Content marketing boosts brand awareness, drives website traffic, increases sales, and reinforces your competitive edge. However, building and maintaining a successful strategy requires significant skills and resources.
This is where business process outsourcing (BPO) comes in. Experts provide the efficiency, expertise, and technology for a top-notch content marketing strategy. Keep reading to learn how to outsource content marketing and unlock consistent growth.
Key steps to successfully outsource content marketing
More companies rely on BPO content marketing for consistency. These third-party marketing firms can provide the experience and industry knowledge to develop high-quality content that aligns with your brand voice, engages your target audience, and drives measurable results.
Consistent output is critical for the following reasons:
- Builds brand authority and trust. Industry statistics reveal that publishing 16 or more blogs monthly could increase leads by 4.5 times.
- Improves search engine optimization (SEO) performance. Google, Bing, and other search engines prioritize sites that regularly update their content.
- Promotes a more cohesive brand voice and tone. External experts can align content with the company’s messaging to reinforce your brand’s identity and values, increase engagement, and strengthen customer relationships.
Outsourcing content marketing also avoids overwhelming your employees as you scale. As demand for blog or social media posts increases, they might struggle to keep up while juggling other responsibilities. This can result in decreased creativity and productivity. A BPO team can ramp up production without compromising expertise or brand standards.
However, to maximize these BPO advantages, you must know how to outsource content marketing correctly. Consider these tips:
1. Define your content marketing goals
Why do you want to outsource content marketing? Is it to generate more leads, increase brand awareness, improve SEO rankings, educate your audience, launch new products, or reduce customer churn? Clear priorities keep the outsourced content aligned with your direction and purpose.
After knowing your objectives, convert them into SMART goals:
- (S)pecific: Clear and focused, stating precisely what you want to achieve
- (M)easurable: Includes a number or metric to track progress
- (A)chievable: Realistic given your resources and market
- (R)elevant: Aligned with your overall business objectives
- (T)ime-bound: Has a deadline to create urgency and focus
For example, you want to increase leads. A SMART goal would be to “increase qualified leads from content downloads by 30% within the next 6 months by publishing two gated e-books per quarter and promoting them through targeted LinkedIn ads.”
Transparent, specific goals help your BPO team align with your vision and create content that drives meaningful results.
2. Match your content with the customer journey
Content has different goals and purposes, based on the customer journey:
- At the top of the funnel (awareness), you might aim to increase visibility through educational blog posts or social content.
- In the middle (consideration), the goal might be to build trust using case studies or whitepapers.
- At the bottom (decision), the goal could be to drive conversions with product demos or testimonials.
Match each piece of content to the appropriate funnel stage and communicate to your BPO team the results you expect. The more context you provide upfront, the more likely your content partner is to deliver relevant, on-brand material that drives results.
Suppose you’re promoting a new project management app. In that case, you might:
- Create blog articles about productivity tips to build awareness
- Develop a case study showing how a client improved efficiency to nurture consideration
- Produce a demo video to encourage sign-ups.
Meanwhile, the BPO team should know that the case study must generate 50 qualified leads within three months.
Aligning content with the customer journey and setting clear expectations guides your BPO team in creating a copy that turns prospects into loyal customers.
3. Determine the scope of outsourcing
Reports show that 58% of B2B marketers credit content marketing with increasing brand awareness. How can you use third-party partnerships to match or even surpass these results?
Another tip when outsourcing content marketing is defining its scope. It prevents misunderstandings, keeps projects on time and budget, and ensures their content directly supports your goals. For instance, your BPO team should handle strategy, long-form content creation, and design if you want to attract more leads using high-value gated content.
Define the external team’s scope with these tactics:
Take inventory of your resources
If your team is strong in brand knowledge but lacks execution bandwidth, you might only outsource content production. If you lack strategy and execution, a full-service content agency might be ideal.
Ask yourself the following questions to evaluate your resources:
- Do you have strategists, editors, writers, designers, SEO experts, or social media managers?
- What volume of content can your team realistically produce?
- What skills are missing or underdeveloped?
Know which functions to outsource
Common content marketing tasks you can outsource include:
- Strategy such as content calendar planning and audience segmentation
- Content creation, including blogs, whitepapers, videos, and case studies
- SEO, such as keyword research and on-page optimization
- Design, including visual content and infographics
- Distribution, such as social media management and email campaigns
Determine which functions internal teams should manage and the ones BPO teams must perform. For example, you might keep brand messaging and high-level strategy in-house to maintain control while outsourcing blog writing to save time and tap into their specialized expertise.
Also, be transparent with content production expectations. Will they be responsible for producing four blog posts monthly, a quarterly whitepaper, or weekly email newsletters?
Define what to outsource and how much to help your BPO partner deliver focused, on-brand, growth-driven content.
3. Find and vet content partners
About 48% of businesses now outsource content marketing, making it a robust business strategy—if you select the right partner. Otherwise, you’re wasting resources and risking damaging your credibility.
When exploring how outsourcing works for content marketing, finding BPO companies through trusted, strategic methods is essential. Here are some valuable tips:
- Begin your search through referrals from peers, business networks, or platforms such as LinkedIn and Clutch.
- Shortlist candidates based on quality, services, and fit.
- Examine each potential partner’s portfolio and case studies to determine their industry alignment, diversity, impact, and quality.
- When possible, request anonymized performance data or testimonials that validate their effectiveness.
- Understand their process. Ask how they handle strategy, SEO, audience research, deadlines, communications, and approvals.
Choosing the right content partner protects your brand and maximizes your investment by ensuring they can deliver quality work that meets your goals.
4. Establish clear communication guidelines
Share your brand guidelines, tone of voice, buyer personas, and marketing goals to minimize onboarding hiccups such as delays and work disruptions.
Clarify your preferred communication channels, update frequencies, and workflows. For instance, your internal team might provide topics and approve drafts, while the provider manages content creation and SEO. You can schedule weekly calls to brainstorm ideas, air concerns, and gather feedback.
Use Trello, Asana, ClickUp, Notion, and other project management platforms to assign tasks, track deadlines, and manage content calendars. A visual system can quickly align teams and minimize delays, even when geographically dispersed.
Now, what is BPO’s role in setting communication guidelines? While your company sets the tone for expectations, the content provider shares equal responsibility for maintaining open, effective collaboration by:
- Asking smart, clarifying questions during onboarding
- Summarizing and confirming requirements to avoid assumptions
- Providing progress updates proactively
- Flagging delays or roadblocks early
- Offering recommendations based on content performance
Excellent BPO companies don’t just wait for direction. They engage in ongoing dialogue to continuously refine strategies and produce high-quality output.
5. Monitor performance and provide feedback
When outsourcing content marketing, monitoring and feedback keep the work aligned with your brand and goals while driving continuous improvement.
Use Google Analytics, Semrush, HubSpot, and other analytics platforms to track content performance. Pay attention to key performance indicators (KPIs), such as website traffic, lead generation, engagement rates, and conversion. Share performance dashboards or reports with your provider to help them modify strategies.
Give quality, ongoing feedback. Schedule regular check-ins to review performance, discuss content relevance, and identify areas for improvement. When providing comments, be clear and constructive. Use real examples, highlight what worked well, and explain what the external team can improve. Examples include:
- “We liked how this post answered a specific question our customers often ask.”
- “The tone here feels too formal. Can we make it more conversational?”
- “Great use of visuals to support the main message.”
- “Let’s avoid industry jargon and simplify this explanation.”
Content marketing should evolve as market and business needs change. Continually adapt your approach and work closely with your BPO partner to keep your content fresh and effective.
