So you’ve decided to outsource your content marketing? Now you can kick back and relax while they handle everything for you, right? Not so fast.

If you want awesome results from outsourcing, read these tips first.

Make a Plan

If you want your content marketing efforts to be successful, you can’t think in terms of how many articles you need this week. Instead, you should be planning on how you will use content to promote your business for the ENTIRE year.

If you can’t think that far ahead, you can make things easier for yourself by at least planning for the rest of the season or quarter. Use a content calendar to get started with brainstorming some ideas.

Set Communication Expectations

Communication is essential because it takes both parties working together closely in order to develop a successful content strategy. Decide on how often you’d like to be updated about your ongoing projects, which communication tools you’d like to use, and when regular meetings should take place to discuss overall results.

While you should check in regularly, daily communication is not really necessary unless there is an urgent project due. Additionally, your content marketing team needs time to actually work on your projects. If they’re continuously answering phone calls, emails, and Skype messages from you, that leaves precious little time for actual work.

Be Consistent

Making a plan is the easiest way to ensure that your content strategy is consistent. However, this also means that you shouldn’t be dumping impromptu projects on your content marketing team if you want everything to get done on time. Plan ahead and notify your content marketing team weeks ahead of time if you plan to ramp up your content marketing efforts.

Keep the Really Hard Stuff In-house

Reserve your most difficult projects for your internal team. Content marketing works best when you set your outsourced team up with projects that can be successfully completed in a reasonable amount of time and for a reasonable budget.

When you send projects that are nearly impossible to research, require hours or days to sort out the details or have numerous scope changes, it not only means that the project will take longer to finish, it will also derail your entire content strategy for the month. So if you have a content project that requires full-time research, don’t try to outsource it to writers.

Set Deadlines Upfront

Do you have a deadline in mind for content that you need for a specific promotion? Let your writer know upfront. Simply assuming that it should take a certain number of days to complete your project is a recipe for disaster.

Keep in mind that writers have other projects to work on and they need to be able to schedule your assignments for completion along with the other projects that they need to finish.

Have All of the Details Ready

If your content writer has requested some additional information from you, such as background information about your company, you need to provide that information promptly. The project can’t begin until all of the required information is available to the writer.

Use Analytics

Using analytics data is an essential key to improving the results that your content strategy delivers. If you want to create content that ranks highly in the search engines, your content marketing team needs access to your analytics data. You can provide a report from your analytics software as needed.

Content Relevancy Matters

It’s not enough to write content that is optimized for the keywords that visitors use when they come to your site. You need to also develop buyer personas so every piece of content you create appeals to your audience by answering the right questions at the right time. Make sure that your content marketing team understands who they are writing the content for and why.

Budget for Promotion

According to most experts, you should spend 80% of your time promoting the content that you spend 20% of your time creating. That means that you need to have a large budget for promoting your content online. Whether you use native advertising, PPC, social media or other methods, you absolutely need a promotional strategy.

Don’t Hesitate to Pitch In

If there is vital information that your content marketing team needs to understand about your business in order to write for you, don’t leave them in the dark. While it’s impressive if they’ve researched every little aspect of your business before starting on your project, don’t make it a guessing game.

Giving your team the information that they need to get results is the best way, even if it means that you have to help out a bit in the beginning of your relationship.

As you go along, your content marketing team might need help with something that requires a bit more effort than you’d probably like to contribute. Don’t get upset. It’s likely that they’ve already exhausted all possible options before coming to you for help as a last resort.

Don’t Be Afraid to Ask Questions

The whole purpose of outsourcing is to help you handle the tasks that your in-house team doesn’t have the expertise or time to do. In fact, you’ll likely find that a content marketing firm operates quite differently than how you might manage in-house writers.

Therefore, don’t be afraid to ask questions about your content team’s strategy, procedures or outcomes. You’ll only learn things that will help to improve your working relationship.

If you’ve never outsourced your content before, these are just a few tips to help you get started. It is extremely important that you follow all of these tips if you want your outsourcing efforts to be successful.

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