Unless you’re trying to transform an old step ladder into a vintage bookshelf, it’d be best to keep a “do it yourself” approach at arm’s length from your content creation strategy. In other words, the two terms DIY and content marketing shouldn’t be used in conjunction.
Building, modifying and provisioning a content creation process without the proper professionals can be quite dangerous. Let’s take a look at why:
The Majority of Companies Partake in Content Marketing, but Few Do it Right
While 90 percent of B2C marketers use content marketing—compared with 86 percent last year—only 34 percent consider themselves “effective” at it, according to CMI’s 2014 report. Entertaining a “pick and choose” content marketing strategy—or worse, a one-size-fits-all model—scarcely yields good results. Challenged with a lack of budget and a lack of time, many companies have their backs against the wall and are choosing content strategies with no real plan in place. There’s so much to be on top of, however; a skilled content strategy vendor can you give that extra support, guiding you to the right vehicles, accelerating your content marketing success with a documented, fully loaded strategy and helping you create custom-tailored copy.
You Can Underestimate the Scope of Content Marketing without Even Realizing It
“This content marketing thing is easy!” says the inexperienced marketer or the employee who has been dumped a marketing project out of the blue. “I’ll just create a WordPress account.” One can easily forget, however, that content marketing is a very large beast consisting of dozens of channels that need to be leveraged including social, blogs, infographics, whitepapers, videos and case studies, among many others.
For example, if a company decides to launch a premium blog, how often should posts be delivered? Who should be authoring the blog? How will the content be optimized to ensure high ranking? If you decide to do an infographic, you need to get your design team involved stat. The list goes on and on…and that’s not even including social media management and engagement. Taking a DIY approach to content marketing can quickly leave you buried up to your neck in things that are far beyond your realm of knowledge.
You Have to Spend a Lot of Resources
You know you need content marketing, but you also know you can’t tip the scale on how your company allocates its spend. As a result, oftentimes you ask your marketing team to don many hats—even those that don’t fit. However what you really need is a team that can—and has the time to—do it all. This is why so many companies funnel money into the promise of content marketing and see no results—their strategy is headed up by a team battling against time and limited experience.
To build a content marketing strategy from the ground up, companies need to assemble a strong in-house team. They need to onboard a social media manager, a group of editors, designers and more to see that their content creation strategy stays afloat. But companies will unfortunately use up a lot of spend and resources in doing so—much more than needed for locking in a content strategy vendor.
An outsourced content marketing team boasts a group of experts solely dedicated to creating rich and compelling content that drives the point home for your target audience and removes onus from your shoulders. This team will cost you less, save you resources, and knows how to nurture a constant flow of riveting, custom content after your first batch of blogs are posted. It makes sense, then, that nearly half of companies plan to turn to an outsourcer in 2014 to meet their content marketing needs.
This is only a sampling of reasons why a company’s content marketing strategy can misfire when taking the DIY approach. What other reasons can you think of?
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
