A couple days ago, the Grammar Chic blog turned to the concept of content marketing for entrepreneurs, offering a crash course on some of the questions entrepreneurs should ask before engaging in any kind of content marketing endeavor. Today, we’re going to narrow the focus further still, addressing three concerns that entrepreneurs often voice about content marketing—and specifically about engaging professional content marketing companies.
The benefits of content marketing are, by now, well established; the various goals that content marketing can help you meet are most significant. The rub for many entrepreneurs is actually relinquishing control of their content marketing efforts—allowing an outside company to take the reins and to try to put the brand’s best face forward.
As an entrepreneur, you may simply feel uncomfortable with a content marketing firm saying things in the “voice” of your brand—the brand you’ve worked so hard to build. Then again, you may simply wonder how a content marketing company can guarantee any kind of ROI.
We’ll take three particular concerns, one at a time, and hopefully shed some light on them.
Concern #1: An external content marketing team won’t know enough about my brand.
You work hard to cultivate a certain identity for your business, and it’s scary to think about allowing another company to shape that identity. And sure, it’s true: A content marketing team won’t know your business as well as you do—but they also don’t really have to. The role of the content marketing company is to understand your values and the benefits you offer to customers, and to convey that clearly. Knowing the full, exhaustive history of your brand, or how you feel about every single issue under the sun, is frankly not necessary.
Content marketers, like those at Grammar Chic, will work with you to understand what your brand is all about, and will allow you to retain as much control as you’d like over the content that is produced. Content marketers don’t need to understand your business as well as you yourself do, however; no one does, and no one ever could!
Concern #2: It is impossible to prove ROI.
This is sort of an old canard about content marketing. It’s true enough that, if you’re looking for a direct line between a piece of content and a sale, you won’t always find it. However, there are several ways in which content marketing can make a real impact on your brand, in terms of authority, loyalty, and visibility, to name just a few parameters; setting the right goals helps you evaluate the value you’re getting. To say that it’s impossible to measure ROI simply isn’t true; you just have to decide how you want to measure it.
Concern #3: I can just do it myself.
Entrepreneurs often have a certain DIY attitude, and it’s certainly reasonable to think that you might just take on content marketing responsibilities yourself, especially early on. The thing is, content marketing can really be a full-time job, and the more you put into it the more you’ll get out. It also happens to be the kind of repeatable task that doesn’t particularly need to be done by the business owner—so when you outsource it, you can free your time to focus on things that only you can do.
Entrepreneurs who have further questions or concerns, of course, are welcome to contact our team today: Call 803-831-7444, or visit http://www.grammarchic.net.
The Red Ink 