Does your target audience know about your brand? Do potential customers have a good understanding of what products and services you offer? And does your content and SEO marketing do a great job of telling your business story?
To answer ‘yes’ to those three questions, it’s vital that you can communicate clearly with your prospects and customers. That means having top-notch written marketing materials, blog posts, campaign emails and video scripts – words that bring your product to life and do the heavy lifting when it comes to raising brand awareness and converting leads into customers.
But not everyone is a good writer. You may have the ideas, skills and motivation to found a startup, but that doesn’t mean you’re a content and communication expert.
So, if you’re still writing your own marketing and social content, here’s a little reminder of why hiring a freelance writer is a move you definitely won’t regret!
1. You’re busy and don’t have time to write
7.4% of the total global population is an entrepreneur, according to recent stats. You’re one of the 594 million entrepreneurs in the world, working around the clock to keep your startup on an even keel, while also doing your best to bring in customers, generate revenue and attract investors.
Running a business is a full-time job. In fact, it’s probably at least three or four jobs, with you attempting to balance being the CEO, finance director, HR lead and operations director, among many other responsibilities.
It all takes time, and trying to head up your marketing AND write your content can often be a bridge too far. How much easier would it be to bring a freelance writer on board so you can hand over the content writing?
With a writer on the team, you can:
- Delegate the content marketing workload and put that time back into running the business and leading from the front.
- Be confident that your content, style and tone-of-voice is now in the best possible hands.
- Tell compelling, well-crafted stories that elevate your marketing and get your audience talking about your products.
2. A writer brings an objective outlook to your content strategy
When you sit down to write about your own products, it’s difficult to see the wood for the trees. You’ve lived and breathed this offering for months now, maybe even years, and it’s very easy to lose perspective.
A freelance writer has no such issues.
When you bring an external writer into the team, it forces you to rethink how you communicate your value offering. And, as a professional writer, we’re used to asking the right questions, delving into the details and consolidating your product offering down into simple, easily digestible chunks that slot perfectly into your marketing.
A freelance writer will:
- Summarise your offering in a way that’s refreshingly straightforward, so you have the best possible elevator pitch to try out on customers.
- Offer an objective, independent viewpoint on where your product adds value and what the main points of engagement will be for an end user.
- Bring fresh marketing and content ideas to the table, getting you out of your product-focused rut and keeping value at the heart of your writing.
3. A professional writer has content skills for days
Founders and CEOs are often clear thinkers, full of ideas and innovation. You know your business model inside out and know exactly how you want the world to perceive your new brand.
But being an ambitious entrepreneur doesn’t necessarily make you a brilliant writer.
There’s a big difference between posting a top-of-mind LinkedIn post and crafting the latest copy for your product marketing campaign. Professional writers have been learning their craft for years (decades in some cases), so they have a toolbox of skills to call on that make it easy to create the content you need, exactly when you need it.
An experienced writer can:
- Use their storytelling skills to create a consistent narrative and style around your content marketing, whether it’s a long-form blog post or a sales one-pager.
- Make sure every blog, email or sales one-pager is well-written, grammatically correct and free from any embarrassing spelling mistakes or typos.
- Structure your content for maximum impact, so emails convert, news stories engage and long-form content gets people sharing their contact details.
4. You benefit from the cross-industry experience of a freelance writer
Freelance writers tend to have a wealth of business experience. We work with multiple different clients, have connections across a range of industries and usually have one or more niches within a specific sector.
This means we’re a goldmine of marketing, content and sales ideas, all ready to be reworked, refined or revolutionised to fit the needs of your business content.
When you’re still at the early stages of running your startup, what you have in spades is raw ambition. However, a little proven business experience goes a long way.
When you bring an experienced writer on board, you’re also hiring their professional knowledge and experience.
Make their most of your writer’s experience and benefit from their:
- Knowledge of your market or industry sector, helping you understand what content strategies have worked for other companies in your niche.
- Experience of writing for your core audience, and the topics areas and themes that are most likely to engage with these customers and prospects.
- Content ideation and topic ideas from multiple industries, giving you an ongoing pipeline of content ideas to plug into your marketing strategy.
5. A human writer tells better stories than an AI algorithm
ChatGPT and other AI apps have completely disrupted the content writing market. If you want, you can type a prompt into one of the many generative AI solutions, and a thousand words will be spat out in a matter of seconds. Handy, right?
As a time-poor startup founder, with a clear focus on lowering your expnses, the temptation is to think that this AI content is good enough. That these words are as valuable as something a human writer would produce.
The hard reality is that AI content is just not up to scratch.
As I said in a recent blog post, ChatGPT is the two-minute noodles of content marketing. Yes, it fulfills your hunger for words, but it’s never going to be the home-cooked meal you’re really craving.
It’s generic, vanilla and devoid of originality – after all, it can only come up with content based on a finite data source of other people’s ideas and writing.
But, generative AI writing isn’t without merit. AI is a useful tool to have in your writing toolbox, but it isn’t a wholesale replacement for a human writer.
An experienced human writer can:
- Write the very best prompts for your AI, using their content writing experience to tailor the prompt and deliver the best content outlines.
- Edit, rework and rewrite your AI content to add some humanity and insight back into the writing, giving your content a style and tone that’s yours.
- Ditch the AI completely, and come up with content that’s invigorating, fresh and 100% human – words and ideas that bring your brand to life in the eyes of your customers.
put the life back into your content: Hire a human writer for your team
At the most basic level, you engage a freelance writer to take care of your content. But as I’m always happy to point out, you don’t hire a writer just to write…
You hire a writer to understand your brand, to talk to your customers and (most importantly) to have amazing ideas.
If you just want to hit your wordcount and pump out some middle-of-the-road marketing collateral, AI can definitely do that for you. It’s fast, cheap and readily available.
But if you want your startup’s marketing content to be world-class, you absolutely, 100% need to get a human freelance writer on the case.
Talk to a writer today and find out how to add the pizzazz to your business stories.
How To Write Killer Content For Your Startup
If your budget simply doesn’t stretch to hiring a freelance writer, I have good news!
My book ‘How To Write Killer Content For Your Startup’ is still available on Amazon. It’s your 101 guide to writing quality content for your business, with tips and hacks to improve your storytelling, brand style and content writing capabilities as a founder.
The book is available in Kindle and print editions now. There’s also a free audio book version available for Audible members.
Kick your content into shape and start telling amazing business stories!
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