When do you need to hire a content writer?

As a small business owner, you might try to cut corners by writing the content for your website, marketing materials, and social media yourself. While this makes sense in some scenarios and phases of your small business, in others it can actually harm your business reputation. This article sheds light on the most common scenarios when hiring a content writer can solve your content creation problems and when it makes absolutely no sense.

You should hire a content writer when

1. Your product/service is fully developed

When you are launching your business, it is really challenging to find time to do extensive research on what is relevant and valuable to your target audience, create content that will answer their questions, and spend time promoting it on the right channels and mediums. In those first stages, creating content is the last task on your priority list.

Yet, sooner or later you start making money. This is when your website, emails, business blog, and social media channels need to do a lot more than just “be there” for the sake of being there. You need to study your customers, create buyer personas templates, optimize your content for SEO, do competitors’ research, keyword research, market research (in short, a lot of research), hone your message so that it is relevant and valuable to your target audience, distribute your content in a smart way, format and edit. That’s why hiring a content writer to give you a hand is the most logical thing to do.

2. You are launching or relaunching something

Whether you are launching a new product/service, feature, website or starting a course or a program, you need a content writer. He/she will be able to explain to your target audience what exactly it is that you are offering, how it works, what is included, and how it will add value to them. Remember: your audience doesn’t know your new product/service/feature as well as you do.

What’s more, a content writer can ensure that all new content that comes up on your website, landing pages, emails, business blog, social posts or whatever marketing channels you are using is consistent (communicating the same message in the same style and tone of voice).

3. You don’t have the time (or competence) to write content yourself

Even if you are a good writer, you will realize that creating business content takes you SO MUCH longer than you thought it would. Creating content takes precious time out from doing what you excel at: running your business. The more successful your business gets, the busier you become. You get down the rabbit hole and create content sporadically or stop creating any content at all. Do you recognize yourself in any of that?

Hiring a content writer allows you to delegate content creation to a person who has the education and work experience to do this. It also frees up your schedule, so you can focus on building your business instead of spending hours writing about it.

Leave the writing to a professional and you will be much more satisfied with the results (and the time you get back).

4. You are too close to your business

As a small business owner, you might think that you are the best writer for your business because no one else knows your business better than you do. However, sometimes this can actually work against you.

It is very hard to detach yourself from your CEO’s/founder’s role and put yourself in your customers’ shoes: how does your product/service help them; how does it meet their needs; how does it solve a problem they are facing; how does it make their lives easier or better?

When you hire a freelance content writer, you expose yourself to completely new content and topic ideas, writing styles and content forms that you might not have ever thought of. Brainstorming with and listening to what a person outside your company has to say about your business helps you look at it more objectively and identify gaps that you didn’t even realize existed.

You shouldn’t hire a content writer when

1. You haven’t figured out what your business/product really is about

It is YOUR job to figure out what your business or product is — NOT the content writer’s. Of course, a content writer can help bring clarity to your ideas, but this is only possible when you know what you are selling. You CAN’T lean on your content writer to figure out the answers to questions such as:

• What problems does your product/service solve for customers?
• What are the strengths and limitations of your product/service?
• What do prospective customers find in your competitors?
• Why did your develop this product/service?

If you don’t know your product or service well and haven’t documented that in a solid strategy but you hire a content writer, you will put him/her in a chaos of conflicting opinions from various stakeholders – product owners, sales people, marketing officers, customer support, and executive team – and of incessant rewrites that go nowhere. The result? Wasted time, money, and energy and a piece of text that isn’t even close to what you wanted.

2. You don’t have money

You want high quality on the cheap? I am sorry to let you down but content writing isn’t cheap (at least, the good content writers aren’t cheap). You can’t expect a professional content writer (someone with relevant education and at least five years of professional experience in content creation) to rewrite your entire website, write five 1,500-word blog posts and redo an email workflow for €500. If you don’t have money to pay for professional content, this is fine. Then simply write the content yourself. When you start making money, you can hire a content writer.

When you hire a freelance writer, you don’t just pay them for the work. You pay them for their experience and skills that they have built for years.

Consider for a moment how much time – and expertise – it takes to write a single business blog post. It entails doing research and interviews, doing a competitors’ analysis and keywords research, editing, proofreading, not to mention the publication and sharing processes. It all takes time. And time is money. Of course, you can always hire a freelance writer who charges 0.03 cents per word (or even less) – you can find this type of writers on Upwork and Fiverr. Just don’t expect that the content they will write will be of high quality.

3. You can’t provide clear guidelines (and feedback)

Content writers can do a lot but they aren’t mind readers. If you brief someone with “We need some content” and no further guidance whatsoever, even the world’s best content writer’s efforts will prove futile in creating content that meets your expectations.

Just as the content writer is going to help you communicate your business’ value to your target audience, you need to help the content writer with clear guidelines.

Be clear: what content do you need, who do you want to reach and why, what is your goal, what is your deadline, what are you trying to achieve with this piece of content? The same goes for providing feedback. If you can’t provide clear feedback (“This isn’t what I had in mind but I don’t know what exactly is wrong with it and how it can be improved”), you are better off writing your business content yourself.

Conclusion

Hiring a freelance writer to give you a hand with your business content creation is certainly something you need to consider if:

• your product/service is fully developed
• you are launching or relaunching something
• you don’t have the time (or competence) to write content yourself
• you are too close to your business.

However, in some scenarios it is better if you don’t delegate your business content creation to a content writer. This is when:

• you haven’t figured out what your business/product really is about
• you don’t have money
• you can’t provide clear guidelines (and feedback).

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I hope you have found these tips helpful. Have you figured out if you need to hire a content writer? Let me know in a comment.

Featured image:  Rymden, Adobe Stock.

Are you ready to hire a content writer? Email me and I would love to help you with your content creation.