How To Outsource Without Losing Your Voice
It’s pretty common to feel nervous about turning your marketing over to someone outside your business. After all, a contractor won’t have a history with the business you’ve built from scratch. If someone else is creating it, will your marketing still sound like you? Will it lose its personality? Not to worry. Let’s talk about how to outsource without losing your voice in your marketing.
Here’s what it’s really like to work with a marketing professional:
The work is collaborative.
No marketing contractor will write and publish content without running it past you first, unless you give them express permission to do so. They will set up an editing and approval process that will help you retain control.
Your marketing contractor will construct drafts and share them with you. Then you’ll have a chance to look them over and offer edits and feedback. Once you’ve given your approval, your contractor will schedule your posts. The longer you work together, the more your contractor will understand your voice. Usually, the editing process goes more quickly with each passing month.
It will save you lots of time.
Even though it can be scary to entrust your voice to someone new, it will eventually save you time. The nature of our digital world means there’s a bottomless need for more captions, more images, more emails, updated web pages—the list could go on and on.
If you’ve been doing all of this yourself, it will be a huge relief to hand it off. Hiring a marketing contractor you trust can save you hours every week. That’s time you can spend developing new products, networking, and tending to your employees.
It takes time to set up the systems.
That said, you and your contractor will need to spend time at the beginning of your contract getting to know each other and putting systems in place. You and your contractor will need to get to know each other and set up systems that work for gathering content ideas, sharing files and scheduling.
These start-up pains will ease as you get to know each other and work together. At the end of your first six months, it will feel much simpler and more familiar.
Your professional needs time to learn.
Your professional won’t be an expert in your area. They’ll have to learn about your voice, your business and your industry. But once they’ve learned it (and it’s all learnable) they will become a trusted member of your team.
Here are a few things you can to do prepare your contractor to work with you:
Know your brand voice.
How do you want your marketing to come across? Do you want to be seen as funny? Loyal? Innovative? Caring? What does your audience care about and how do you acknowledge it in your marketing?
The more you understand and can describe your unique voice, the smoother the introductory phase of your contract relationship will be.
To prepare for your relationship with your marketing contractor, you can explore Stephanie Schwab’s 4 elements of brand voice. Think about your brand’s character traits, the vibe or tone you embrace, the type of language you want to use and the larger purpose of your content.
You can also think about MarketingLand’s Three Cs of brand voice. What makes your business culture unique? What are the specific pain points of your community? What do you have to offer the conversation?
Choose your -isms.
Choosing a few things that make you stand out to your audience—things that make your business quirky, fun, warm or inviting—are key elements of your brand voice. Ashlyn Carter, a successful copywriter and calligrapher, talks about champagne a lot. Jenna Kutcher, digital marketing expert, is always referring to her love of mac-and-cheese.
These may sound silly, but they’re touchstones for your audience, in both your images and your copy. Name a few things that you love in the world and get them to your marketing pro.
Educate your marketing professional.
It’s imperative for you to educate your marketing professional if you want to outsource without losing your voice. Provide them with reputable sources for industry news and information. Invite them to an employee training course or online class about your company so they can familiarize themselves with your history, philosophy, mission, values and branding choices.
Without this information, it will take them much longer for them to learn on their own. Take the initiative with a plan to onboard them as you would one of your employees and greet them with a list of great resources to give them a solid start.
Make your relationship collaborative.
Dedicate yourself to a warm, ongoing relationship with your marketing professional. They need information, frequent contact and solid communication but also person-to-person connection so they can learn more about you and feel connected to your business. Come to your content planning and strategy meetings prepared to work together to create beautiful, authentic content that draws people to your work.
