Content marketing has unrivaled power to drive an online business forward. Done properly, it can generate impressive returns for an attractively modest investment. But in any lucrative sector, you’ll be up against stiff competition, and that means your content needs to be of the highest quality.

Can your business produce this content using your current in-house resources? Maybe, but only if you can draw on staff with expertise in the following areas.

Deep Research Ability

No one can be an expert on every subject a business’s content needs to cover. But for professional content creators, this isn’t an issue. What’s far more important is the ability to thoroughly research a topic in a short time, and come up with the facts, figures, and angles necessary to produce authoritative and compelling work.

Marketing Nous

Great content doesn’t stand alone as a work of art. Words can be immensely powerful, but if they’re not created with marketing in mind, that power is wasted. A good content creator will have a solid understanding of marketing imperatives and will provide material that works toward your commercial aims.

SEO Savvy

But marketing in the digital arena brings issues of its own. Whether you’re looking for website content or social media marketing material, SEO principles need to be taken into account to achieve maximum impact. From applied keyword research to optimized structuring, great content pleases search engines as well as readers.

Writing Ability

And of course, solid writing ability is essential for producing credible content. The finished work needs to be technically sound, but also readable and engaging. As a cursory glance around the web will show, that’s much easier said than done.

Added to that, professional writers need to deliver high-quality work quickly and reliably. An expensive marketing campaign can’t afford to wait on a temperamental artist suffering from writer’s block.

Careful Editing

But no matter how gifted a writer is, mistakes and misfires will slip through occasionally. Careful editing is the quality control of content creation. A good editor will tidy up any technical mistakes and carry out exhaustive fact-checking, but will also put the final sheen and sparkle on the original writer’s work.

Lastly, an editor will check that the writing brief has been fully met and that the content quality is high enough for its intended purpose.

Does your business enjoy the know-how and experience to achieve all this at a realistic cost? If not, outsourcing your content creation makes perfect sense, whether you’re publishing a weekly blog article or launching a million-dollar content marketing campaign.