Despite frantic predictions in recent years, a full-blown recession seems unlikely in 2024. Experts are backing off of dire forecasts as 2024 begins to stabilize into a gradual slowdown in the economy. A welcome relief for businesses, this situation allows time for owners to figure out the best way to operate more efficiently and scale when the economy isn’t in a high-growth period.
One key strategy is downsizing and outsourcing, which allows significant cost savings without sacrificing key revenue drivers like content marketing and sales enablement. However, as companies undergo internal restructuring, it’s crucial that changes within the organization don’t create a negative impact on customer relationships.
In particular, when it comes to content, consistency is key in maintaining trust with your audience and continuing to attract and nurture leads through the sales funnel.
Thankfully, there are several actions smaller content teams can take to adapt and consistently build and maintain the customer relationships that drive revenue. Let’s take a look.
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Why Consistency Is Vital for Content Marketing
Content marketing is one of the most effective and high-ROI marketing strategies because it builds trust with your audience. As a relationship-based marketing strategy, it’s crucial to have consistency in terms of content quality and brand presence.
If you’ve spent any time and resources building up your content strategy and getting into a good posting rhythm, you don’t want to lose that because you had to downsize or restructure. Here’s a closer look at how the consistency of your content publishing efforts impact SEO results, customer relationships, and overall revenue.
SEO Results Requires Consistency
SEO results don’t happen overnight, but your Google placement can drop nearly overnight if you stop publishing cold turkey. When that happens, not only do you stop growth, but you can miss out on maintaining the ROI of your existing pieces.
That said, you may not have as many financial or human resources available to dedicate to content marketing during a downturn. Whether you have fewer people on your team due to layoffs or a lower budget, it’s still better to reduce your publishing frequency to maintain consistency instead of stopping new posts altogether.
Reducing consistency can negatively impact the work you’ve already invested in, and you may see a decline in rankings and traffic for existing posts if you disappear.
Ultimately, your audience still needs to hear from you, even if it’s less frequent or shorter-form content.
At this point, you might be wondering, “What happens if I stop publishing new pieces for a few months? It can’t be that bad.”
Like nature, the internet abhors a vacuum.
If you’re not publishing new content, your competition will fill that vacuum/open space, taking the leads you could have had.
That reduces the number of leads coming through the top of your funnel, making it difficult to generate strong revenue or grow.
Consistency Maintains Trust with Your Target Audience
Success in content marketing lies in continuing to show up for your audience on a consistent basis. When it comes to building and maintaining customer relationships, you can’t go wrong with that mindset.
A consistent presence is key to earning your audience’s trust and staying at the top of their minds, and to do that, you have to show up.
At The Blogsmith, maintaining a level of consistency in all of our channels is a priority, even for platforms that aren’t our main drivers.
For example, with Facebook, we continue to maintain an active presence because if someone came to the page and saw the last post was three years ago, they may incorrectly assume we’ve gone out of business or stopped caring about our brand’s presence, leading them to explore other options.
To a customer, an out-of-date social media page looks a lot like a boarded-up storefront. Yes, it’s there, but it may be sending the wrong message about your business.
Establishing a strong brand through content includes building and maintaining a strong presence. If you do the opposite — build momentum, create content, and then suddenly drop off — it can be jarring and signal to your audience that you aren’t reliable, which can further reduce sales.
Content Supports Sales and Other Departments
After downsizing or restructuring, your team may have a smaller number of employees available to interact with customers and nurture potential sales leads. If you can nurture leads through effective sales assets, you can keep moving prospects through the sales funnel and generate consistent revenue.
When your team can share high-quality content assets that educate your audience and answer their most important questions, fewer people can accomplish more in the same amount of time. One way to stretch your resources is to use an outsourced content team that can handle content tasks while saving you money on overhead costs, human resources, and benefits.
Content (produced internally or outsourced) can also support departments like customer success, support, and management. For instance, help articles and tutorial content can assist your customer success team in saving valuable time on frequently asked questions. Thought leadership, on the other hand, can drive brand awareness and increase consumer confidence.
It’s all about balance.
How To Consistently Publish Content With Fewer Resources
If you have fewer resources (time, money, or people) available to allocate to your content marketing efforts, there are ways to scale down effectively until you can return to normal. These tips will help you maximize ROI with limited resources.
Reduce Frequency
Publishing less frequently is a helpful cost-cutting strategy to use when you want to stay lean and preserve the progress you’ve already made. You might not be able to publish as often as you did before, but having a consistent cadence is still helpful for Google and anyone visiting your website.
For example, you might need to go from multiple posts per week to one post a week. This way, you always have fresh content on Google, and if someone goes to your blog page, they’ll see that your business remains active.
Leverage Shorter Content
Publishing shorter pieces can help you maintain consistency when you have fewer resources. While we don’t recommend making every piece short, sprinkling them into your editorial calendar can help you keep up your publishing frequency.
For example, instead of publishing four longer posts each month, you can reallocate your planned lower word count to create two long-form and two short-form articles. This will allow you to continue posting weekly while still reducing workload and budget needs.
That said, every piece must deliver value to your readers, and shortening a blog post shouldn’t lead to a subpar reading experience. Examples of blog post types that work well in a shorter format include news roundups, company announcements, infographic explainers, and thought leadership.
Fill Content Gaps
If you don’t have time to work on everything, you can prioritize your work by assessing your marketing and sales needs and determining where you lack content coverage.
Examples of content gaps include:
- Topical: Subject matter or keywords that you don’t have supporting pieces for.
- Format: Lack of certain types of content, such as case studies or sharables.
- Funnel-based: Parts of the buyer journey lacking content support, such as the middle or the bottom of the sales funnel.
Focus on filling content gaps to create a seamless full-funnel experience for each stage of the buyer’s journey for each of your customer persona groups. Using your limited resources this way creates a more streamlined and high-quality customer journey that can support sales and result in more trust for your brand.
Identify Your Best Performing Content Types
If you can only keep up frequency for certain types of content, it’s best to choose them strategically. To do this, look at your metrics to figure out which types of content deliver the best ROI, and focus more heavily on those for the time being.
For instance, you may find that webinars and blog posts optimized for search engines lead to the most engagement and new leads, so continuing those will give you the biggest benefit.
Invest in Creating Sales Assets
As more buyers research and purchase products online, content has become a significant part of the buying decision and consumer relationship. In 2023, 82% of content marketers said that the importance of content as a revenue driver increased, and we expect that to continue in the near future.
Investing in sales assets such as ebooks, product PDFs, and whitepapers can often have the highest impact on driving revenue, especially in B2B sales, where purchases often involve more research and decisions are made by committees.
These assets enable you to educate buyers and demonstrate the value of your solution to the various members of your customers’ buyer’s circles.
High-quality sales enablement assets are also helpful for supporting your sales team and increasing efficiency because they educate prospective buyers about the solution you provide and lead to more productive interactions with sales leads or existing customers considering add-ons.
Take Advantage of Content Refreshing
Restructuring is a perfect opportunity for some spring cleaning. If you already have a blog, you can focus on refreshing instead of only creating new content. Since Google rewards fresh content, updating an older blog post can often increase your SERP ranking and drive more traffic with less work time involved than an entirely new post.
When surveyed, 53% of marketing professionals saw engagement increase, and 49% reported an increase in SERP rankings and traffic after they updated existing content.
To get the best results, you can update sources, answer questions customers asked after reading the original post, refresh graphics, include updated information, and adjust any tone and branding that might have changed since it was originally written.
Repurpose Existing Content
Another way to increase the ROI of existing content is by repurposing it into different formats. This allows you to get more results out of the brainstorming and research you did the first time for existing posts.
For instance, a webinar replay can be repurposed into a blog post, video shorts, and reels, or an infographic. Similar to refreshing, this strategy lets you keep up with consistent publishing without the work of crafting a fully new asset.
Repurposing content is an especially helpful business process for keeping up your brand’s presence across multiple channels. Instead of creating completely new ideas for each channel, look at existing assets and optimize their formats to fit different outlets.
Write Guest Posts
Writing guest posts for another brand can effectively expand your reach and find new opportunities by gaining exposure to their audience. Plus, being a featured author on an influential website for your customers adds to your credibility.
With this strategy, you do need to take some time upfront to identify brands you would like to work with and reach out to them to set up opportunities. However, it can pay off in the long run. Specifically, it helps you build brand authority and generate high-quality backlinks to your own website.
Work With a Content Marketing Agency
If your resource limits exclude keeping up content tasks internally, working with a content agency to handle implementation, and even strategy, can help you maintain consistency on a budget when you don’t have people or time to spare.
Spoiler alert: Hiring a content agency frees up valuable time, delivers results, and saves you money in the long run.
Outsourcing your content needs helps turn downsizing into right-sizing.
Benefits of Working with a Content Agency
Downsizing and outsourcing during a recession or economic slowdown can be an excellent way to maintain content consistency and maximize your ROI with fewer resources. Here are the top benefits you receive by working with a content agency.
Support Your In-House Team
In 2023, the biggest struggle for building and maintaining a healthy content strategy was the lack of time, resources, and strong writers. During restructuring or downsizing, workloads can become significantly heavier for your team members, and finding the right support becomes crucial, especially if you have a content team of one.
An agency partners with your staff to provide the support and resources they need to execute each content initiative.
Working with an agency to support content strategy and execution can free up time for them to complete more tasks because they oversee rather than facilitate every step of the way. This gives your team more time to focus on winning new business and supporting your clients.
The key to maximizing the benefits you receive from an agency is finding the right partner that you can trust to take the same level of care with your content as you would, so you’re not left with extra editing work.
One Provider for Multiple Needs
If you work with independent freelancers for content creation, you may need to manage several different providers, which can easily create a burden of administrative work for your team. When you work with an agency, you can consolidate your efforts and receive the same amount of support from one provider.
At The Blogsmith, we can help your brand with several elements of your content strategy, including:
- SEO audits to help you discover content gaps and opportunities.
- Competitive research to ensure your editorial calendar gives you an advantage.
- SEO content creation to increase presence on SERPs and drive leads to your website.
- Sales enablement assets such as case studies and customer interviews that demonstrate value and support conversions.
Consistent Alignment With Your Branding
Lack of content alignment with branding is one of the big obstacles to volume. That said, it takes time for any new external provider to fully adjust to your style at the beginning.
With an agency, you only have to go through this learning curve once. Once the agency is attuned to your voice, preferences, and audience’s needs, you don’t have to worry about re-educating.
For example, at The Blogsmith, our account managers and editors ensure that each piece of content you receive aligns with your brand, so you don’t have to spend time requesting changes during the approval process.
In contrast, working with individual freelancers can mean you have to go through this learning curve with each new contractor you bring on.
Access To a Team of Experts
Agencies often have industry and subject-matter experts for a range of different topics, which would require multiple hires to build a comparable in-house team.
At The Blogsmith, our team consists of writing, copyediting, SEO, image creation, and content strategy specialists with diverse work experiences and industry expertise to lend authority and unique value to each piece of content.
In addition to specialists, you get access to our resources, including our style guide, which includes best practices that we tailor to your brand, as well as content performance tracking.
Cost-Effective Solution for Consistent Publishing
An all-in-one content agency is an efficient and cost-effective way to maintain the quality of your content and publishing frequency.
For starters, with an agency, you only have to hire once. If you want a well-rounded internal content team, you may need to hire, onboard, and train writers, editors, designers, and SEO specialists. Training a content team requires support personnel and processes that are developed over time through trial and error.
With SHRM estimating the average cost-per-hire at $4,683 per employee, it can take a lot of time, money, and effort just to assemble a team before you can start to get your strategy off the ground and reap the rewards of your content. Then, your team creates ongoing costs such as payroll, benefits, PTO, and administrative overhead.
Working with an agency eliminates those costs.
Higher Availability
When working with individual freelancers, their availability can impact your timelines. If a writer gets sick, has a family emergency, or takes a vacation, it damages production.
Partnering with an agency, on the other hand, means you have access to a full team of writers and editors, so you’re not worried about juggling vacation times while maintaining consistency the way you would with an in-house team.
Agencies also have multiple team members on staff for each position, which allows them to cover your needs even when one person takes time off. This way, your deadlines, publishing volume, and content quality needs are always met.
Flexibility in Content Production
By downsizing and outsourcing through a content agency, you can adjust the workload more easily depending on your company’s shifting priorities or budgetary changes. As your needs change, an agency can adjust with them.
Achieving this level of flexibility with an in-house team would keep you continually involved in the time-consuming process of hiring or restructuring. At The Blogsmith, we become an extension of your team. It’s like having an experienced content team without the costs involved with hiring and paying in-house strategists, writers, designers, and editors.
The Blogsmith can tailor our services based on how much support your team needs. For example, we can focus more strictly on content execution for teams that have the capacity to do keyword research and develop briefs but just want content that’s ready to ship.
Alternatively, we can act as your business’s content marketing arm if you have one individual responsible for all marketing channels, including social. From a strategy standpoint, we also offer topic and research development, helping you craft an editorial calendar that’s relevant to your target audience, helpful for nurturing sales leads, and delivers SEO results.
How The Blogsmith Supports Your Content Marketing Efforts
The Blogsmith specializes in developing data-driven content that supports your entire sales funnel so you can drive consistent growth and revenue. Here’s a look at our content writing services and how they can benefit your team.
SEO Strategy and Competitive Research
Our team of SEO experts can help develop keyword strategy, brainstorm content, and identify your most significant SEO opportunities — tailored to your goals, brand, and audience. We don’t just create new content; we can help you get the most out of what you already have by re-optimizing existing blog posts and website pages.
Similar to SEO research, we can perform competitive research to identify content gaps and help you outperform other brands in your sphere, which is crucial to maintaining growth when the overall economy slows down.
SEO Content Creation
With The Blogsmith, you have access to a team that specializes in the intersection of SEO and content marketing, allowing you to maximize the performance of both strategies. Our team of specialists spans keyword research to content creation and editing to ensure you have content that can perform well on search, engage your readers, and match your brand’s unique voice.
Website Copy
Optimizing your website copy is essential for converting SEO-driven leads into loyal paying customers. Our team of skilled writers and editors can help you create SEO website copy that provides a consistent user experience for your website and focuses on driving conversions.
Sales Funnel Assets
We develop content assets that support and nurture leads throughout your entire sales journey, from discovery to conversion and customer success — including conducting customer interviews to develop case studies.
Get the most out of your team and investment by using content that creates value for your readers and helps you build and maintain relationships with your target audience.
Additional Content Marketing Needs
Whether you need an agency to act simply as a content source or as the complete content arm of your business, we adjust to fit your needs. We know every business is unique, so we work with you to tailor deliverables to your brand, audience, and goals.
Final Thoughts: Navigating Content Strategy While Downsizing and Outsourcing
Having fewer resources for your content strategy doesn’t mean you have to give up on it entirely. By adapting and maintaining a level of content consistency, you can continue to reap the benefits of your existing work, bring more leads to the top of the funnel, and use content to help convert lower-funnel leads into customers.
You can take several steps to achieve more with less, including outsourcing to a content agency. Working with an agency like The Blogsmith gives you the resources you need to execute a successful content strategy while offering flexibility to scale up or down as needed.
Contact us today to see how we can support your growth.
