You’ll often hear of content marketing as “feeding the beast.” That describes the ongoing labor of creating content to keep a content strategy working.
Although many healthcare organizations have embraced the importance of content marketing, many are struggling to produce enough content to keep their key patient audiences engaged. Even a weekly blog can become a challenge.
So, here are your options:
- Continue to crank out content yourself—when you and your team have time.
- Hire freelancers.
- Hire more full-time employees, who will be dedicated to content.
- Contract with a web design or branding agency you’ve already worked with.
- Partner with a content marketing agency.
Shameless plug: This blog post will endorse option five, because, well, CareContent is a content marketing agency.
Here are 12 reasons why the first four options don’t stack up to partnering with a content marketing agency.
Option 1: Crank out the content yourself.
Why this doesn’t work…
If you spend most of your days creating content, you probably aren’t focusing on strategy or promotion or the other moving parts that make content marketing successful.
You’ll also have to stay on top of all the changes in search algorithms, social media, design, and content marketing trends. Content marketing has become so competitive that if you’re not going to do it well, it’s best not to do it at all.
The title of this blog is Out-By-5. That’s probably not what you’re doing if you’re creating content. Most of the time, content is added to an already long to-do list.
Option 2: Hire a freelancer.
Full disclosure: Before CareContent, I freelanced for healthcare organizations. Okay, carry on.
Why this doesn’t work…
Freelancers have limited skills. They usually won’t know how to optimize a post for search, create visual designs, or develop and execute a plan for promoting the content. And, you may still need to do significant editing. Freelancers rarely have outside editors review content before they give it to you.
Freelancers have limited time. You’ll have to budget your content marketing projects based on the availability and capacity of just one person. Unlike a content marketing agency, the freelancer is probably not allowed to delegate work among a team.
Freelancers are cumbersome. Managing a group of freelancers can be a headache—answering their emails, tracking their invoices, negotiating rates, remembering what that rate was. And if your favorites are unavailable, do you have time to recruit replacements?
Option 3: Hire full-time employees to do it.
Why this doesn’t work…
It’s not just another person. It’s a team you’ll need to hire—and everything that goes with that: salaries, plus all the benefits like health insurance, sick days, holidays. Not to mention the time you’ll spend helping that person climb the learning curve and managing their workload.
Full-timers tend to get stuck in meetings. Once they’re in your organization, how much time will they actually be able to sit, head down, to focus on creating content? Most healthcare marketing managers and coordinators have so many meetings that they can’t focus on content until after 5.
If you hire someone to write the content, it’s unlikely that the person will also be able to optimize the content for search, add visual design, self-edit, keep up with best practices in content marketing, etc.
Option 4: Let your agency of record do it.
Why this doesn’t work …
It might not be their primary skillset. You originally hired them for branding, web design, or advertising. Those capabilities do not usually translate to content marketing.
They might try to subcontract with a content marketing agency and mark up the price. That means their content services will come at a higher cost than if you’d partnered with the content marketing agency directly.
Even if they create content, they may be missing other elements. For example, if some of your content was best formatted as an infographic, a patient guide, a podcast or a quiz could they do that? Or would they be limited to one type of content?
Here’s the bottom line: Content comes first. It shouldn’t just be riding shotgun. It should be the driver of every website, social media channel, and digital campaign. It’s time for healthcare organizations to add a new partner to their vendor speed dial: A content marketing agency.
