Timing, Relevancy, and Frequency are the most urgent requirements in today’s competitive digital content marketing. As competition for audience attention and loyalty intensifies, business enterprises must shift from tactical and siloed content approaches to strategic messaging and storytelling. While original, creative, and helpful content is top of the agenda, we cannot convert these attributes into lasting advantages without collaborating with a full-service content agency.
Self-reliant buyers are more informed, so your content must add something new and address their current context to be relevant. In short, the old ways are irrelevant.
Whatever the nature of the marketing initiative – acquisition, retention, or expansion – its digital content must build new understanding of its purpose and values, boost audience engagement, and motivate buyers to act. A steady and sustained content strategy that offers compelling storylines will create momentum and produce measurable outcomes for the business.
So, what’s the way forward? Hire freelance writers or resort to content mills? These options may seem obvious but let’s see why they are bad ideas.
- Quality is Dead, Long Live Quality: The proliferation of freelance marketplaces and content mills has increased convenience but killed quality and originality. The concept of creating one-off content pieces is no longer an SOS, and it is drowning the ship and the sailor for the reasons mentioned.
- Expedient models: Freelance content churners on these platforms work on fractured models such as 1) Rate per word, 2) Rate per hour, 3) Cookie-cutter packages, 4) Piecemeal content, 5) AI and Machine Learning-derived assembly-line copy. You get what you pay for…and that it’s up to you to manage them even though they have no affinity or relationship with your business (are not employees).
- Availability: Freelancers exist in the ‘feast-or-famine’ cycles. They are loaded with projects or facing downtime, so depending on the phase, they may or may not be available. This means that you are not in control of your needs. Even if they accept your brief, it will likely be an over-commitment or straw-clutching, which will result in sub-optimal content that requires so much editing you would be better off writing the content yourself.
- Tone, message, and language: Freelancers are solo workers; they may have writing skills, but that alone does not lead to thoughtful content. To create the right content for businesses, it is critical to have subject matter knowledge, target audience understanding, and client awareness. It is also not a stretch to say that plenty of copy is recycled from other published sources, with enough cleverness to escape the plagiarism scanner. So, the content neither resonates with the brand’s tone, message, or language nor is it original, creative, and effective.
- Who’s seeing the Big Picture? For content to be effective, it must be born of the big picture. The copy creators must be inclusive and integral to the business overview and churning out a quick copy is not the best approach. The content team must participate in the organization’s culture and be abreast of its values, mission, and vision. Even a small copy for the business must reflect these elements, which can only come from an integrated relationship between the company and a full-service content agency.
Advantages of a full-service content agency
For a business entity, hiring an internal content team is a slow and expensive process because it requires multiple resources. On the other hand, hiring a full-service agency is a fast and more cost-effective solution and is free from the drawbacks of working with unpredictable factors.
With a full-service content agency, you will gain an entire content team that reduces the risk of overcommitments thanks to its internal workflow and efficiency measures. This team becomes an asset that leads to diverse resources at your disposal, including strategists, researchers, subject matter/industry experts, SEO professionals, and editors. It’s a full-service team that creates content aligned to the client’s vision and requirements, enhancing the brand’s vision and strategy.
Conclusion
A full-service content agency that integrates creativity, analytics, and purpose to craft your content can open people’s minds, and also their hearts and get them on board to drive a meaningful and measurable difference in your revenue and ROI.
You don’t get this from freelance content writers or from a content marketplace that connects you to the freelancers.
Hiring a full-service content agency specialized in your industry will save you from jeopardizing your digital marketing goals and help you fast-track your progress.
