Your digital or online marketing strategy should include a blog. The purpose of all your social media platforms (facebook, twitter, pinterest, youtube, google+) are to increase conversions and drive traffic to your website or into your bricks and mortar store. Having a blog on your website means your website will be viewed with more favour by Google and other search engines as it will have lots of new content and highly searchable keywords. The blog also serves as a news portal as you tweet links to your posts and pin images from the posts.
Why You Might Need To Outsource Your Content Marketing
Businesses use a ‘ghost blogger’ or a content creator for a variety of reasons – it can be due to lack of time on behalf of the business owners and staff, it can be due to a lack of confidence or ability amongst the staff. Some business owners will outsource the social media content for a six month period before being convinced of its value, at the end of 6 months they decide to hire an additional member of staff with part of their role being social media management. Others will outsource their social media content on a continual basis.
Google changed its algorithms some time ago and as a result, businesses that were depending on paying for backlinks to their website found their google ranking had, quite frankly, vanished. Google is now rewarding websites that produce good content, product content that people find interesting and stay to read. Hence, having a blog is more important than ever.
However, a good blog requires more than just writing some text. Apart from being interesting and appropriate for your target audience, it requires the inclusion of highly searched keywords, appropriate and pinnable images, attractive layout, good structure, calls to actions and effective titles. Writing a well optimised blog post takes time – time that you might not have to spare if you are busy working on other elements of your business.
How Outsourcing Social Media Marketing Works:
#1 Complete Content Creation and Social Media Marketing Package
Some clients prefer to let us come up with the content for their blog and update their facebook page and other platforms as appropriate. They will read the posts when they are published. We communicate by email or telephone as required and meet up once every three months to evalute results and plan the marketing strategy for the next three months.
#2 Assisted Content Creation and Digital Marketing
Some clients prefer to let us come up with the content for their blog although they may send us occasional links. However, they like to check each post before it is published and this is perfectly fine. In fact, if the subject is in an area that could be misinterpreted or be controversial, we’re happier that they do that. Like above, we meet every 3 months to evaluate results and plan going forward.
#3 Partial Content Creation
Another scenario is that clients want to provide the content but need us to write it articulately and to optimise it. They send us links or bullet points, we write up the posts. They usually feel happy to manage their own twitter / facebook / pinterest accounts but prefer to outsource the actual writing up of the blog.
Outsourcing your social media content means that you are free to concentrate on the areas of your business where you excel and where you are needed most. It may be that extra business generated from the social media could result in the hiring of additional staff in a number of months and one of those new staff could adopt the social media role.
#4 Blog Coaching
Like the saying, give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach him how to fish and he will never go hungry. If we teach a business person how to blog, they are able to manage their own social media marketing. We also support businesses with blog coaching and mentoring sessions so they feel confident about the blog writing process. I received a telephone call from a happy client this morning – she had been very nervous about using facebook and twitter for her business but couldn’t quite manage to outsource it. Having had one training session, she is using hashtags and joining in conversations very competently. She now feels ready to start writing blog posts for her business and wanted to book a blog coaching session to ensure she is blogging effectively.
Businesses who blog receive more leads per month than those who don’t. Can you afford not to blog in this digital age? If you would like to talk to us about our content creation services or to enquire about coaching, do get in touch.
Image: Free Digital Photos
