Outsourced content production vendors are plenty. Agencies are in their hundreds. Freelance marketplaces have thousands and LinkedIn has millions.
But vendors who can create content that’s compelling, different, and drives business results? Those are rare.
To avoid wasting your resources on a mediocre content agency or freelancer, you need a thorough vetting process.
We’ll discuss 12 questions for narrowing your vendor list, so you can find a reliable content partner quickly. But before you jump onto that, let’s explore questions you need to answer as a client.
4 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Outsourcing Content Creation
The best content marketing agencies and freelancers vet you just as you vet them. Like you, they want to work with the right clients and deliver results. And because these vendors are great at that job, they are high in demand and often have retainers. As such, they have the privilege of choice and can pass up clients who are unprepared.
Here are the four questions to answer to appeal to top-tier content vendors:
What are my content marketing goals?
Think of your outsourced content creation vendor as a pilot. They can fly you wherever you want. But it’s up to you to choose your destination.
Our point? You shouldn’t be outsourcing goal setting.
However, if you lack content marketing expertise, prospective vendors may help you with the right content marketing strategy, tactics, and estimated timeline for reaching your goal.
When creating goals, don’t stop at increase web traffic, build brand awareness, generate leads, increase demo requests, etc. Such goals are not SMART.
Your goals have to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
With a SMART goal, it becomes easier to estimate how much content you’d need, including the estimated budget required to execute the operation.
Do I have marketing assets to help the vendor create great content?
Good content is insightful, digestible, and actionable. Great content is, in addition, differentiated, includes your unique points of view, and feels like it can come from just you. Only writers who have deep knowledge of your product and brand can produce such content.
If you want great content from your preferred agencies or freelancers, you need to provide the marketing assets that’ll help them deliver. These assets include your:
- Brand narrative
- Value proposition
- Brand positioning
- Differentiators
- Target market and buyer personas
- Brand style documents
- Detailed case studies
You may also need to schedule product demos and provide access to your internal SMEs.
As Kaleigh Moore who’s a freelance content writer puts it, these elements make you an ideal client. Why? They ensure your content partner understands your product or service, becomes fluent in your brand voice and tone, and feels like an extension of your in-house team.
What do I want to outsource?
If you lack in-house content expertise, you will outsource the entire content creation process. This includes tasks like:
- Content strategy and planning
- Topic ideation
- SEO keyword research
- Content writing or production
- Editing and proofreading
- Content publishing and CMS management
All that’s left is approving the work, providing feedback, and tracking progress.
If you do have in-house content expertise, determining what to outsource shouldn’t be a hassle. Take a cue from Eric Doty, content lead at Dock, who said:
From the beginning at Dock, we decided to take a one-channel-at-a-time approach where we prototype in-house and then outsource.
- Spin up the blog internally, then delegate to freelance writers
- Spin up SEO for our product templates, then delegate to a freelancer
- Spin up the podcast, then delegate distribution to a freelance marketer
- Spin up the blog design, then delegate to freelance graphic designers
We’re going to keep repeating that formula over and over.
Prototyping in-house before outsourcing helps you:
- Have a benchmark for what makes up high-quality content
- Become more helpful to contractors when you delegate work
In-house marketers often fear that vendors won’t produce content as good as their internal team. Anecdotal evidence shows this is false, provided you’re working with the right vendors. Erin Balsa, the Chief Picky Editor at Haus of Bold, puts it best when she said:
After you’ve worked with a writer for a few years, you almost barely have to edit their stuff after. It’s just like boom, boom, boom. Quick tweak, quick tweak. [They] get it. [They] know the audience. [They] get the point. [They] know the strategy.
Pro-tip: Don’t wait for your outsourcing needs to become critical before you begin delegating work. At a minimum, consider outsourcing to freelancers once you’ve built your prototype. This lets you test out vendors and build a list of vetted experts you can rely on when the need arises.
Here are a few tips to aid your transition:
- Start small: Outsource relatively easy/low-stakes tasks like ToFu content and content refreshes while creating BoFu and thought leadership pieces in-house.
- Move to content briefs: Identify the top performers and let them create their content briefs. For best results, Ryan Baum recommends providing a pre-brief or recording a Loom to share article angle and specific context.
- Progressively let go of BoFu content: Test out top performers with the BoFu or thought leadership pieces you’d typically keep in-house.
What are my preferred contract terms?
Companies often get locked into contracts with agencies delivering sub-par work. To avoid this, try leaning towards short-term contracts. If you must enter a long-term contract, ensure it includes a 30-day out clause (for any reason), as Brendan Hufford recommends.
The problem with long-term contracts is that they protect the agency and leave you vulnerable. Once you’ve entered a contract, it’s easy for your vendor to relax instead of working hard to deliver KPIs and earn your business. A good example is this potential love story with an agency that went sour.
Perhaps the vendor delivered as expected in their first month. But this doesn’t mean they continued to do so. As such, you should protect yourself by reviewing your contract. Beware of predatory practices that keep you locked into a contract even when things go south.
12 Questions to Vet Your Outsourced Content Creation Vendor
There’s no fail-safe formula for finding great outsourced content creation vendors. However, the following questions will significantly minimize your chances of hiring an incompetent vendor.
Are they familiar with your industry and the pain points of your audience?
As we suggested earlier, vendors can’t produce excellent content if they don’t understand your industry, audience pain points, and brand. It’s one reason the internet has content that speaks in hand-waving generalizations and doesn’t get specific.
We recommend choosing a vendor that specializes in your industry. For instance, at Content Estate, we specialize in content creation for SaaS and MarTech brands. However, our greatest superpower isn’t niche knowledge but our deep content research process.
Bottom line: It’s okay to work with a vendor unfamiliar with your industry, provided they’re happy to do deep research.
Does their portfolio align with your expectations?
You want proof that your vendor can deliver on your KPIs and live up to your quality standards. A relevant content portfolio is a good way to verify this. Read the content they’ve produced. Is it compelling? Does it come across as authoritative, meet your standards, and drive business results?
For example, our portfolio includes:
- Tens of SEO articles that rank on page 1 of Google for their target keywords –– some within three weeks of publishing and driving monthly traffic worth up to $1.5k monthly.
- A content refresh project that resulted in over 4,200% traffic jump within three months.
- Comatose content that we diagnosed and resuscitated, raising traffic by over 700% within three months.
A case study that resonated deeply with the audience and became one of our client’s “greatest hits in 2022.”
While a guarantee of results isn’t ideal, in this line of work, past results indicate future success. Your content marketing partner wins extra points if they’ve delivered the results you seek to previous clients.
Pro tip: Portfolio samples give you a feel for a vendor’s quality standards. When working with freelancers, you may also do a paid test project. Paid tests are great if the vendor doesn’t have samples in your niche.
How do they measure content quality?
Quality is subjective. Still, to avoid disappointment, it’s helpful to agree on objective measures of quality.
At Content Estate, we use the following questions to baseline content quality:
- Is it insightful, and does it add to the conversation? We puke at the sight of regurgitated, generic content.
- Is it optimized to drive business outcomes like traffic and leads? We aim to exceed KPIs.
- Is it publish-ready? We want our partners to publish our drafts with minimal edits.
What is the process for revisions and feedback?
Most competent B2B marketers include two rounds of edits in their content production process.
They cap the modification requests at two rounds to curb endless revisions and scope creep. That said, like us, the best vendors deliver content that requires zero or minimal edits, making two rounds of edits sufficient.
If your content still needs multiple edits after working with a vendor, it’s a sign you’re with the wrong partner.
What is the average turnaround time for different content types?
Can your vendor produce content fast enough to match your desired content output? Answering this question gives you insights on the number of vendors to hire.
If your goal is to scale content creation, then the agency you hire should have a bench of content talents. If you’re working with freelancers, you may have to hire multiple freelancers or a freelancer with experience managing other freelancers.
Who have they worked with? What do past clients say about them? Have they worked with notable clients in your industry?
For freelancers, view their website, the recommendation section of their LinkedIn profile, and the testimonials section of their profile on freelance marketplaces. For agencies, view their website and their third-party reviews on sites like Clutch and Google.
At Content Estate, our competence is endorsed by marketers from some of the world’s leading MarTech brands including HubSpot, CoSchedule, Engagebay and Omnicore.
What’s the cost of the outsourced content marketing service?
The most expensive content you’ll ever create is cheap content. You either dispose of it or edit it forever. Good content costs good money. That said, cost is not always indicative of value because the best content isn’t necessarily the most expensive.
For instance, agencies are more expensive than freelancers of comparative quality. This is because, besides paying their talents competitive rates, they have overhead costs that freelancers may not have.
To maximize your budget, you can consider working with a skilled freelancer with experience managing a team. Chances are, they’ll pass on the savings to you. At Content Estate, we work with clients with budgets starting at $1,000 to 7,000 monthly. With top content marketing agencies, you’re looking at a starting average of $10,000.
What content creation tools do they use?
Content marketing is difficult. Page 1 of the search engines is a minefield where incumbents smoke competitors with their ammunition of built backlinks.
To stay in the game, your outsourced partner needs tools in their arsenal that can help you compete. Here are some tools we use:
- Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, and Semrush: These are best-in-class keyword research research tools.
- Grammarly and ProWritingAid: We use Grammarly and ProWritingAid for editing.
- NeuronWriter: NeuronWriter is an AI-powered content optimization tool that helps with on-page SEO. It helps you save time on SERP analysis, provides internal linking recommendations and does a dozen other things to improve your chances of ranking on page 1 of the SERPs. Little secret 🤫⇥ NeuronWriter is currently promoting a lifetime deal starting at $89, which is 91% off the normal price.
Related reading: NeuronWriter Review 2023: Why This SEO Tool is Worth It.
What’s their stance on AI-written content?
AI is a great co-pilot, but an incapable pilot. Companies that let AI solo-pilot their content have crash-landed. Many have made a U-turn, hiring content experts to help re-do their content because AI-generated content didn’t produce results.
Even companies that manufacture these AI tools don’t completely rely on them for content production.
Alaura Weaver, Director of Content at Writer.com, an AI writing tool, warned that:
If you’re producing generic, robot-written content, then you’re going to lose your audience.
AI tools like ChatGPT or Writer.com have lots of excellent use cases. At Content Estate, we use AI marketing tools to brainstorm, draft outlines for simple posts like listicles, uncover talking points, summarize and extract key points from audio/video transcripts and whatnot. We don’t outsource our thinking to it.
Ask your prospective vendor how they use AI and ensure they don’t rely solely on it for content production.
Who retains the rights to the content produced?
Freelancers rely on showcasing their published work to attract clients. Unfortunately, brands may remove a writer’s byline during content updates, thereby hurting the freelancers’ businesses.
Yes, the freelancer can share Google Docs links to unpublished documents with prospects. They can also share screenshots of old web pages. However, these lack the credibility of live attributed content links.
Consequently, freelancers may request you to give credit by including their byline in the article for as long as the post is active. Agencies, on the other hand, may not prioritize retaining content rights. Clarifying these ownership rights upfront helps prevent disputes later on.
Does the content outsourcing vendor report on performance?
Performance reporting helps you gauge your content’s impact. It also provides feedback for optimizing your content strategy and maximizing ROI on your content marketing budget.
Content outsourcing agencies typically offer performance reporting as part of their service. Most expert freelancers can also provide this service on request. They track metrics like traffic, keyword rankings, email sign-ups, and conversions.
Inquire about their approach to performance reporting. Specifically, find out:
- The key metrics they track (and ensure it aligns with your KPIs)
- The frequency of reporting
- How they use the data to refine content strategies
Content writing is one of many content marketing services you’ll need to hit your KPIs. To maximize your content’s traffic potential, you may need to do content repurposing and distribution, link building, technical SEO and so on. You may also choose to produce survey-driven reports to build thought leadership.
If you know you’ll need these services, consider choosing a content marketing vendor that can provide them. Depending on the breadth of services you need, this might mean working with a full-service agency rather than a freelancer.
Outsourcing Your Content Creation to Content Estate
Outsourcing content creation doesn’t imply settling for mediocre content.
The right outsourced partner can help you produce content that bolsters your brand reputation and drives business results. These, and many other qualities, are reasons our clients trust us to create their content; not once, but monthly.
If you’re a SaaS or MarTech brand looking to scale or build out your content operation, we might be the right vendor for you. To get started, fill out the form below and we’ll respond within 12 hours.
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