Brian Honigman is a marketing consultant, professional speaker and freelance writer. This article originally appeared on the blog Skyword.
A recent study content Marketing Institute, 44 percent of B2B marketers rely on content creation for outsourcing such as writing, design, content distribution and publishing. B2B Marketing, a full 57 percent of technology buyers outsource their content marketing team.
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Obviously, the content of outsourcing is a more efficient and effective approach for building and running a successful content strategy for many B2B companies, especially B2B technology.
The goal of your content team should be to help your company create compelling content, distribute this content effectively, and analyze results on a regular basis. In other words, you must provide the resources needed to launch and maintain excellent content marketing strategy.
The process of your internal team should take in managing your content marketing team outsourced is:
1. Set goals
Whether you are the outsourcing the creation of your content strategy or not, your internal team should establish the general objectives of your organization relating to the content. Ask yourself what you want to gain through content marketing. Is your organization looking to drive more traffic, increase conversion rates, better market your business, or perform a combination of these goals?
Once you have established the objectives of content in your organization, your team, or a member of your outsourced team can help choose the settings that best measure against these benchmarks.
It is essential to establish a framework for the goals you are trying to achieve before you bring outsourced the majority of your content team. There must be a strategic direction to begin before adding more team members on the project.
Although they can certainly help formulate your strategy over time, it is important that your internal team to be the main drivers of these objectives, since you understand your organization and its top priorities.
2. Create a flexible work flow
The next step to consider before putting the outsourced content marketing is to determine the processes and tools your team will use to manage these members the team and decide how your content is created, distributed, and measured.
Your workflow should determine who will be the internal manager of the team of freelancing. This person point regularly deal with team members contracted through different business functions.
This is an essential step in managing the content of an outsourced marketing team because they will need guidance and support from someone in your organization who can also review their work and approve as developed, created and distributed.
Finally, the tools of your company chooses to use to manage the contents of your B2B marketingdirectly affect your outsourced talent. Decide what types of social curation, content management, organization, measurement and visual tools you need to position the best for your content marketing team for success.
3. Hire qualified freelancers
An essential part of the implementation of the contents of an outsourced marketing team is hiring the right people in the first place. When looking to build your team, it is very important to think about your goals and fit your organization with freelancers that will help you achieve them.
Search across your home network or using a platform of content marketing to tap into an independent community of writers, publishers and content specialists. Next, examine the portfolios of writers, editors, designers, and other browsing the quality of their past work and the clients for whom they worked.
Reviewing their past work will help you determine if their capabilities align with the expectations of your organization. Once you have found potential candidates that meet your needs, the interviewer to better understand their interest in your project and determine if they are a cultural fit for your organization.
This is important because your outsourced team needs to get along with your in-house team. You also want to make sure your freelancers are satisfied with your project and want to work for your company over the long term.
4. Choose the right topics and forms of content
Once your content outsourced team is assembled, it's time for your team and freelancers to meet constantly and communicate the types of topics resonate best with your audience.
Your team will lead this conversation by providing brand guidelines and a customer profile of your public to help inform your freelancers. This will allow them to add their comments and understand the intricacies of your brand and customer base.
Decide what topics will be treated better with certain types of content, whether blog posts, white papers, videos, infographics, and more.
5. Maintain an editorial calendar
Your team should create and oversee an editorial calendar to ensure your organization produces a variety of content in different forms, covering various topics of interest to your audience, and the timing of these content efforts with other marketing activations within your organization.
This calendar will help you organize the different members of your outsourced content team so everyone is on the same page about who does what, what topics are covered, what types of content are in the pipeline, and when and where each piece of content is published.
6. Consideration work presented internally
As mentioned earlier, it is essential that at least one person in your organization to manage the flow of content from your outsourced team. This person should be the end point of the review and approval before publication.
This is not because the work of a freelancer can not be trusted. Rather, it allows your organization to compare the content submitted by all members of your outsourced team to ensure that it has a consistent message and experience for your audience.
Your internal team is responsible for ensuring all content represents your brand and effectively reflect the interests of your customers while continuing to transmit this knowledge to your outsourced team.
7. Measuring success and iterate
Finally, it is important to regularly communicate the successes and failures of your various initiatives content with your entire team, both internal and outsourced.
Using a measurement tool such as Google Analytics to understand how your content is performing based on measurements that show a change in the sales, lead generation, consumption and sharing. This will show if your content is reaching your goals and conduct long-term results.
The measure is important to your future success because it helps everyone on your team to understand how their content is performing and allows them to change their tactics based on what worked with your audience and what does not.
How your organization is managing its content team outsourced? What strategies have you found the most success when working on content with freelancers? Share your thoughts in the comments below.