be the nimblest when it comes to recognizing opportunities to make content work harder to achieve your business goals.

Agency partner

Working with your agency partner to develop content allows you access to an entire team of people without having to pay each individual’s salary. Next to someone in-house, your agency partner is going to be the most familiar with your business goals and the people, processes, goals, and assets that can impact your content. Plus, if you worked with your agency partner to develop your content strategy, then there’s also no time lost in onboarding them to do the work—they’re already well versed in your strategy and goals for the project.

However, if your budget doesn’t allow much room for production, hiring your agency to create content may not be an option. But they can still be a valuable asset in ongoing content governance.

Freelancer

Freelancers can sometimes be the most cost-effective option when it comes to creating content, but they can also present the most challenges when it comes to ensuring content is on-strategy. Onboarding a new freelancer can be a difficult process, especially if you don’t have a documented content strategy to help them understand things like style, audience, and tone. You may spend a lot of time upfront vetting freelance work and going through additional rounds of revisions to get the content where it needs to be.

Making the right choice

Ideally, your content will be both on-budget and on-strategy, but you may end up having to decide between the two. When weighing the options, consider the potential impact of content on your bottom line. What will it mean if the content is successful? What will happen if the content fails? Ultimately, if your content strategy is designed to bring you more leads and/or sales, it should be easier to justify increasing the budget to ensure the content is executed well. Regardless of which route you choose, be prepared to evaluate how well it’s working a few months down the road. If you’re spending ample amounts of time working to fix content, you may find that investing in a better content source actually costs less in the long run.

Need help with your content? Contact us to learn more about our capabilities in content strategy and production.