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3 Reasons Why Outsourcing Your Content Marketing Is a Bad Idea

Posted by Carole Mahoney on 10/23/13 11:04 AM

When you outsource too much of your content creation, the main thing you risk losing is your personal connection to your customer.

  1. Your voice, tone, style is lost and you look and sound like everyone else in your industry. (this is also the reason why template industry sites and white-labeled content don't sit well with me.) Goodbye branding.
  2. Your expertise and views on industry standards is lost. When everyone says the same things in the same way as everyone else, no one is an expert in anything. Goodbye thought leadership.
  3. Your unique personal experiences are lost and buried where no one can connect with and learn from them. Goodbye social proof.

Connect with Customers through Content Marketing

Talk to a sales person and ask them if they have someone else develop the relationship with their prospects, or close them to new clients or customers. I'm pretty sure that no matter how good or bad of a sales person they are, they will look at you like you have 2 heads.

How would they be able to understand the personal challenges and needs of their prospects if they didn't personally ask:

  • What they thought their problem was?
  • Why it was a problem for them?
  • How they wanted to solve it?
Some outside person couldn't know their business or the needs of their buyer as well as them! It is these conversations that sales, support, and service have with buyers and customers that are the gold mine for content. After all, we aren't selling a product, service, or even a company- we are selling ourselves first. (People buy from people, not companies.)

It would be like hiring someone to date your future wife for you. She's probably not going to be delighted with that.

But there isn't enough time in the day to do content marketing!

Ask a marketing person or business owner if they should outsource their content, and a common answer is yes, of course! Do you know how much time it takes to:

  • Create original and educational and entertaining blog posts, videos, and social media interactions AND
  • Compelling and actionable calls to action, landing pages and emails AND
  • Ask qualifying questions in forms that help sales follow up in a personal and relevant way?
This is why sales, marketing and service alignment is crucial to business growth.
Does anyone else see the problem with this process? Sales wouldn't imagine outsourcing the relationship with a customer, marketing can't imagine not outsourcing content creation. Content is everything, and is every one's job.
 
Is this why companies with aligned sales, marketing and service teams are more in tune with their audience? Is that how they are able to achieve top performance for revenue growth? Does alignment solve the problem of how to scale the creation of unique, personal, and relevant content?
 
Content isn't meant to sell, it's meant to engage, interact and attract. If you are using your content to talk about your company and not your customer, you are missing out. You will struggle to come up with topics to write about.
 

Topics: sales and marketing alignment, content marketing