Why We Believe Hiring Freelance Writers Doesn't Work for Most Companies
Writing for a company — in other words, content marketing — is different from writing for a personal blog, a publication, or a newsletter.
Why? Because the incentives are different. A company needs to acquire and retain customers to use a product or a service. And if a company is investing in content, they will want to see an ROI.
And yet, most content marketing out there is optimising for traffic. If you make money via ads, that’s fine. But if what you’re a business, the metric you care about is customers. You could be generating 5,000+ pageviews a month, but if you’re a business that sells accounting software to business owners and all your blog posts are about gardening, then do those 5,000+ pageviews really matter?
It’s an extreme example, but what I’m seeing is companies writing blog posts that are optimised for traffic — and therefore written for the completely wrong audience. If you were selling ads, those 5,000+ pageviews are great. But if you’re a company that wants to acquire customers, pageviews are technically irrelevant.
What’s happening here? Part of the problem is that companies hire generalist freelance writers to do their content.
I want to be clear: I used to be a freelance writer (and still do some writing), and have many freelance writer friends. In no way is this a criticism of freelance writers — it’s more a theory on why some parts of the content marketing industry are using the wrong model.
In this article, I want to explain why — based on my own experience and experiments in content marketing — hiring freelance writers as a company might not always be the right model.
Most writers won’t be able to write for your audience
As an employee or business owner of a company, you know the most about your audience, customers and product (although in some cases, outside consultants will know more as well — it depends what stage your company is at).
So is it realistic to expect a freelance writer — who is not part of your company — to write a stellar piece that successfully targets the right audience, knows which pain points to address and when to mention a specific product feature?
Most content marketing agencies won’t know your audience pain points, and will instead create content ideas based on their keyword research. That’s how you get a product like a credit card for CFOs writing about topics such as “what is microlending” and “creating a business plan for investors”. Topics like these can be Googled and regurgitated. And are CFOs really reading articles on this? No.
Even if you wanted to write an article on something more advanced, like VRP payments in Open Banking, the generalist writer won’t know how to write about it. Expecting a generalist writer to be an expert on your topic, product and customer is unrealistic.
And if your target audience reads those articles, how do you expect them to take you seriously?
Perhaps, the right approach is to hire a specialist writer?
Specialist writers are great, but don’t know about your product/customers
Most people are either great writers, or experts. Finding someone who is a great writer and an expert is very rare. Because they’re rare, they’re expensive since they provide better value. I know, because I was one (and many of my content marketing friends are).
Specialist writers are great, because they can write on advanced topics. But there is still a caveat: they’ll understand the industry in-depth (maybe even more than you), but they might not understand your product or customer pain points in-depth, because it’s not their job.
It means that they can only really write thought leadership or Top of the Funnel (TOFU) content — which is fine, but see the problem below.
As a freelancer who doesn’t understand your product or customer pain points in-depth, you can’t write the types of content that generate the highest number of conversions, such as comparison posts, use cases posts and case studies. Can you expect a specialist writer to write a “Xero vs [your product]” article? Not really.
The other problem is that they are pricey, for a good reason. That means they are out of reach for quite a few companies. If you have the money and want to write thought leadership content, that’s fine (just be sure this is intentional).
But if you want to produce content that mentions your product features and drives conversions (the content marketing metric that is most aligned with companies), you need a different solution (which we’ll outline below).
Dominic Kent, a former freelance writer and now niche content marketing agency owner, agrees:
“I’m always on the lookout for specialist freelance writers to help with articles. These are the people with a mix of domain expertise and writing skills. They come at a higher cost than generalist writers but are worth every penny as they know about what they are asked to write. However, knowing they are only a small part of the process means I spend considerable time on the research, outline, and editing process.”
You have to create the strategy
You might be a CMO. Or a marketing manager. Or a founder. Unless you have an in-house content team, you won’t be a content marketing expert. But if you hire a freelance writer, that means someone will still have to do the strategy: how do you decide what to write about? Who will upload the articles? How will you track conversions? As Dom says above, writing is only a small part of the process.
Strategy is just as important as execution, but your freelance writer won’t do strategy for you. How could they? They would need to do a lot more research and to be a content strategist, not a writer.
If you’re working with a freelance writer, you’ll have to be the one doing all the tracking, managing the calendar, publishing the blog post, building backlinks — it’s a huge job. Do you have the capacity to do that? Do you even want to do that?
If you don’t want to end up producing endless articles with no ROI in sight, then you need a different solution.
Here are some suggested solutions to the freelance writing model conundrum:
1. Build an in-house content team
If you know content will forever be a large part of what you do, then it might be worth hiring people in-house. If you’re just getting started, I would hire an in-house writer who will work with you long-term and part-time or full-time, and will therefore take the time to understand your product and niche inside out.
But that’s not enough: you should also hire an in-house content strategist. This is the person who will do the strategy, report to the boss and publish and tweak the blog posts.
Sure, you could find someone who does both, but eventually they will need a writer.
2. Hire a freelance content strategist and freelance writer who writes based on interviews with company employees
This is a bit tricky, but I’ve seen it work. You really need a high quality freelance content marketer who will manage the writer and will take the time to understand the product, talk to customers, etc.
Many content marketers are freelancers, since the demand is high and there aren’t many of them. I know a couple of freelance content marketers who would support the company and help them find a writer, complete the strategy, do the tracking and reporting, etc.
Since the writer will be freelance, the best way to write in-depth articles is to get them to write their articles based on interviews with company employees.
The strategist would set up interviews between the writer and company employee (who is an expert on product and customer pain points) and the article would be based on the employee’s knowledge. Some people call this “journalism based” content marketing.
Remember, some people are experts and some people are writers. With this strategy, you can hire a generalist writer who interviews the team experts. The important thing is to make absolutely sure that this is a writer who understands the importance of basing the content on the interview rather than just Google research.
3. Hire a full service content marketing agency
Yes, this is what we do at Mint Studios.
But before going into detail, I need to let you know that you need to be very careful with this: there are good and terrible agencies. Remember, in order to solve the conundrum of hiring freelance writers, you need to work with people who are willing to understand your product, customers and industry inside out. If they aren’t willing to do this, they will not be able to generate customers for you — only traffic.
Many content agencies will send over a questionnaire, then do some keyword research and create content ideas from their keyword research. If you want TOFU content and traffic, that’s fine.
But if you want to produce BOFU content that generates customers, this model doesn’t work.
At Mint Studios, we don’t even consider ourselves really an agency — instead, we’re more of a lead generation company. We use the Mint Studios framework, whereby we do in-depth research on customer pain points, all our articles are based on interviews with company employees, and we take care of the strategy, execution and distribution. It doesn’t mean we never do middle or top of the funnel content, it’s just that we are intentional about prioritising conversions.
With this approach, we are able to get around the above freelance writing conundrums:
We do in-depth research, talk to your sales team and your customers to understand your product and pain points. We also have a background in fintech so we work from experience.
All our content is based on interviews, so the expertise comes from you, not from us (although we also do know a lot about fintech, which helps). This allows us write up case studies, add in quotes and highlight product features.
Strategy, content production, promotion and management are all included in our price, so you can easily budget for us on a month by month basis.
We take care of the strategy and are accountable for leads. We measure attribution so you know how many customers our content has generated for you.
We allocate one dedicated, high quality writer who will be with you for the long run and you’ll get to know them.
We are aligned with your business goals and can more accurately measure the ROI of our content marketing efforts.
By working with an agency, you can work with content strategists and writers who’ve worked together before and can hit the ground running. They will also take care of the entire content marketing process, including strategy, writing, publishing, distribution and reporting.
We are constantly experimenting and finding what works best. Once again, this approach is what we’ve found helps solve this conundrum best in the content marketing and SEO world. We’re always looking for ways to improve our service and how we work, which is why we’re very open about how we work.
Although working with a content marketing agency is more expensive than working with freelance writers, it’s definitely cheaper than having your own in-house team. Content marketing is not an expense, it’s an investment. An agency is aware of that and can work with your business and create a strategy that will optimise for a return on your investment.
At the end of the day, you want to find what works best for you and your team. If working with freelance writers is generating the results you want, then it’s a model that works for you. But if it isn’t, then it might be a sign to look for other solutions, such as hiring a freelance content marketer or an agency.
Want to learn more about how we work? Read about the Mint Studios framework.