Your content ideation, execution and project management isn’t playing out the way you’d like. You’ve been thinking about hiring a marketing assistant, but with the current economy and pushback from HR, it’s just not in the cards. So, why not go the teamlancing route? You can virtually expand your team (temporarily or long-term) with creative pros who live and breathe content marketing. They’re ready to solve your challenges and get your campaigns rolling.
In 2019, we asked over 2,800 marketers about their biggest hurdles when it comes to content, and it’s no surprise that having the time to devote to content tasks topped the list.
Additional concerns included:
- Needing help with content creation
- Creating a quality product
- Getting the writing done
- Having trouble finding talented content creators
- Putting out content consistently
- Devising a strategy to make sense of it all
See, you’re really not alone. Successful, actionable content production involves more than putting an idea into words and clicking the publish button.
Teamlancing can solve these six marketing challenges.
Let’s be candid and recognize it’s not uncommon for small-to-medium-size businesses and boutique agencies to collaborate with creatives on contract to supplement in-house content marketing efforts. Here are six of the top challenges we recognize here at ClearVoice and have the skills to solve.
1. Short-term project execution
Everything is aligned for your new product launch. The packaging is beautiful. Retailers have it stocked. But, you know you need to promote it beyond the sales route, and your marketing team is already overtasked with the everyday needs of your website, newsletter and social media feeds. This scenario is so incredibly common.
The Project Management Institute explains that an initial best practice in project management is defining and scheduling a project. Sounds simple, until you don’t have the staff or hours to implement this critical step. By choosing a teamlancing approach, you can temporarily hire a team of creative individuals to spread the word about your launch. Whether you want to invest in one quarter or one year, you can enjoy a documented strategy, content plan and analysis of the campaign’s success to evaluate the ROI of your marketing dollars.
2. Marketing strategy development
Let’s say you do have a robust marketing department. You even have writers in the wings that you can call on to help create your content, and they do so faithfully, but you’re just not seeing much of a spike in leads, engagement or profits. What gives?
Do you have a strategy in place? We find that many clients race ahead with content production without having a clear roadmap in place to do so. In HubSpot‘s ‘The Ultimate Guide to Marketing Strategies & How to Improve Your Digital Presence’ a marketing strategy is defined as the tool that defines a specific goal in an achievable way. Hiring a content strategist to mesh with your team can help you identify your challenges, determine how to solve them and outline the targeted actions needed to reach your goal. This strategy then informs your content plan and production.
3. Content creation and production
Got products. Got strategy. Got a process? No? Thank goodness teamlancing can kickstart your content production into high gear. Once you have a content plan in place, it’s time to get those assets created and scheduled for publishing and sharing. Working with an extension of your team can quickly fill your content coffers.
The Marketing Insiders Group explains that producing quality content at volume on a tight time schedule is often one of the biggest challenges content marketers face. Having an external team augmenting your marketing efforts allows you to both scale and be agile with content messaging that resonates with the current public climate and your brand’s core values.
4. Content dissemination
After all that content gets produced, it can be tough to know what to do with it. It goes on a blog, right? No! Content can be used to populate your website, yes, but it’s also used to engage with social media audiences, fuel ebooks and use in emails to nurture leads, and so much more. The takeaway? Content distribution shouldn’t be an afterthought.
The University of Queensland, Australian Learning and Teaching Council Ltd, and partners penned the “Planning a Dissemination Strategy” chart to engage potential interest across the life of a project. In the flowchart, they also remind us that content can work as talking points for presentations, provide the base for press releases and be transformed into new mediums, such as podcasts or videos. A freelance content strategist can help you get the most mileage out of your content assets by creating a distribution strategy.
5. Campaign evaluation
We all like to know what we’re doing is working, right? If your team doesn’t have the time or expertise when it comes to campaign analysis, this is another task that can be teamlanced. Let pros who know the ins and outs of SEO, social media trends and reporting software work their magic and produce an easily consumable feedback report for your review. This deep audit can then be reviewed by your head of marketing to inform your next strategy, and how it may need to shift from previous processes.
The creators of reporting software at Adstage crowdsourced a group of marketers to comment on their favorite ways to measure success and failure of a campaign, generally in the B2B space. They all agreed any campaign should produce results by way of leads, revenue, filling the pipeline and creating sales opportunities. Sure, engagement metrics and likes are fun to see, but, did they convert? A campaign evaluation can shed light on this popular inquiry.
6. Long-term growth planning
Finally, we often meet focused, productive marketers who have stellar content strategies, plans and production methods. They know campaign analysis is vital too. But, what they forget is to look to the future. They get so focused on real-time production and results that they don’t anticipate shifts in audience needs. We can help with that too.
A team of strategists can review your brand’s marketing efforts over time to determine trends and how your audience might respond to future messaging. This predictive strategy lays the foundation for future campaigns, taking the guesswork out of what to do next. SEMRush offers an incredible content marketing strategy guide for 2020 that can inform your planning, positioning, value proposition and business goals as we move forward in an economy that’s flocking to at-home online shopping and services.
These are just six challenges we see pop into our inboxes here at ClearVoice each week. Some marketing folks need us to help with one aspect, while others onboard a teamlancing collaboration to work from strategy ideation to future planning together. Some of our clients have been partnering with our team of creatives for years, while others use our service as a helping hand to get through a one-off project. No marketing task is too big or too small around here.
Challenges solved: 3 teamlancing case study highlights
If a few of these challenges have crossed your desk too, you’re in good company. It’s no secret that everyone from solo marketers to huge corporate marketing teams outsource tasks to teams of creatives. Let’s dig into a few success stories of brands who took the leap into teamlancing to finally meet their goals.
1. Customer experience content production
A marketing specialist from CloudCherry, which was acquired by Cisco in 2019 and is now known as Cisco Webex Experience Management, contacted ClearVoice to assist with challenges #1 and #3, content production for a short-term (one year) project. Her organization needed a mix of long- and short-form content focusing on customer experience. Together with ClearVoice, she guided a team of writers and editors to produce blog posts, case studies and white papers during 2019-2020. The team communicated via phone calls, email and the chat feature in the ClearVoice platform to keep the collaboration on track and on time.
2. Defining and developing a voice
In the fall of 2019, the VP of Strategic Operations at PropStream, a real estate analytics software company, reached out to ClearVoice. They needed to address challenges #2, #3 and #5 with a core focus on finding their brand’s voice and devising a strategy that would make them stand out amongst their competition. Crafting and publishing six articles per month has garnered higher traffic numbers throughout their entire website, not just on the blog. This process has allowed them to discover what their customers care about most and lay the groundwork to grow their content production.
3. Scaling to see website results
Nested within the challenge of creating content is the ability to continually produce, and then, up the ante. Southern California home furnishings store chain Jerome’s Furniture engaged a teamlancing model with ClearVoice in 2018 to produce 50 pieces of content. In 2019, they scaled to 350 pieces of content. The company’s goal was to improve site page ranking in organic search and increase page-quality scores, both of which were achieved by building up their content quantity and quality.
Are you ready to teamlance your way to a successful product launch, website redesign or blog refresh? Contact ClearVoice today to discover which freelance pros can move your plans into production.
