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If you’re part of a 1-5 person marketing team in a small to medium sized business, you’ve got a lot of responsibility. Not only are you constantly juggling 15-20 highly important tasks on a day-to-day basis, you have to prove that all your efforts are positively affecting the bottom line. The pressure on modern marketers has never been higher.
As much as marketing automation software, content management systems, and new CRM solutions have streamlined a lot of marketing activities, technology is worthless without a steady stream of fresh, useful content.
A reliable content marketing partner can help you produce blogs, whitepapers, and social media content on a regular basis, buoying your thought leadership efforts, increasing your reach, and attracting new customers. There are 4 ways the right content marketing partner can help you reach your goals faster.
Saves You Time
For the average marketer, a well-produced blog post complete with internal links, photos, and search engine optimization can take upwards of 2-3 hours to research, write, edit and publish.
Hubspot founder, Darmesh Shah, encourages companies to “Blog as often as you want to be found online.” Well, if that’s true, than that’s at least 4-5 blog posts per week…up to 15 hours! If you’re like most hybrid marketers, you can’t spend 38% of your week on writing blog posts. Too many other important tasks would be left to the side.
Content marketing partners, such as Community Elf, have the unique ability to create high-quality, written content at a much faster pace, saving marketers like you and me valuable time. Why? Because they have writers solely dedicated to blogging, posting on social media, or writing whitepapers. These expert bloggers know what it takes to write a good blog post and after immersing themselves in your industry, they can quickly adapt their writing skills to your audience.
Protects Your Budget
Unless you’ve got significant VC or PE backing, your SMB most likely works within a fairly lean marketing budget. Let’s say your monthly marketing budget (including salaries) is $250,000/month. You’re working with a 2-person marketing team, and you’re completely overloaded. To drive traffic for your website, you know you need to produce content, but you’re team is tapped out.
Hiring a marketer to write and produce social media content could cost you $30,000-40,000 per year excluding benefits! What if you could hire a content marketing partner to produce the same amount of content, for just $10,000-$20,000 per year without all the hassle of healthcare and other benefits?
What would you do?
Helps You Grow Reach
After consistently producing helpful content, and effectively publishing it to your intended audience, your ultimate goal is for your audience to read it, love it, and keep on coming back.
A common method used to measure how your content is resonating is by monitoring your blog subscriber and social media follower numbers. If your content marketing partner is helping you increase your “Reach” online, then they are doing their job.
My company, DonorPro, provides fundraising software for nonprofits. We partnered with Community Elf for content marketing help starting in November 2014. Here’s what our blog subscriber chart looks like…
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The ability of Community Elf to provide our audience valuable content on a consistent basis helped us grow our reach 400% in just 9 months.
Ability to Scale
By taking the bulk of the daily writing responsibilities off ours hands, Community Elf enabled our small marketing team to focus on conversion optimization, website management, video production, and other pipeline growth activities.
Scaling your marketing operations can come in one of three ways:
- Working 80+ hours per week (who wants to do that?)
- Hiring internally (that drives up Cost of Customer Acquisition and training costs)
- Finding a Partner (some ramp up time needed)
The right partner can free up your strategic thinkers and enable your marketing team to scale efficiently and enable you to position your firm as a thought leader in the industry.
Closing Questions
In closing, here are four questions you should ask any content marketing partner before agreeing to move forward:
- Do your writers have any background in my industry? (This will accelerate implementation period)
- Who is responsible for coming up with article topics? (If you’re too busy, they should be able to contribute)
- How are you staying on top of the latest SEO changes? (Get them to share details, not fluff here)
- What kind of photos do you have access to for our blog posts? (You want these to reflect your brand)
*This is a guest post written by Dan Quirk, Marketing Manager for DonorPro. Dan contacted Community Elf about writing a post and was warmly received. Neither DonorPro nor Dan received any incentives for writing this post.
Are you interested in writing a guest post? Contact Allison Maloney at amaloney@communityelf.com!