With a fluctuating economy, transition to remote or hybrid work environments and the Great Resignation, it’s no wonder many businesses struggle with productivity, increased workloads and inefficiencies. In addition, now is a time when web traffic has risen steadily, and marketing teams need more content than ever. The result has been rushed, low-quality content, or even worse, no content at all.
Unless your marketing department moved its remote office to the underside of rocks, you already know that company blogs are one of the most important content marketing tools. Blogs drive web traffic to your site, position your brand as experts or thought leaders, help potential customers learn something new that is relevant to problems they want to solve, and so much more. More directly, HubSpot reported that in 2021, company blog posts led 56% of consumers to make purchases from a brand.
So while the marketing department might be struggling to keep up with changing needs, company blogs must never fall by the wayside. If you’re just republishing old content or cramming stuff together without much thought, you’re missing out on one of the most powerful and influential ways to grow your brand’s reputation and bottom line.
The 2021 Executive Marketing Leadership Survey, conducted by HubSpot and Canva, reports that nearly half of marketing teams know they need to update their websites more frequently. The company blog is one of the most valuable ways to do this, but forsaking quality for quantity is not a sustainable option.
The solution for your marketing team’s stretched resources? Outsource your blog content, but be selective about how — and with whom — you choose to do so. Don’t hire traditional marketers who produce promotional-sounding flack that nobody wants to read. In today’s world, you need skilled experts with the chops to identify compelling stories about your brand or expertise.
These are three compelling reasons why you need to hire a brand journalist.
1. Brand journalists create relevant content
Organic search is the No. 1 traffic source for blogs across all industries, according to SEMrush. When consumers are searching for information about a topic, they likely fall into three categories:
- They’re trying to find information — perhaps in the form of products and services — that helps them solve a problem
- They’re bored
- They’re genuinely curious
Regardless of the reason for their search, your consumers and clients need to find content that resonates with and teaches them something useful. This content should be informative and engaging.
Brand journalists create content that checks the only boxes you should care about: whether your content can be found in a search and whether it will be read. These freelance writers create search-engine optimized blogs not just with keywords but with actual, relevant information.
The pandemic has heightened the need for outsourcing premium content:
- 70% of marketers changed their targeting/messaging strategy
- 64% adjusted their editorial calendars
- 53% changed their content distribution and promotion strategy
- 40% changed their websites
- B2B marketers said blog posts/short articles produced the best overall content marketing results for the organization over the last 12 months (tied with virtual events/webinars/online courses)
2. Brand journalists can help improve your credibility
Brand journalists have a unique skill set not commonly found in the marketing industry. Rather than producing promotional (marketing) content, they think about content by using news judgment to tell stories that connect with readers. If the topic is too complex for the majority of people to understand or care about, journalists are trained to find ways to distill it down into stories that truly resonate.
Brand journalists follow the same set of principles that guide news journalists, the most important of which is the obligation to the truth. By outsourcing your blogs to brand journalists, your content will never be misleading or embellished. Brand journalists help your credibility soar.
3. Brand journalists can help you focus
As marketing teams feel overworked and burned out, they’re also facing convoluted, changing business strategies that are in flux due to the economy, changing job expectations and the pandemic. Your content can’t reflect these constant shifts in internal strategies.
According to a 2021 survey of more than 500 marketing leaders conducted by HubSpot and Canva, the biggest barriers to marketing department productivity are:
- Insufficient team resources (19%)
- Team workload and burnout (17%)
- Constantly changing business strategies to respond to the global environment (11%)
Marketers with too much on their plates need to be able to trust that the third party they’ve hired to write content can deliver results while taking into account the bigger picture. Brand journalists bring the contextual mindset to every story that marketers can sometimes overlook.
A marketing professional responding to The 11th Annual B2B Content Marketing Survey said: “We have to focus on acquiring customers while also being sensitive to their issues. … We can’t be tone deaf with marketing in times of great change and crisis. We have to support people before the business. Without people, we don’t have business.”
Without good storytelling and communication strategies, your content won’t be able to reach the people upon which your business relies. When you hire a freelancer, you discover where the most impactful stories exist, rather than relying on marketer tunnel vision that focuses only on the products and services that need to get sold.
B2B marketers are often piecemealing together these editorial tools while creating content:
- Keyword research for SEO
- Editorial calendars
- Shared documents to track ideas
- Personas
- Readability tools
- Ideation/project management platforms
- Fact-checking tools
PowerPublish combines all of these tools into one simple solution, so your company’s content marketing needs — from blogs to white papers to social media — are unified, engaging, high-quality, original and credible. This journalistic approach to outsourced content removes the hassle and noise of other marketing solutions, so you can start publishing the best branded content right away.