How to Ensure Technology Content Creation Quality? 60% of Companies use Outsourcing!
Creating technology content is costly and time-consuming. But, trading quality with quantity is risky - in the worst case, it can disqualify you from the buyers' shortlists! Over 60% of companies don't take such a risk - they outsource content creation!
According to a 2017 survey conducted by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), 89% of US based B2B marketers use content marketing. And, 75% of them considered being successful in achieving their goals. The popularity of content marketing in B2B is breaking new records every year. According to CMI‘s annual survey, every year since 2014 approximately 70% of marketing teams reported to have a plan to increase content creation in the year to come.
There is a reason for its popularity...
Why Technology Companies Create Content?
Content marketing perfectly matches today’s B2B buying behavior in almost all technology sectors and industries. More and more of the technology buying process takes place without contacting vendors’ sales representatives. B2B buyers are technology-savvy professionals able to collect and compare information about competing technologies and offerings. Vendors are typically contacted only at a later stage after preliminary shortlisting.
Consequently, it is of utmost importance for vendors to build a top-of-mind brand and an industry thought leader image, which is highly visible on search engines, social media, and key technology media to stay on the radar of potential B2B buyers whenever they activate their buying processes. Also, material provided online should serve buyers farther down the process as the first personal touch point with a vendor takes place later.
For vendors, this means that they must create and publish more high-quality content with more details and topics covered.
By creating low quality content, companies risk becoming disqualified on the vendor selection process before their sales reps even receive a contact request.
Risks of Creating Low Quality Content
The flip side of the coin is that content creation is very resource intense. Planning, research, writing, visual design and overall production eats up resources and requires many skills, let alone content distribution and monitoring on multiple channels. In the CMI content marketing survey, half of the respondents admitted that lack of time and other challenges limited their ability to produce content, even to the extent that 25% respondents could not prioritize content quality.
As a result, technology buyers are blasted with low quality content, irrelevant blogs and ebooks, which fail to provide the needed brand visibility, thought leader image and let alone address buyers’ key concerns. Too often opening an ebook or reading an industry article is a turn-off for a reader.
Here are the risks of creating low quality technology content:
By creating low quality content, which is not providing answers to a customer’s key pain-points at each stage of a buying journey, companies risk becoming disqualified on the vendor selection process before their sales reps even receive a contact request.
Sales Lead Generation, one of the main objectives of content marketing, has largely been based on providing downloadable content for B2B buyers in exchange for their contact details. Unfortunately, due to the past experiences with bad content, people have stopped giving out their real contact details, which has reduced the effectiveness of content marketing.
Bad quality content does not only turn off human readers. Since 2011 from its Panda release onwards, Google started to remove so called thin content sites, i.e. sites full of keywords and copy without real information, from its search results. This and several other search engine algorithm functionalities penalize bad content, while sites with high quality content are rewarded with higher rankings.
The cluttered technology content marketing space reduces its effectiveness and Return on Investment (ROI) and its days as the most popular B2B marketing concept are soon over in case marketers do not start investing in content quality, instead of quantity.
Over 60% of companies are outsourcing content creation to agencies to get access to specialist skills, without the cost and risk of employed resources.
How to Create High Quality Tech Content? Outsource!
Building a world-class in-house content marketing capability is not an option for many companies as it requires specialist resources from a range of disciplines: Content strategist, writing, graphics, layout, marketing automation, online publishing, search engine optimization (SEO), and public relations.
This however is not a good enough excuse not to invest in better content quality as the entire sales performance of your company is often at stake. Over 60 percent of companies are now outsourcing content creation to agencies to get access to specialist skills, without the cost and risk associated with employed resources.
A tailored, outsourced end-to-end content marketing process combining formulation of content strategy, research, creation, publishing and distribution is easy to integrate into your marketing organization. If in addition the agency provides sufficient technology and industry substance knowledge, outsourcing instead of in-house organization brings faster results and the only thing needed from the company is to review and approve the content to be published.
When you need high-quality technology content quickly, contact us for free consultation!
