In the highly competitive tech industry, there’s no such thing as too much marketing. Staying ahead of your competitors is a full-time job for multiple people, with content demands alone often being too high for your in-house team to meet.
If you’ve got a backlog of blog posts, case studies, white papers, product descriptions, and user manuals that all need to be produced yesterday, it’s worth considering outsourcing some of the work to a trusted tech writing team. In this guide, we’re breaking down exactly how you can scale your marketing output with outsourced tech writers.
Example Plan of Action
Every business is different, and exactly how you choose to use outsourced tech writers will depend on your marketing goals and the existing strategies you have in place. With that in mind, here’s an example plan that you can adjust to your needs:
Step 1: Audit Your Current Content Output
Start by working out how much content your team produces each month and compare it to how much you actually need. As an example, let’s say your team writes four blog posts a month, but you need at least eight to compete in search rankings.
Step 2: Define Your Goals for Outsourcing
Next, decide what you want your outsourced writers to focus on. For instance, you might choose to outsource all your long-form blogs to drive organic traffic, or hand off your product documentation work.
Step 3: Create a Process for Briefs
If you hire a quality tech writing team like DevDocs, they should be experienced enough to produce the work you require without much direction. But it’s still helpful to create simple templates for your project briefs, so outsourced writers always have the context they need when it comes to things like target audience, format, and tone.
Step 4: Assign Ownership
If you haven’t already, decide who in your company will oversee the outsourced writers. This person should have the availability and the competency to handle assigning tasks and reviewing drafts, communicating with the outsourced team to help them deliver the best content.
Step 5: Start with a Pilot Batch
Outsource a small set of content to your chosen tech writing team first, so you can test not only their writing abilities but also things like communication and responsiveness. Use this stage to refine your processes and confirm that he team is the right fit before you scale up.
Step 6: Build up Capacity Gradually
Once you’re confident in the quality of your outsourced writing team, you can then go forward and increase the number of pieces you outsource each month. This might be tricky if you’ve always handled content internally, but have trust! Your internal team will appreciate being freed up to focus on other areas of work.
Step 7. Measure Your Results
Finally, measure the results of your outsourcing by tracking metrics such as turnaround time, traffic growth, lead generation, and even things like internal hours saved. This will help you prove ROI, and can also be helpful when you’re deciding how far to scale outsourcing.