An Essential Guide to Outsourcing Content Creation to VAs
It is well known in the business world that content creation is one of the pillars of digital marketing; that is why many companies do not risk outsourcing these tasks as it can turn into a much larger time investment than simply handling everything in-house.
Although outsourcing always comes with risks, there are ways in which it can be done without it implying a huge investment in time, decrease in quality, or high costs.
In this article, we will share the main aspects to take into account in order to outsource content creation to VAs in an efficient manner.
Your Brand Essentials
Begin by identifying what message you want to communicate. For this, it is also necessary to have clarity about your company’s purpose, values, and what you want to offer to your market. If you haven’t dedicated time to creating a summary with all the details of your brand, now is the time to do so. This way, your VA will know exactly what you want to communicate and every piece of content will be focused on your brand’s message.
Be Clear About Your Needs
Once you are completely clear about your core business, you can decide what kind of content you want to publish depending, of course, on the audience you want to target. Which platforms should you use? What type of content does each one need? What details should you include in these different types? Keep in mind that telling your virtual assistant you need a 500-word blog post once a week is not the same as saying you need 1,000 words of weekly LinkedIn content. Be specific with your expectations in order to avoid delays and content of little value to your customers.
Create a Style Guide for Content Creation
It is generally recommended that companies have a style guide, especially those that outsource tasks such as content creation. A style guide is simply a set of copywriting rules that establish the message you want to convey. These rules specify the tone for the writings, sentence structures, preferred and undesirable words, audience profiles, among others.
Style guides can be summarized in an easy-to-read PDF that can be shared with any new writer. In fact, new writers should submit samples based on your style guides in order to create content for you. This ensures that they have properly understood the rules for the brand and you can fine-tune any details that need adjusting before creating the mass content.
Hire VAs Experienced in Content Creation
For this type of work, it is very important to have VAs with experience in writing. Even if you have a detailed style guide with all the necessary information for each piece of content, it is important that your VA has knowledge in SEO; that they know how to use platforms like WordPress and that writing is something that comes naturally for them.
There are entrepreneurs who look for VAs that do a little bit of everything; sometimes these end up not doing anything right, which is one of the worst things that can happen, especially when you look for a VA on your own.
Keep in mind that at There is Talent we have a pool of virtual assistants specialized in certain tasks who not only meet our clients’ expectations but far exceed them.
Make Sure to do Follow-ups on Organization/Supervision
For any work that is outsourced, it is very important to be able to review the process and compliance. Therefore, we usually suggest that our clients use tools to keep track of their VAs productivity. Some tools that can be used to monitor tasks are Asana or Trello.
There are clients who prefer reviewing the content directly on the platform. So if, for example, you use WordPress to upload content to your blog, your VA can upload her drafts and leave them for your review. This is also an efficient way to organize and supervise the content your VA is creating.
Have an Editor for Content Creation
Sometimes it is best to double-check that everything is as should be. That’s why some people may also have an in-house editor; they can take care of the organizational and supervisory functions of the content created by the VAs.
You might be thinking that this is an extra expense, but this can be a person already on your team who can be given the responsibility of reviewing the created content.
The time invested to create content is not the same as monitoring and confirm that everything is fine. It is an extra step, yes, but some people prefer to be 100% sure before uploading content to their platforms.
At There is Talent, we connect you to your ideal virtual assistant, provide supervision and support functions; so anytime you need someone to double-check everything, we will be available for you.
Want to know more details?
