Your social media strategy will most likely include a range of different media from infographics and instructographics to video and comic strips, and you’ll certainly want your posts to incorporate a range of appealing and informative content that will entertain and engage your audience.
Instead of attempting to produce all of this content yourself, you can often make better use of your time and resources by outsourcing this umbrella task to a reliable and trusted third party provider.
There are several ways of going about this:
- Decide on the amount of content you’ll require on a monthly basis, which will allow you to determine what you’ll pay for the service.
- Ask the prospective provider about delivery and storage volumes.
- Pay proper attention to support. This is in fact a crucial issue and you’ll need to know such things as whether to contact the provider by phone or email and how long the expected response time will be.
- Ensure that you get value for money. You can ask for recommendations from the blogging community, and all the companies you consider should be able to point you towards samples of their work that have been uploaded so you can evaluate their levels of competence.
Flexibility
By outsourcing content production your content marketing calendar will have greater flexibility as well as saving time with multitasking and fast turnaround. The best providers will deliver professional quality work to tight deadlines, and this will also let you run multiple projects at the same time. Research, creation and the gathering of materials can be hugely time consuming for an in-house team.
Imported expertise
Outsourcing also gives you access to expertise you probably won’t have in-house, and you’ll be assured of optimized content that is adequately in-depth and effective at engaging its targeted audience.
Strengthened strategy
Your content marketing strategy can be greatly improved by outsourcing content to a good provider. They’ll know all about what type of content should be used for different goals and the best tools to use to promote the created content. They’ll also be able to evaluate and analyze results and what changes to implement in order to keep results coming in.
Risks
Of course outsourcing can have its downside, and you’ll also need to consider things like security, management challenges and the like. System integration can be another potential headache, along with training and knowledge transfer. Accounting products such as QuickBooks from Intuit, a leading provider of financial packages, can help in this connection by streamlining accounting processes across multiple platforms. At the end of the day you’ll have to weigh it all up and make your own decision.
Example:
The successful ’15 Days of Beauty Thrills’ campaign run recently by Sephora on Facebook was designed to drive traffic to the new website by actively engaging fans using a range of media. By offering insights, deals and a sense of exclusivity, and leveraging partners to amplify the message impact, Sophora ensured a completely social experience that succeeded in going viral. At the heart of the campaign was quality content that included videos, images and feeds to actively engage a younger audience and lure them with big rewards for participation.
Author:
Carlo Pandian is a media and marketing geek and Italian expat. He is interested in ‘lean start-ups’ and shares how entrepreneurs can focus on their core business by outsourcing their social media content needs with the community of The Social Robot.
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