Pros and Cons of Outsourcing Your Healthcare Blog

Are you thinking about outsourcing your healthcare blog? 

Do you think it might thrive under different management?

According to Our Social Times, more than 60 percent of businesses hire someone else to manage their content marketing. That’s a significant number, and hardly surprising.

Maintaining a blog is a lot of work, more than most businesses realize when they dive into inbound marketing, and some of them decide outsourcing is the way to go. If your company is thinking about making this move, it’s a good idea to weigh the pros and cons of what you are getting into.

Advantages of Outsourcing Your Blog 

It Frees Your Time For Other Tasks.

How many times a week are your blogging efforts derailed by competing priorities? If this happens on even a semi-regular basis, you could be in danger of losing focus on your content.

Healthcare practitioners are very responsive to quality, educational content, and every week your blog goes without an update is a missed opportunity to build a lasting relationship.

Companies that recognize the importance of keeping their website fresh and interesting – but can't find time for writing – often benefit from hiring a freelancer or agency to manage it for them. A growth agency not only keeps the blog output strong, they also make sure your publishing efforts stay aligned with a strategy that produces sales.

The obvious benefit of outsourcing is that it frees your time to focus on other critical marketing tasks. If you can spend more time with Sales and Service, they can help you generate fresh ideas for your content.

Sales people usually get the most face time with customers, and they can provide great insights about questions and concerns your buyers have.

This feedback can help your writers produce amazing content. A blog that stays laser-focused on real customer questions is a blog that can attract good-fit prospects.

You Can Get Professional Healthcare Bloggers, Not Just Writers. 

Some companies have excellent writers on staff. Others just think they do, and sometimes they have good writers who are bad bloggers. 

Blogging requires more than just sharp grammar, accurate spelling, and a stylish voice. There is more to it than that.

You need a keen sense of how people consume information online, and adjust your writing style to fit the format. You also need an intimate understanding of the buyer persona, making sure all jargon and syntax feels comfortable to them. Effective business-to-person communication relies upon building trust, and you cannot do that if your writing doesn't connect with people on a personal level. 

Many Bloggers Also Have SEO Expertise. 

I’ve talked about how companies need to stop worrying about SEO as a business goal, but that doesn’t mean they should ignore it completely. Organic search traffic is the number one source for website conversions, so it’s critical to optimize your blog content.

Most experienced bloggers have at least some experience with SEO, although many of them are not as knowledgeable as they claim to be. Knowing where to put long-tail keywords in the meta data and on-page copy is easy.

It's important your writers understand how modern topic-based SEO works, and how to use topic clusters effectively to drive the right traffic to your website. There is a lot of content saturation online today, and it's easy to get lost in the noise if you aren't following best practices. 

Disadvantages of Hiring a Freelance Blogger or Agency 

Good Writing Costs Money.

If you want quality writing on your website and can’t get it in-house, you’ll have to pay for it. How much does a good blogger cost?

You can hire a content writer for as little as a few cents a word or as much as $4-5 a word. That’s a wide spectrum of cost.

My recommendation is to start by looking at who they’ve worked with in the past. Do they have experience working with organizations similar to yours? Are they familiar with writing about EHRs, medical devices, and nutrition? What is their track record at producing sales? If they can't give you verifiable evidence of generating leads for other businesses, I would probably pass. 

They Might Not Be Familiar With Your Industry.

This deficiency will sneak up on you when you get the first post from the writer. You sit down, start reading and realize immediately that anyone who’s familiar with your solutions will know this writer has no real experience in the subject.

These cringe worthy moments are not fun, but if you catch the mistakes before they go online it’s not the end of the world. If the writing seems solid, despite the author’s lack of intimacy with the subject, you have a choice. You can make a few corrections in the short term and give your writer time to get acclimated to the subject, or you can cut them loose. 

The best way to minimize mistakes and accelerate the writer’s understanding of your industry is by letting him or her interview you. Sure, it will take up some of your time, but the results will be so much better.

You Still Have To Make Time For The Blog.

Your company might outsource the blog in hopes of taking it off the to-do list, but you still have to make time for reviewing and approving content.

If you don't have at least one stakeholder engaged with your content writers, you will have no idea if they are staying on strategy. Blogging is not a good one-way street. Writers need feedback on a regular basis from someone within company who is responsible for managing the process. Otherwise, you should not hold them accountable for doing a good job.

Getting outside help with your blog can be vastly rewarding or a nightmare. The difference really comes down to two things: your expectations and the skills of your content creators. If you take the time to vet your candidates and find a good fit that knows how to manage a strategy and deliver sales leads, you may find this is the best decision you’ve made in a while.