Although it’s been almost two decades since Bill Gates said it, the phrase “Content is King” is as true today as it was then.

Most successful businesses have an appreciation for the importance of content in any marketing strategy. Investment in content, be it in-house production or outsourced consultancy, continues to grow rapidly, making up about a third of all marketing spending. And with polls showing that at least 90 percent of businesses use — or plan to use — content marketing for their brands, this spending will continue to grow.

A long held assumption about content marketing is that it is always better to have dedicated staff to handle content needs in house. While this may be true for extremely specialized businesses involving arcane issues, products or processes, the decision to outsource content marketing is a smart option for most other businesses. Digital content marketing companies employ consulting staff with a wide variety of knowledge areas, and they can provide dynamic content on just about anything in virtually any format or style.

Some of the reasons that digital content production companies are frequently more successful at producing content include:

• Flexible scheduling: Companies whose business focus is seasonal in nature will have needs that are different from those that move at the same speed year-round. Content consulting companies are staffed to handle high volumes of requests on demand, so there is always capacity available.
• SEO knowledge: It is not enough to write good content. For a business to stand out and to appear on the top of search results, content has to be SEO savvy and writers need advanced and up-to-date SEO knowledge.
• Quality content is more than just writing: Creating content that will benefit a company involves comprehending the business of the company and collaborating with people in various areas of the business to obtain needed information. It also means meeting the goals that are defined by businesses leaders, creating the image they have chosen, fully understanding the market sector the business is a part of, knowing the appropriate audience to target and understanding the audience’s needs. Content is not static. It’s a social and emotional process that involves both relational and contextual elements.

Visitors to a business website should be rewarded with deep, relevant, accurate and up-to-date content that is integrated into the general story of the business. With new technology providing increasing ways to tell a brand’s story, many consumers will expect written, audio and video capabilities, along with specialized content specific to those mediums.

Most importantly, for a brand’s content to capture and hold attention, it needs to be engaging and provide opportunities for personal involvement that goes far beyond the comments section. This means using people who are highly capable in all facets of content production.

While a business may have personnel who are skilled in some of the crucial areas of content marketing, making sure the production process is coordinated can be difficult when people have other functions within the company. A successful digital content campaign involves numerous functions: content production, editing, rewriting, organization, presentation, integration of content from multiple sources, combining different types of media content, oversight and the ability to weave all the raw material into a complete picture that tells the story of the business.

If you have a content marketing program, or are planning one, download our ebook:  100 mistakes businesses make when starting, optimizing and scaling content marketing programs.  Learn from the mistakes of hundreds of other companies.  100 mistakes walks you through common and uncommon challenges that they faced with their content marketing programs.