“We’re ending our marketing agency relationships and moving all creative, web dev, and email in-house.” That’s a bold statement from a founder. A couple marketing agency types agreed, saying their model is build, refine, then hand it over. But is either-or the only choice? Or even the right one for content marketing initiatives, long-term? Pivoting from make or buy in B2B content marketing can help get to more long-form projects with better results.
Set a better tone from the start
There’s a better strategy: make and buy. That’s not a typo; I don’t like the term make or buy, or make versus buy, even though most literature refers to it one of those ways.
Make or buy is a hard concept to sell, even top-down. It sounds like a threat to the people doing the work. Why aren’t in-house resources good enough? It’s such a bad message, some in-house people will devote efforts to campaigning against it as soon as it comes up.
Plus, make or buy sets up a competition between in-house resources and external resources for the right to work on a project. Yes, the first project vets external resources before they can be trusted. But constant competition wears on people and organizations.
Make and buy sets a better tone. It teams up in-house people with external people instead of competing, aligning them to work on the same goals. It’s a message both hands-on folks and managers can wrap their brains around.
Who works on long-form content?
Think about a bigger picture. What if there are more ROI-worthy projects than there are in-house resources to work on them? That’s often the case in B2B content marketing. In-house marketing teams can grapple with getting stuff started, much less finished. Gridlock can be worse in bigger organizations where competition for resources is fierce.
In-house marketing priorities often lean toward product or service launches and lead generation. White papers, case studies, and competitive analysis take longer to create, and sometimes end up on the back burner.
Where does an in-house team go for help? Internal subject matter experts (SMEs) like engineers often want to support marketing but are busy in their day jobs. If an SME can be pried away to work on longer content, it might be for one project.
Get more long-form projects started
Consider this: the average B2B buyer gets half way through their journey before making contact (source: CoSchedule). Dedicating people to long-form projects is hard. But, they’re essential to bringing prospects into your funnel – and snatching them out of competitor funnels. Anticipating questions and explaining options brings prospects back for more information.
A content marketing freelancer can get long-form writing projects moving. Some writers can even provide subject matter insight, reducing the burden SMEs by using them as reviewers and fact checkers. As a writer develops familiarity with the products, services, and messaging, reviews go more smoothly.
Shifting from make or buy to make and buy in B2B content marketing pays off. In-house marketers and SMEs get quality content with a minimal investment of time. An experienced freelancer lends perspective, capturing knowledge of industry trends and competitive forces. More quality content plus time to focus on decision-phase projects can be a big win for in-house marketing teams.