If you want something done right, don’t do it yourself. Forget conventional wisdom. You’re not an expert in everything, and the more complex the field, the more you need an expert. While that seems obvious, only 30% of B2B marketers say their organizations are effective at marketing. When it comes to content marketing, you literally can’t afford to leave anything to chance. Any amateur move you make means a more skilled competitor is getting ahead of you. Enter the content marketing specialist. Below, we’ll be taking a look at why you need one.
Cost Efficiency
Would you rather hire a team of editors, writers, graphic artists, social media gurus and still fall short of your goals, or hire a content marketing specialist and be sure it’s sewn up? A specialist makes a good deal of business sense. They know their trade and don’t require the same overheads as full-time employees. You can hire content marketing specialists as you need them, whether it’s for a short-term campaign lasting a few weeks, or as a longer effort to direct your marketing strategy over a number of years.
A specialist has a genuine investment in your brand, because your success will ultimately be their success. As a result, you’re likely to get driven individuals who will do their utmost to maximize your revenue. The price of not hiring a content marketing specialist is worth considering. Your website might be destroying your business with amateur-hour content.
Poor content doesn’t just drive your own customers away. It also gives your competitors a boost. If your competitors have invested in a specialist to take their content to the next level, you can say goodbye to your customers altogether. Even when you’re not literally spending more, you’re still losing money you could have gained, which amounts to the same thing.
Holistic Strategy
What’s your content marketing strategy? Did you hesitate? Admit that you don’t have one?
As a business owner, you know that good strategy can make or break a business, but you may not have considered that each section of your business requires its own strategy. The same is true of content marketing. Creating a coherent strategy is basic-level stuff for a true specialist. A strategy gives you a schedule, deployment techniques, and idea of cost and returns, as well as timescales involved. Without a strategy, your attempts at content marketing are likely to be ineffective and scattered.
Marketing isn’t something you do when you have nothing else going on. Marketing requires hard work and a dedication to seeing a plan through. A strategy will also maintain brand coherency. In an age of short attention spans and instant feedback, your brand needs to be strong and consistent.
Would it shock you if I said we’re only at the start of the digital age? Social media, influencer marketing, and SEO are snowballing to a huge degree as more and more businesses understand the potential of the digital world. Without an effective strategy, you’re destined for extinction.
Skills
As with any discipline, you’re paying an expert to get the skills.
Content marketing specialists study for years and have a wealth of experience to pull from. They know what works and what doesn’t. They know how to listen for trends and learn from the mistakes of others. Trying to work alone may cause you to make mistakes. You can’t hope to match the experience of someone who has spent years immersed in the field, and you’ll lose money doing so. So why try?
You wouldn’t expect to imitate the skills of your programmers, graphic designers, or accountants, so don’t expect content marketing to be the domain of dabblers, either. It’s a serious, full-time discipline. If you leave it to amateurs, you’ll get amateur work. Content marketing specialists aren’t cookie-cutter, though. You’ll need to have some idea what set of skills you’re looking for before you go looking for the best candidate. Luckily, most specialists will be happy to discuss your needs with you. Think of them as consultants, rather than employees, and make use of their expertise.
Content Marketing Specialist Insights
Marketing specialists are big-picture people. They know marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s influenced by trends, personalities, news stories, and changing tastes. Specialists are trained to pull down big data to look for patterns. Even if you’ve managed some marketing success on your own, do you know why it happened? Can you repeat it? Probably not.
Specialists can look at the data over time, and incorporate it into the strategy we talked about previously to ensure maximum effectiveness for your marketing budget. Analyzing this kind of data also gives the specialist an idea of time. They can plot marketing campaigns over weeks, months, even years, with expectations drawn from known trends. These insights also extend to knowing your audience. Specialists will know to conduct market research to know exactly who your potential customers are and how to speak to them. They can boost the level of trust your audience has in your brand, and position you as an authoritative voice in your industry.
Focused Workers
Everybody wants to see themselves as multi-skilled go-getters, but there’s a phrase for that. “Jack of all trades, master of none.”
If you’re the manager of your business, then that’s what you should be doing. It doesn’t sound like rocket-science, but too often managers dilute their effectiveness by trying to have a hand in everything. If you’re preoccupied micro-managing your Twitter or struggling to get to grips with Photoshop, you’re not advancing your brand in the ways only you can. Time lost to ineffective content marketing is time you should be using to manage your team, build your role as the face of your brand, and further your business.
A successful business strategy is always going to be about putting time and money in the right place. The businesses who manage to do it efficiently will succeed, while others will fail. By investing in a content marketing specialist, you can stay ahead of the pack and ensure your brand stays strong.
For other marketing hints and tips, be sure to follow our blog, or contact us to find out how we can help boost your brand.