Why You Should Co-Source Your B2B Newsroom

Everywhere you look, you’ll see reports and warnings telling you that outsourcing your B2B newsroom is going to detract from your brand’s image. Outsiders don’t understand your brand, you’ll need a full-time person to manage your outsourced news team. And our personal favorite – a B2B newsroom is a waste of time.

While there are some legitimate concerns with outsourcing content creation and management, the reality is many businesses aren’t doing that great with content marketing production themselves.

In fact, the B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets & Trends study shows that 35% of companies who consider themselves most effective at content marketing struggle with producing engaging content. Marketers who considered themselves less effective at content marketing struggled even more with “engaging content.”

However, the biggest challenge for most marketers is the time factor to create content in general. Then, they struggle with producing enough content.

Quality, engaging content seemed to follow strategy. The study shows that 66% of marketers with a documented content strategy find themselves more effective. Lastly, if you look at the marketers who consider their content marketing “best-in-class,” you’ll find that blogs rank as their most effective tactic (79%). That’s above all marketer’s top tactic – in-person events (76%).

So, now that we’ve given you some data on the state of content marketing, let’s talk about why co-sourcing is the next best thing for your B2B newsroom.

A dedicated staff to populate your newsroom with original, engaging content is a struggle to fund and manage — but it’s important to be producing the content that engages your target audience. So, if it’s not feasible to hire a team of writers, designers, content curators, social media managers, what do you do?

You could try to do it alone, but as the survey data suggests, it’s a struggle — that’s why we thing co-sourcing may be an option for companies that know the value of a B2B newsroom.

Co-sourcing means using a third-party vendor to bring the talent, management, and promotion of your brand newsroom to your organization with assistance from your internal staff. Co-sourcing goes further than traditional outsourcing in that the agency will work with you for the first month to get the tone, talent, and topics selected. The next month, you approve a few things and you’re on autopilot.

Seven Benefits of Co-Sourcing Your B2B Newsroom:

1. Assistance in developing a focused content strategy – a secret of the most effective content marketers.
2. Creating a solid editorial calendar so that you always have fresh, focused content and flexibility in reacting to breaking news.
3. Constant contact and collaboration with your brand experts to deliver a polished, original product to your readers.
4. Access to a stable of talent with experience in your industry that you vet.
5. Help in maintaining a constant pulse on what’s engaging and not-so-engaging to your readers with real-time analytics.
6. Use of best-in-class technology (the backbone of a successful brand newsroom) to your organization.
7. Originality and storytelling as core principles for your B2B newsroom.

With these seven key benefits, it’s possible to make a smaller or start-up B2B newsroom a star. What’s more is that you can staff your newsroom with a co-sourced team at a fraction of the cost of hiring and managing your own team.