Different organisations have different approaches to outsourcing.
Some fortunate organisations are able to outsource anything as long as gets a thorny problem off their team’s plate. Others don’t have the cash reserves to afford such a luxury. And some are still doing pretty much everything internally, almost out of habit.
However, as businesses change and responsibilities build up, outsourcing certain tasks becomes a sensible call.
There are numerous great reasons why companies should outsource copywriting and content writing; and in my experience they tend to boil down to five overarching factors.
So, let’s explore them, shall we?
Why Should SMEs Outsource to a Copywriter or Content Writer?
Outsourcing Gives You Access to a Fresh Pair of External, Expert Eyes
We all need a critical friend sometimes. Someone who has a certain level of distance from a situation but is invested enough to want the best for you. When you work with an external copywriter – or indeed any outsourced creative – that is exactly what you get.
In business, a savvy, earnest, and ethical marketing friend is truly a friend indeed. To excel at any creative marketing skill, we need to know enough about the fundamentals of marketing to make our stuff really shine.
For example, I’m an expert B2B copywriter and content marketer, but I also know a lot about other marketing topics too: promotional strategy, SEO, pay-per-click, conversion optimisation, design, website creation, and more. Not enough to put any of my colleagues in those fields out of business mind, but enough to provide a well-rounded approach to the word wrangling I do for my clients.
Where am I going with this? Well, any copywriter worth their salt will know that a few honeyed words aren’t going to magically transform a website that search engines can’t see. A good tagline isn’t going to overhaul a campaign for a product the market doesn’t want.
When you outsource to a well-rated creative, you’re working with an expert. Someone who is likely to be that critical friend – and even give you a bit of tough love if it’s for the best.
Even in prosperous times where tough love isn’t needed, an experienced marketing resource can help support and steer the promotional ship. Copywriters and content writers may be able to suggest a better way of approaching a subject or may find a more succinct way of describing what you do.
As the old adage goes – two heads are better than one.
Good Copy is an Investment in Your Brand, Like Design
Ask yourself: what is a brand? What makes up a brand’s constituent parts? A lot of the answers business leaders generally provide to these questions are likely to make graphic designers very happy.
Visual assets are essential to any brand: the logo, the colour palette, the presentation style, the fonts. But the linguistic parts of a brand are often overlooked: the brand’s tone of voice; the names of its products or services; the way their copy keeps people hooked; the way they persuade people to buy.
I’ve always said that graphics and text have an equally important job in marketing. Graphics get people looking in the right direction and create an initial appeal – but the copy gets people hooked and ready to make a purchase. They go hand in hand.
Copy isn’t just there to fill a space or tick a box. It’s there to win you business. The right words have to be selected and strung together in just the right way to pack the maximum persuasive punch.
So, if you’re going to pay someone for design, consider paying someone for the words too. They’re two sides of the same coin.
Outsourcing Unlocks Internal Time and People Power
This one is a particular sticking point for a lot of smaller and growing businesses. Copywriting and content writing is often something that companies “DIY” in their formative years, often with the intention of outsourcing it when cash-flow starts to allow.
But when you get used to doing a certain task yourself, it’s easy to perceive outsourcing as “giving away control”. I totally understand – it takes a lot of trust to hand over the reins like that.
However, any kind of creative work takes a lot of time and mental bandwidth. Aside from employing dedicated, in-house creatives, there will naturally come a point when the time and brainpower your company spends on DIY-ing copy and content will be better spent elsewhere.
And if you suddenly uncover a need for pages’ worth of new copy, I doubt that many of us will have the time and energy to carve out however many hours or days that would take to write.
Let’s not discount professional burnout, either. That heavy, numb feeling of “running on empty” yet still in headless chicken mode. In that situation, your creativity will take a nosedive.
Yet even if you delegate copywriting to someone in-house, you’ll have to think about how that will affect their existing responsibilities – and their own “burnout-o-meter”.
But by outsourcing your copy and content writing to a professional, you no longer have to worry about fitting promotional writing around an ever-growing to-do list.
One last point before we move on: if something urgent comes up for a client that demands our attention, it’s usually tasks like self-promotion and content creation that get sacrificed. However, any copy or content writer you work with is duty bound to deliver in line with your objectives.
Outsourcing Gives You Access to a Conversion-Focused, Professional Persuader
We’ve all heard the argument “I can write, can’t I? I’ll just write the copy myself – or get ChatGPT on the case.”
Take it from a professional persuader. Getting people to do something is hard work. In a lot of cases, a business’s biggest competitor isn’t the similar company over the road. It’s the client simply doing nothing – ignoring the problem or putting off a solution.
Writing copy that gets people to sit up and take notice is a big enough ask. But the copy also needs to keep their interest, persuade them, and lead them through to a sale. It’s a real skill. Plus, that copy needs to fit in seamlessly with the design and the reader’s place within the buying journey. It can be a lot to consider sometimes.
So, when you work with a copywriter, you’re effectively getting a professional persuader in your corner.
What About Generative AI Though?
There’s a similar conversation to be had around using generative AI tools like ChatGPT to write your copy. The leaps and bounds that AI and machine learning tools have made in the past few years is staggering. And these free, publicly available tools can churn out some surprisingly readable, nicely flowing text.
BUT.
The copy that these tools spit out is often remarkably surface level. They don’t know your brand. They don’t have your expertise. AI responses are blended up, regurgitated copies of other works, so they naturally lack originality.
But most essentially, they lack a crucial human touch. A human copywriter will sit down with you and get to understand your business inside and out. They will be able to sense your excitement about certain parts of your business and your story. They will be able to fundamentally grasp the good you bring to your audience. And they will be able to bring that enthusiasm through into your copy.
No amount of prompting will ever be able to get that through to an AI.
Selling Yourself is Hard Work
Sometimes, when you eat, sleep, and breathe what you do – especially in a highly technical industry – it can be really difficult to put yourself in your buyer’s shoes.
This can be best summed up by an anecdote I heard from a contact once.
She was chatting with someone she knew in the aerospace engineering sector, and she asked “what does your company do, again?” The engineer proceeded to talk her ear off about drag coefficients for what was nearly a solid 20 minutes.
After a good deal of polite smiling and nodding, she clarified “yes, but what does the company actually do? What exactly do you solve for your clients?”.
Cue awkward silence.
Yet I find the engineer’s situation totally understandable. When you are so “in” your business and so passionate about what it does, it can be hard to get out of your industry-orientated head and think like an outsider. And not just think like any outsider – the most important outsider to any business – your customer!
Even those who do “get” where their customer is coming from, some folks simply dread the concept of putting together sales text or shareable content. I’ve met plenty of business leaders who are naturally good writers, but they just loathe the task of creating sales text.
As copywriters, our job is to build bridges between what our clients provide and what their customers need. If there are technical elements involved in what the client offers, the benefits to the end user need to be depicted in a way that the target audience will understand.
With that in mind, copywriters like me also serve as de-jargonifyers and techie translators too!
Are you in the market for a professional explainer™ writer to put your business into words? I’m an experienced and highly rated copy and content writer and strategist for B2B tech providers. Drop me a line and let’s talk about your copy and content needs.
Note: This post was first published on the 5th July 2017 and has since been edited.
