Hiring In-house Writers vs. Outsourcing to an Agency vs. Hiring Freelance Writers: What’s Right for You

One of the first steps to building a great content team is deciding whether you will hire in-house writer, outsource to a content agency, or hire freelance writers to produce content. Every business is unique so there isn’t just one right answer to this question, instead it’s going to depend on your goals, industry, and budget.

Before Getting Started Ask Yourself…

You know that you need content to support your marketing strategy and overall business goals, but before you hire someone there are some questions you should ask yourself.

“What type of content do I need for my content strategy?”

Most people here are looking to hire a writer to produce content for the company blog. In this case you’re looking to hire a content writer with some degree of knowledge about your industry.

But not every company needs blog posts. For example, technology and SaaS companies may need technical content to educate leads and onboard customers. In this case you should hire a technical writer.

Copywriters are great if you’re rewriting website pages or ad copy.

Working with a journalist would be ideal if you’re creating news content or an interview piece.

“How much industry experience does the writer need?”

Another question to ask yourself is how much industry experience does the writer need to create high-quality content?

Businesses in larger, established industries will have a much easier time finding and hiring writers with the right skill and experience levels.

And vice versa.

Businesses in smaller, niche industries may find it more difficult to source writers that have both the industry knowledge and writing talent needed to create high-quality content.

Once you’ve answer these questions, it will be a lot easier to decide between hiring in-house vs. outsourcing to an agency vs. hiring freelance writers.

Hiring In-House Writers

Understandably, when most people think about building a content team they think about hiring in-house writers. But for a lot of companies, hiring in-house writers isn’t the best option. Why not?

First and foremost, there are the additional costs of hiring, training, and insuring a formal employee. In most cases, the additional costs of hiring add up to about the cost of salary multiplied by 1.25 to 1.75.

Second, if you only have the budget for one person, then finding someone with the skills to strategize, plan, create, distribute and promote content is going to be nearly impossible. Content marketing is best played as a team game where everyone focuses on what they’re good at.

Lastly, in-house writers aren’t scalable. You’re limited to working within their time constraints, writing ability, and industry experience.

Hiring in-house writers (or a team of writers) makes sense for big brands with big budgets that can afford to pay someone to spend their day writing.

Hiring a Content Writing Agency

If you decide that hiring in-house writers isn’t the right way to go, then you might consider hiring a content agency to work with you.

And there are some benefits: a managed service, access to writers, and someone to promote your content.

But there are some downsides as well. For one, you still have to find, vet, and hire a content agency before you commit to signing a retainer. Second, an agency may not have writers with the industry expertise that you need to create truly compelling content. While any content agency will have “expert” writers on-hand, you don’t really know how much industry knowledge they have.

You’re also going to spend between $5-10K+ per month for this type of agency.

Hiring Freelance Writers

For the majority of businesses, hiring freelance writers is the best way to build a great content team. The reasons are simple:

• Expertise
• Flexibility (and scalability)
• Cost

The benefit of building a team of freelancers with varying writing abilities and levels of industry experience is that you can pick the most relevant writer for each piece of content.

• Your expert articles can be written by an actual industry expert.
• Interview pieces can be written by an experienced journalist.
• Some writers are especially good at crafting in-depth, informative articles.
• Others are great at writing technical, how-to content

The advantage here is that you have a variety of styles and types of content at your disposal and can easily scale your content up and down as need be.

Also, freelance writers don’t require benefit payments or a retainer, which means it’s typically the most cost-effective method.

The nest step is to build and manage this team of freelance writers…

Next: 9 Tips for Managing a Team of Freelance Writers (tips start about half-way down the page)

Are you looking to hire freelance writers to produce content for your business? Constant Content makes it easy for you to find, vet, hire, and manage a team of freelance writers. Our easy-to-use, collaborative platform and managed enterprise services allow us to help businesses of any size to scale and improve their content creation.