Finding the Right Freelancer for Your Needs

As AI-generated content creates more noise in the marketplace, quality writers are crucial for scaling content strategically. It can be difficult to find the right fit, whether you have a niche subject matter that requires an experienced expert to write about it thoughtfully or you’re in a regulated industry that requires knowledge of compliance.

You need writers who understand your brand, your voice, and your industry. Those qualifications may seem rudimentary, but I know you know how difficult that triple threat can be to find. Content marketers never have enough time in the day, which means you don’t have the bandwidth to train a newbie on the cornerstones of your industry.

You also need talented writers with proven experience in the niche that you can trust to give you a great draft the first time. You don’t want to waste the precious time you do have training a writer on how to put together a grammatically correct sentence, either.

Contently’s Managing Editors

At Contently, our freelancers are pre-vetted and trained before they’re ever assigned to a client account. Our Managing Editors act as an extension of your team, enabling you to train one person on your brand tone, voice, and guidelines and then hand over the reins when it comes to sourcing, training, and editing the freelancers for hire.

With this valuable teammate in place, you can scale content creation rapidly. Managing Editors meet with their clients at their convenience for routine one-on-one meetings. In these sessions, clients discuss their content ideas, ask for help with ideation, and share feedback on recent content submissions.

Managing Editors keep track of your content calendar, advising where there are potential gaps that a new piece could fill. Whether you’re strategizing for better thought leadership on your blog or need a more strategic approach to the whole funnel, our Managing Editors can help you create a content calendar that meets those needs.

Contently’s Freelancers for Hire

With over 160,000 freelance profiles currently listed on Contently’s creative marketplace, we offer a broad array of talent for every industry. You’re not just tapping into a global network of creatives—you’re investing in a smarter way to scale your content program.

We don’t just offer access to talented writers, either. Our network is comprised of talented creatives in a variety of disciplines—including editorial, graphic design, illustration, photography, videography, and more. Just imagine what you could produce with these creative professionals at your fingertips.

We can also connect you to talent in various industries, from healthcare and financial services to hospitality and manufacturing. Got a specific niche in your field? Our internal creative marketplace team can help you find the talent you need for your specific project. Just submit a talent search request, and we’ll follow up with our top recommendations.

Measuring Freelancer ROI

In content marketing, measuring return on investment is never easy. What kind of engagement on your content leads a person to act? How many pieces of content does it take to reach a conversion? What CTAs led your reader to schedule a demo or add to cart?

There is no right answer because human behavior can only be measured in averages. While you could analyze the trends and see what gets a majority of people to convert on a specific CTA, there is no formula for the perfect media mix that gets every viewer to convert.

While Contently offers a variety of ways to prove your content’s value, it’s also a great tool for assessing the effectiveness of your freelancers. In the Contributor section of Contently Analytics, you can view specific time periods to see which writers are making the most impact on your audience.

You’ll be able to see the total people viewing content attributed to the freelancer, percentage of those people engaged, average time spent on their assets, average finish rate, and total attention time. These metrics can also be broken down by story when you open the carrot by their name to reveal individual metrics by article.

Above, you’ll see one of The Content Strategist’s key contributors, Laura Starita, and her contributions to TCS in Q2 2023. While those individuals preceding her have more total viewers, we must also consider the percentage of people engaged, average time spent, and finish rate. Those who precede here are founders, board members, or Contently alumni, and they all published their articles years before Laura started contributing to TCS. This alone shows us that she’s doing exceptionally well for the time she’s been measured.

If you need to see how one contributor compares to the rest, you can easily generate a CSV report to download and take to your team. When you click the Generate Report button on the top right corner, Contently gathers the data and emails you a CSV file.

This CSV file is attached to the email, which you can download in Excel or convert to Google Sheets. Below, you’ll see that I chose the latter. The contributor analytics pulled from Contently showcase the date range I pulled, Contently’s Q2, and the metrics for each author, including total people, engagement rate, average attention time, average finish, and total attention time.

A Content Marketing Platform With Freelancers for Hire

Contently is the ultimate content marketing platform (CMP) for marketers seeking to scale their programs with ease. With the increasing demands of the business, it’s difficult for content marketers to keep up. We need freelance support that can deliver quality results quickly. Contently can help you achieve those goals.

Ready to realize your content’s potential? Get a personalized demo today to see how you can measure even more return on your content’s investment.

The post Level Up Your Content: Unleash the Power of Freelancers for Hire appeared first on Contently.

Though everyone’s brand is unique, there are some best practices that apply universally to how marketers can build up their personal brands and grow followers into customers or clients.

From building a dynamic website to creating a personal content marketing strategy, use this guide to get started.

1. Showcase Your Authenticity

Above all, be authentic. If you blend in too much, you’ll never stand out.

Your specialized skills, work ethic values, sense of humor, and even the way you speak are what make you unique.

Ask yourself: How can I use the characteristics my friends love about me to make my personal brand resonate with my target audience?

Take Andrew Davis, for example. Can you tell what his favorite color is? You can recognize him by his glasses and bowtie, but his voice also remains consistent. He’s cheeky, interesting, and creative all at once.

Once you’ve established your “voice,” stay consistent with how you present yourself. This applies to your social media profile photos, the design of your website and business cards, and the way you dress and carry yourself at in-person events.

The key is to stay consistently you as you put yourself out there. A personal brand that switches personas to please everybody will end up pleasing nobody.

2. Find Your Target Audience

Before unleashing your marketing know-how across the digital world, research your target audience. The more you know about your audience’s needs and pain points, the better you’ll be at creating content that strikes a chord with them.

Some demographic details to focus on:

• What is the age group of your potential audience?
• What industries do you have marketing expertise in?
• What are the marketing challenges in those industries?
• What conversational tone appeals to your target audience?
• What are the topics they’re most interested in?
• What social channels do they prefer?

Finding your people requires both audience research and your own self-awareness. If your specialty is content marketing, don’t present yourself as a master of all marketing practices.

A great example of aligning a personal brand with an audience is digital marketing influencer, author, and content expert Jay Baer, who targets mostly creatives and marketers. His personality and social media presence — which exudes clear-thinking, empathy, and humor — align with his audience’s needs as creators.

3. Build a Dynamic Personal Website

LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are important channels for personal branding, but they can also be distracting. You’ll be surrounded by a sea of content and hundreds of marketers just like you.

That’s why a personal website is so important. Here, you are the sole focus. A well-designed, easy-to-navigate website is a platform to show your target audience who you are and how you can help them without the noise of social media.

For instance, Pam Didner, a marketing consultant, speaker, and podcaster, created a personal website with a clean look that makes it easy to learn who she is and find her recently published content. A pop-up box just under the hero image links directly to her latest blog post. This is a smart way to bring content to the visitor rather than hoping visitors will seek it out.

4. Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Some of the most successful personal brands in marketing have a content strategy, publishing significant amounts of free content.

But before you start cranking out blog posts, podcasts, and videos, make a list of the topics that appeal to your target audience. BuzzSumo and Google Keyword Planner are two popular tools for researching topics and keywords.

Once you’ve established your keywords and topics, decide which content types you should create and where you should publish them.

The content types you focus on — written articles, short videos, podcasts, infographics — will depend on your audience’s preferences. For instance, if your target audience is Gen Z, you’ll want to focus more on video content for social media instead of other mediums.

As for where the content should live, your website should have a resource center as a home base for blogs and videos. Content should also be featured in an email newsletter to amplify its distribution impact. You’ll want to share your content on the social channels where your audience is most active, whether it’s LinkedIn, Twitter, or TikTok.

As you start pushing out content, be sure to look at content performance metrics for your website (visitors, time on page, bounce rate) and social media marketing efforts (likes, comments, shares). If the metrics are positive, slowly expand your content frequency, add more content types (podcasting, anyone?), and share on more social media channels.

If you’re looking for a personal brand content strategy to steal ideas from, check out Ann Handley’s blog. Her posts merge a personal touch with business wisdom as she doles out tips on work-life balance, general marketing strategy, and how to be a better writer.

Evolving Your Personal Brand

Change is a constant in the digital world, so your personal brand will need to stay fluid enough to evolve with the times. But never change your nature to please everybody.

Ultimately, with a well-honed personal brand, you can show people who you are and what you stand for as a marketer. With this solid foundation, you’ll be able to adjust to marketing trends while staying uniquely you.

To stay informed on all the content trends that matter, subscribe to The Content Strategist for more insight on the latest news in digital transformation, content marketing strategy, and rising tech trends.

The post How to Build Your Personal Brand in Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

A great freelance writer can be a tremendous asset to your company and a long-term partner who helps keep your marketing motor running. Contract help is, by and large, more affordable than hiring full-time employees. It’s more flexible too.

During the pandemic and the rise of another recession, workforces across the world have found themselves needing to cut overhead. Increasingly, companies are catching on to the contract model rather than hiring more full-time employees.

A stellar writer will save you time and money while serving up valuable content and resources to your audience—which opens the door for them to become an extension of your core team. But less-than-stellar freelance work will cost you money and massive amounts of time.

So as you search for reliable help, are there any red flags you should look out for? After years of working with freelancer writers, I’ve discovered four common issues that signal someone may not be the best choice.

Red Flag #1: They don’t respond in a timely manner

Timely communication is critical to the success of your content marketing efforts. If a freelancer’s responses routinely come with delays, it’s worth noting the pattern that’s forming.

Barring an emergency, unresponsiveness early in a relationship could mean a couple of things. The writer may not be that excited about the work, or they could be too overloaded with other projects. In either case, the writer is likely not in a position to offer you their very best efforts.

Pro Tip: Be clear with your expectation of promptness from the start. Consider establishing a “timeliness guideline” as a standard (like, 48 hours during the work week) for everyone to follow.

Red Flag #2: They procrastinate and miss deadlines

It’s very difficult to produce good work at the last minute, even though many of us feel we work best under pressure. Like all things, good writing requires planning and research—and that’s before it comes in house for edits.

What should you pay close attention to? Listen to how they talk about project management when you meet with them. For example, if a freelancer mentions they tend to juggle lots of projects and pull all-nighters, that could throw off your content calendar down the road, signaling they may not be the best fit for you long term.

Pro Tip: Use a project management tool to help track progress and streamline communication, and consider setting milestones. Communicate early that someone from the team will be checking in (depending on length, maybe a day or two before deadline) to see how thing are going and if there are any questions or feedback along the way.

Red Flag #3: They frequently reject assignments

Do you have a freelancer who you’d love to work with, but they never seem to be available?

This is when setting expectations is crucial. When someone routinely turns down your assignments, ask them to have a larger conversation about what work scope and interests. If you need a consistent contributor but a freelancer is only available for the occasional one-off, it might be time to move on. They could be really busy, or they’re politely telling you they’re not a good fit.

Pro Tip: Many freelance writers book work at least a month out, so they know what they’ve got coming in. If you make a content calendar well in advance, set up an agreement with the writer so they can save room in their schedule.

Red Flag #4: They push back on your company’s processes

You have an established workflow that works for you. When you onboard a new freelancer, it’s important to explain the process and people involved so the freelancer knows what to expect. It’s also important that you give them any relevant materials, like style guides, brief templates, tech access, etc.

If a writer ignores these, pay attention. It could signal more trouble down the road if they’re unable to follow your established system, and the editing and feedback process may prove difficult down the road. It’s important to work with someone who’s flexible to adapt to your company’s existing workflow. This will lead to more efficiency and less administrative headaches for you.

Pro Tip: Before you move on from anyone, be sure to have a conversation to figure out what’s behind any process issues. It’s possible that, as they’re learning you and you’re learning them, something got lost in translation.

Remember the four flags

Your ideal freelancer is out there. As you work with new contractors, it’s important not to be totally enamored with them on the first meeting. Be sure to keep an eye on these red flags—otherwise, you may find yourself strapped to a freelancer you’re ultimately unhappy with.

But if you keep your eyes wide open when working with a new freelancer, you’ll set yourself up for successful relationships with your freelance writers. And that can serve your company major long-term dividends.

The post 4 Signs Your Company Should Break up with a Freelancer appeared first on Contently.

Our brains are craving escape from the doldrums of isolation and quarantine. If the pandemics of the past are any indication, we’re about to witness a decade of flourishing creativity—a content revolution that changes our culture.

There are signs it’s already begun.

If one media trend dominated 2020, it was the emergence of “The Creator Economy.” The term describes individual creators—writers, filmmakers, TikTok stars, etc.—who build self-sustaining businesses without media companies.

We’ve seen a slew of prominent writers from Matthew Yglesias to Ashley Feinberg go out on their own on Substack, for instance, and easily monetize their following. I believe the forces behind The Creator Economy will also drive the broader content revolution over the next decade.

In the mid-1990s, only a tiny fraction of the world were content creators; today, damn near everyone creates content in some way—from Janet Yellen to your flat-earther cousin—and over 50 million people formally identify as a “creator.”

But over the past year especially, two technological forces have made it much easier for creators to build independent businesses: monetization platforms and no-code tools.

Ad revenue is a fickle beast. Subscriptions are much more reliable. Today, platforms like Substack, Patreon, and Revue (recently acquired by Twitter) make it simple for people to subscribe directly to people’s work. Meanwhile Teachable, Udemy, LinkedIn Learning, and others allow creators to spin up paid courses, and platforms like Contently, where I work, make it easy to pick up high-paying branded content gigs if necessary.

As online learning expert Brandon Jordan told me recently: “We’ve entered a golden age of educational content. Creative educators are about to dominate the world.”

It’s also much easier to break away from a media company and go it on your own if you don’t have to rely on a big team of designers, video editors, and web developers to help develop your content.

That’s where no-code tools come in. Squarespace makes it easy to build a beautiful website; Adalo lets non-coders build apps. Canva allows non-designers to produce high-quality visuals. Descript, mmhmm, and TikTok are making video editing faster and easier than ever. Individual creators can be competent across mediums without spending hundreds of hours learning Photoshop and FinalCut Pro.

These tools are changing the way we think about creative work. Which leads me to the question I’m contractually obligated to answer in this newsletter…

What will the content revolution mean for brands?

It’s easy to see parallels between the creative revolution happening right now and those that happened during past pandemics—from Shakespeare’s creative breakthroughs during the Black Plague to the Jazz musicians and modernist writers of the 1920s.

Pandemics force people to think about art and storytelling in new ways. As things return to normal, there’s a wave of momentum for those creators, both from the post-pandemic economic boom, and also from the strong desire to engage in communal experiences.

As the content landscape shifts, media companies and brands alike will need to adapt.

Many marketers will look at the creator economy and see 50 million new advertising vessels. Influencer marketing! Spon-con! But that’s just repeating the same old advertising playbook—a passive approach unlikely to yield big results.

Smart marketers will look at the shifts and figure out how to build a bigger, better audience of their own. Here’s how.

1. Embracing internal influencers

Last summer, Medium and Twitter co-founder Ev Williams wrote that we’re now in a “relational media” era. There’s a lot to unpack in his piece, but one of the core ideas is that credibility and affinity mostly come from individuals—writers, podcast hosts, etc.—rather than traditional media brands. We care more about the byline more than the masthead.

The good news is that affinity can transfer from the person to the brand. People trust Contently and come to us for content marketing advice because they read and watch smart things made by me, Jordan Teicher, Deanna Cioppa, Kristen Poli, and other people who work here. We’re more likely to trust a brand when we associate it with real people—particularly in B2B tech.

We care more about the byline than the masthead.

Many marketers I talk to are afraid to embrace internal influencers. What if the person leaves? This is silly. First, these influencers are more likely to stay if you give them a valuable platform. Second, if someone leaves, it just presents an opportunity to elevate someone else.

2. Double down on creative talent—even if you can’t hire them full-time

Those influencers can only build trust if they’re pretty damn good at creating thoughtful content.

The truth: Some marketers just aren’t that good at creating content. It’s not what they studied. It’s not how they paid the rent in their 20s. That’s okay! There are thousands of talented journalists and media refugees looking for work.

Your internal influencers don’t necessarily need to be full-time employees either. They can also be freelancers who write regularly for your brand. Over the years, we’ve had a bunch of Contently freelancers who wrote consistent bylines for our blog and earned trust with our audience. We’ve seen them do the same for our clients as well. And often, a great freelance writer is just as likely stay with your brand for a decade than the average employee—if not more so.

3. Know your audience inside and out

One of the advantages of Substack is that writers can focus on a smaller, dedicated following that loves their work, instead of the broader audience of a media company. Those people are willing to pay for that work because the writer knows exactly what interest them.

If brands want to compete, they need to know their audience really well. Too many content strategies start with “What do we want to say?” instead of “What does our audience want from us?”

And as a marketing leader, you need to drive that mindset. You also need to …

4. Give your creative team freedom

The great news about all of the tools at our disposal is that we can create content faster than ever. Give your team the freedom to come up with ideas and execute on them without always asking for permission. Have a strategy and guidelines, but don’t over-engineer things. Your best ideas don’t have to come from a grueling five-hour brainstorming session.

For example, Jordan, our director of content, made this Venn diagram in about 3 minutes on Canva. It was our best performing LinkedIn post of the month.

5. Leverage both creator economy tools and enterprise content creation tools

It becomes a lot easier to give your team that creative freedom when you have visibility into what’s going on. For example, Contently’s platform makes it easy for me to have oversight because I can instantly see everything my team is doing across publications and campaigns.

Most brands need a content creation stack that has two types of tools. First, an enterprise content marketing platform where they can track everything and streamline the compliance process. And second, inexpensive yet powerful creation tools that their content teams can use to create incredible content on the fly.

The past year has brought so much pain and struggle, but as the light emerges on the other side, let the possibilities ahead give you life. There’s never been a better time to create. Let’s get at it.

The post The Content Revolution Is Here. Is Your Brand Ready? appeared first on Contently.

This makes a lot of sense; all marketing is digital now, and digital marketing just doesn’t work well without great content. And every marketing leader on earth needs to focus on developing their team’s content muscle if they want to thrive.

With the pandemic raging across the United States, it’s likely that in-person events aren’t coming back until the end of 2021, and that’s being optimistic. Even if a vaccine is rolled out at scale in the first half of the year, it’ll be some time before we can safely pack convention centers again.

In-person events make up over 20 percent of B2B marketing budgets on average, and upwards of 50 percent inside many organizations. Smart marketing leaders are planning to shift that budget to content; according to LinkedIn, a whopping 78 percent plan to up their investment in content.

Content from brands is going to get better as a result. And everyone is going to have to up their game to stand out.

The smartest will reevaluate their media budgets, and reinvest some of that spend in content to up their effectiveness overall. After all, great content lowers your cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-lead (CPL), and spreads awareness, trust, and affinity for your brand.

The first place to start? Display. As Branded has repeatedly revealed in its newsletter, many display campaigns end up in unsafe brand environments—surrounded by bigotry and misinformation—and simply don’t work. Headphones.com, for instance, recently reduced its display spend from $1200 to $40 per day and saw no drop in performance.

Starting today, every marketing leader should have this checklist in their head.

1. Content Strategy

Do you have one, and does it have all seven key components? Do you understand the type of content your audience craves, and have you identified the sweet spot where what your brand cares about and what your audience cares about overlaps?

2. Creative Talent

Do you have the right creative talent at your disposal to create content that’ll truly stand out? Are you able to go beyond blog posts and create for the channels and formats your audience craves the most? And if the answer is no, how will you scale quickly? Will you build an in-house team, or join the new generation of content marketers scaling with top-flight creative talent to maximize their creative and budget flexibility?

3. ROI Model

You’ll struggle to get adequate budget if you can’t show how your content investment will drive revenue. Do you have an ROI model in place? (If not, this article and this webinar will help.)

4. Technology

Do you have the right technology in place to empower your content team to do to their best work? To give them the content insights they need, streamline their production process, measure what’s working and what’s not, and make it easy to improve with each round of publishing?

The marketing leaders who develop their content muscle are the ones who will thrive and survive next year and beyond. They’ll generate leads that are already evangelists, totally bought in. They’ll dominate search, and deliver compounding returns over time.

They’ll do marketing that’s actually worthwhile, and they’ll be rewarded.

The post The 2021 Content Marketing Checklist appeared first on Contently.

Getting work done is suddenly extra work. Some of those office annoyances? They now seem like perks. Those awkward hallway half-smiles you’d exchange when you should have known someone’s name but didn’t? Those feel as substantial as missed romantic connections.

You’re also missing important productivity cues. Like being able to look over someone’s shoulder to troubleshoot an issue on screen, whiteboarding in-person, or seeing that everyone else has left the office.

To gather tips on being productive while working remotely, I talked to freelancers and consultants who, like myself, have already lived this life for years.

1. Give yourself one month to adjust

The shift from office life to remote life can seem jarring at first. But like living too close to the airport, you get used to it. Can you still hear me? I said you get used to it. The minor irritations like traffic noise or its converse—mind-numbing silence—become normal. Expected. Even pleasant.

“You have to give yourself permission to take the necessary time to adjust,” said Ellen Sheng, a writer and editor who’s been freelancing since 2010. “What you feel during week one won’t last. If you have multiple people in your household, it’s not just you that needs to find their routine, it’s everyone.”

2. Scale back expectations to dig in for the long-haul

When I began freelancing years ago, I quickly burned out because I packed my old commute time and meeting time with extra work. I didn’t understand the value of unstructured time to think.

I now have that built in to my schedule. Every morning, I read a non-work book, make coffee, and take my sweet time before checking my phone. I’ve scaled back. This is doubly necessary for those with kids.

“Especially now, with two young kids at home, my schedule is changing a lot,” Sheng said. “I’ve had to ease up on what I expect to do during the day. I’m sticking to emails and calls during the daytime and then focusing on work (namely writing) for evenings when it’s quiet. I’m fortunate that my husband’s work is flexible so we can take turns on who is on duty with the kids while the other gets work done.”

3. Pay attention to your work environment

Seasoned freelancers know that while the kitchen table presents a familiar seat, you don’t want to be that close to the temptation of the pantry. Part of your job at home is to create order and boundaries.

Design your own home office, even if it’s just a corner, and declutter it. Your brain will thank you because, as Libby Sander points out on the Harvard Business Review, “constant visual reminders of disorganization drain our cognitive resources.” When you build a mental and physical wall around your work and keep that space clean, you free yourself to deal with the tasks at hand.

“Those normal cues for when it’s time to take a break just don’t exist unless you create them.”

To Deanna Graves, a remote marketing consultant who recently transitioned from a full time role, developing a dedicated space has been vital. “Each day I do one thing to make my work space more appealing,” she said. ” I keep it minimally designed with only the objects I need to brainstorm. I have a whiteboard that occupies an entire wall. I can be messy and write down all of my ideas without anyone seeing them, and then quickly clean it. It helps me organize my thoughts and start my day out thinking of what I want to accomplish, turning these thoughts into actions, and focusing on the few things I will do very well.”

A few extra home office gadgets can also boost confidence when dialing the outside world. Danny Salvatori, a consultant and co-founder of a remote product design studio, finds that a good camera setup helps him show up fully to meetings. “Knowing my video and audio setups are high quality and reliable makes me feel confident on calls. I always keep my backdrop clean, use a conference mic, and turn on a small LED light cube to light up my face during night calls.”

4. Triage tasks and delegate to your brain-dead self

Cognition works a bit like a utility, which is why it’s easy to run out of brainpower by lunchtime. There were times I’d find myself stuck between the ticking clock of a deadline and a difficult problem, and my brain just wouldn’t start. The freelancer’s trick? Tackle the hardest responsibilities early in the day and delegate low-brainpower tasks to the end of the day.

“I try to time things out so I’m not trying to concentrate on something complicated late in the afternoon when I’m tired and the kids are bouncing off the walls,” Sheng said. “That’s a good time for tasks like emails and invoicing that don’t require as much focus.”

5. Honor your rhythm before you enforce a routine

When Salvatori worked from an office, he’d step out at least twice a day—once for lunch and again for afternoon coffee. But when work and home became one, he slipped into a time vortex.

“There have been days where I don’t leave the house at all without realizing it,” he said, “and that’s because those normal cues for when it’s time to take a break just don’t exist unless you create them.”

To create order, find ways to hold yourself accountable. Eve Lewis, a freelance brand strategist turned remote chief strategy officer, plans her day around high-intensity interval training workout classes that she does with friends and pays for in advance.

“Honor your own rhythm … If you hate working out in the morning, don’t aspire to. You’ll just create disappointment,” Lewis said. “I do a lot of research and have to get inspired across mediums and disciplines. My routine is that I permit myself to read a little bit of a book, make a coffee, meet a friend, and work out when I want. I couldn’t do that when in the office. But now, when I sit down to work, I’ve collected all my inspiration and focusing is rarely a problem.”

The post What Marketers Can Learn From Freelancers About Working Remotely appeared first on Contently.

By Gallup’s estimate, as much as 29 percent of the U.S. workforce lists freelancing as their primary job. Freelancers power not only Uber and Lyft, but much of the media, marketing, and entertainment we love. According to a new report by Freelancers Union, 76 percent of freelancers have lost work as the result of COVID-19, and 91 percent expect to lose income.

While the $2 trillion CARES Act passed last week intends to extend unemployment benefits to freelancers, it’s been nearly impossible for freelancers to apply for benefits so far. I have one freelancer friend who called the New York unemployment line 50 times. The line went dead 47 times, and the other three times, he got a busy signal.

At this moment, freelancers in need have nowhere to turn.

What we can do to help

At Contently, helping freelancers has always been a core part of our mission. We’re officially partnering with Freelancers Union to raise emergency grants for those in need via the Freelancers Relief Fund.

The fund will provide grants of up to $1,000 for freelancers facing economic hardship as a result of COVID-19. Applications are open, and the goal is to get money in the hands of people in need as quickly as possible.

We’re aiming to raise $50,000 for the fund in April. We’ll be donating $5,000 for every $200,000 that brands pay to freelance creatives on our platform, and an additional $5,000 for every content strategy deliverable we sell. But if you’re in position to help out, you can chip in by donating as little as $5 or $10. (And if you’re interested in becoming a partner, email me at lazer@contently.com).

We know there are so many important causes to support right now, but if you’ve read this far, we hope you’ll consider making a small donation. Without our creative class, the world would be a far less beautiful, interesting, and entertaining place.

The post Freelancers Are in Trouble. Here’s How We Can Help appeared first on Contently.

Agencies took on the big campaign work—TV commercials, out-of-home advertising, print, media buys, etc. Then as digital came along, they took on website design, banners, and the occasional god awful microsite.

Meanwhile, the in-house team tackled anything that required an intimate and technical knowledge of the brand. Think website copywriting, brochures and one-sheets, help centers, email newsletters, the occasional blog post and press release.

That traditional model is collapsing before our very eyes.

The variety of content brands need has increased exponentially—social video, animated explainers, blog posts, data visualizations, video case studies, interactive tools, white papers, infographics, and more. They need to create it all quickly, cost efficiently, and across all stages of the customer journey.

Content used to be considered primarily a top-of-funnel tool. Today, however, consumers expect helpful, high-quality content across every touchpoint. And to accomplish it all, we need a new model.

The problem with an internal solution

Faced with these growing demands, some companies have tried to adopt by growing their in-house team, putting up job postings for more copywriters, videographers, and designers. In a few rare occasions, brands (Red Bull, Reebok) have made this work.

But most companies that aren’t hot consumer brands have found that it’s really hard to recruit top-flight creative talent to work at a bank, insurance company, healthcare company, etc.

Also, while you may need help for a specific content format (like data viz), the need isn’t great enough to justify a full-time head. It’s often hard to produce great creative work when everyone lives inside the echo chamber of your own brand.

The problem with an agency solution

Others, meanwhile, have relied on agencies to pick up the load—particularly as more and more shops rebrand as content-centric. But many brands have struggled here as well because you still end up having to pay full-time employees just to project-manage endless messy email chains, Google Docs, and compliance reviews.

While your agency was great at the big campaign work, they aren’t built to handle the brand’s wide array of content needs at scale—e-books, webinars, case studies, explainer videos, etc. Even when the content does get created, it’s super expensive, because agencies jack up the hourly price of creative talent by 2-4x. That doesn’t work long term.

The new generation of content marketing

Over the past few years, four big shifts have changed the course of content marketing.

1. Brands accept that their content can’t be full of product plugs. With an emphasis on true storytelling, the creative class is more open to working for them.

Granted, this is a work in progress because too many marketers are focused on outdated SEO stuffing tactics and product plugs. But content that puts the audience first is now an established best practice.

2. We’re in the midst of a media apocalypse.

I wrote about this dynamic earlier in the year. Layoffs and takeovers by private equity vampires are hurting traditional media companies. (As someone who once ran a failed news site, I know this pain all too well.) We’re now entering a world in which some of the best-funded content operations are run by brands, and freelance creatives are giving them a much longer look than they did five years ago.

3. For the first time, the technology exists for brands to collaborate with remote freelance creatives at scale.

Invoicing, brainstorming, and creating content with independent freelancers was a nightmare before the rise of content marketing platforms. Now, it’s as seamless as working with an in-house employee.

4. A new generation of marketers is coming into power.

This last point is really important. The new wave of marketers that’ll dominate the 2020s are unattached to the old ways of doing things. They often come from a digital media background, and they’re eager to build deeper relationships with their customers across channels.”Companies get it best when they hire people who are video editors or have journalism backgrounds,” Crystal Eastman, who’s led marketing at Blackrock and Amex, told me recently. “They bring that external view and expertise on how to create content that people would actually consume and look forward to. Then you can merge the artistry and the science of those experts with the internal teams that are the experts at the product. That’s the way best content gets created for customers.”

What’s to come

As these ambitious, content-savvy marketers rise into leadership positions, they’re gravitating toward a model that lets them build deep relationships with their audience. They’re allergic to the idea of producing mediocre content that merely checks a box.

We’ve seen this model work first-hand at Contently, by fusing our content marketing platform with world-class content creation talent and strategy services.

With this system, the results can be incredible—just look at Marriott Traveler, which attracts millions of readers each month across over 50 local editions across the globe; or RBC’s Discover and Learn financial education hub; or ENI’s ambitious thought leadership on renewable energy and climate change. It’s inspiring to see what great marketers will do when they can access and collaborate with some of the world’s best creative firepower on demand.

In the future, this model will enable the creative renaissance for branded content we’ve all been waiting for. It’ll usher in an era in which helpful, entertaining content becomes the centerpiece of marketing—an era in which marketers will rise up to the challenge of telling great stories. What a great era it’ll be.

The post 4 Big Shifts That Will Usher in a New Generation of Content Marketing appeared first on Contently.

Let’s say you had your first big hit last year—an epic drama about star-crossed lovers in Spain. You worked hard with an amazing crew and brilliant actors, and now you’re famous. Congratulations!

Now, in the wake of your hit, Disney says they want you to direct the new Marvel movie: Spiderman 7. Double congratulations! But now, I have question for you: Are you going to use the same team for this movie as your last one?

Probably not!

Sure, you’ll tap your most trusted crew members—cinematographer, editor, etc.—but you’re also going to need different resources to bring Spidey to life. You’ll want a big computer graphics department, different location and set design pros, and more. And you’ll probably hire a bunch of different actors for this movie than the last one.

This is The Hollywood Model.

Illustration by Andrew Rae | New York Times Magazine

In the movie business, each project presents a unique challenge. Meeting that challenge means assembling a team that combines proven coworkers with new talent. I bring this up because I believe that the future of content production is going to look more and more like this model.

Whether you’re a publisher, marketer, or even a blogger, your “team” is going to use the Hollywood Model in the future. It’ll give you the greatest chance to tell stories that resonate with your audience.

As someone who’s coordinated a lot of content campaigns—and led numerous teams throughout my business career—I’ve spent significant time thinking about teamwork. I’ve been fascinated by the question of what makes certain groups of people add up to more than the sum of their parts. I ended up writing a book about this, and what I learned in the process helped explain what I’d been seeing across media and marketing.

The best creators don’t do the same thing over and over again. They continuously tap into different types of talent so they can push the boundaries of their field.

In other words, they aren’t afraid to think like Hollywood.

The Hollywood Model treats every problem as discrete. A new film means a custom cast, locations, and collaborators. Anyone who’s spent time on a film set studying will see something pretty astounding: Professionals with real expertise in their crafts can come together and make something amazing happen with very limited oversight. Lights, grips, sound, makeup, wardrobe—all of these work under the direction of leadership, but they don’t need to be told every little thing to do. They come together and make things happen.

The best creators don’t do the same thing over and over again.

In this setting, the director’s job is to set the vision and share as much information as possible with the team. Good directors empowers people. They don’t micro-manage the grips. They doesn’t hoard information so they can be the hero.

And when it comes time to cast a film, the director doesn’t just hire 20 actors with the best GPAs from Harvard or the same from the last film. A new film means new ground to break, a new story to tell, and a fitting group of people to make it happen. The best casts are chosen carefully for their ability to portray the story and to bring out the most in each other.

When production ends, the crew go their separate ways to other projects—until a new project unites some of them again. Steven Spielberg famously brings much of his crew back together for new movies, having found people he trusts to help execute his vision. But he also brings in new writers, actors, and technical specialists who breathe new ideas into his work.

I’m convinced that creative people of the future will think of themselves like directors. Their job isn’t to do everything, to know everything. Their job will be to assemble the right teams to tell the best stories. Over and over again.

The post Why the “Hollywood Model” Is the Future of Content Creation appeared first on Contently.

With one former client, those rocks became full-on boulders. I was stuck in a pool of editors bidding for assignments at sub-standard rates, and I hadn’t seen any consistency from the client. One week, I was offered three projects, all of which were delivered on time. But the next three months were silent. When work did come, I jousted (read: politely disagreed) with the staff over my edits.

The value just wasn’t there. While it was nice to have the occasional freelance project, it wasn’t worth the expense of a one-sided relationship with my client. So I walked away.

In the traditional workplace, relationships form naturally through team projects, weekly meetings, happy hours, and company outings. Over time, coworkers get the chance to establish trust and loyalty. But what happens when a company outsources a substantial amount of its responsibilities?

Like any part of your company, a team of creative freelancers is a long-term investment that needs to be nurtured. Putting in the work on your brand voice, content calendar, and format mix won’t matter if you don’t have a reliable roster of contributors who can translate that into the right assets. If your freelancers don’t stick around, you’re in trouble. Every time you bring in a new person, you have to spend time vetting their work, introducing them to your content strategy, and getting through the inevitable ramp-up until they’re adjusted to your program.

Because freelancers don’t receive the same benefits as full-time employees, their sense of value comes from a few key factors. Right now, we’re moving toward a world where more freelancers can consistently find high-paying work. To keep pace, you have to show that you respect their commitment to your company.

Reach into your wallet

This may seem like an obvious point, but I know firsthand that it’s not. Brands have to know market rates for their industries and pay accordingly.

There are enough resources out there for freelancers to know what qualifies as good pay. If another opportunity comes up that competes against the fee you’re offering, you can expect some turnover. In fact, nearly half of the brand editors I’ve spoken to have reported low rates as a reason for writers leaving their publications.

Consider what you’re paying for: topical expertise, good storytelling, and a few revisions. When a project calls for an interview or original research, then you’re getting even more for your buck. So while it’s tempting to offer budget-friendly rates, you’ll end up sacrificing more than you save in the long run.

Transparency is ultimately a timesaver.

If you aren’t sure where to start, talk to your content marketers or editors. They should be able to give you a sense of the going rate in your industry, as well as how prices change depending on the format. A blog post about technology won’t cost as much as an infographic on small business financing.

Also don’t be afraid to talk directly with your freelancers about what previous clients paid. Find out what they consider to be “competitive.” Then set a rate that meets the expectations of freelancers who produce the caliber of content you need—not the bare minimum. This will keep creatives from ditching the team to work whenever something that pays a little more comes along.

Give them room to be creative

Once a freelancer gets comfortable with your content strategy and finishes a few projects, they’ll start to envision pitches and assets on their own. When this happens, content programs really start to take off because brands don’t have to spend all their time trying to brainstorm everything in-house.

A global software company, for example, received a pitch for an original white paper that has evolved into a series of executive reports. After some finessing, the client’s calendar is now flush with content that incorporates internal leaders, even though those employees didn’t have to use up their time on ideation and research. Thus far in 2018, our clients have used 25 percent of their content budgets on stories that started as freelance pitches.

Give your experienced writers the opportunity to pitch their own ideas. You’ll be pleasantly surprised with what you get. And even if something happens to be off, you can always provide feedback and reset expectations before they sink in too many hours on an a project that’s already been approved.

Find networking opportunities

Freelance isolation is well documented. So it’s important to find ways for your contributors to communicate with the rest of your organization whenever possible—for interviews, features, and profiles. This practice encourages them to become intimately familiar with the personalities and nuances that make up your brand, something they won’t totally capture behind a computer screen.

Event coverage also presents an organic way for freelancers to network while creating content for your brand. A note of caution, though: It can be awkward for a freelancer to reject an assignment based on travel costs. When you’re sending a freelancer to a trade show or conference, try to absorb the expense of their travel and—when essential—lodging. In return, you’ll get a reporter who can focus on finding the right angles, interviewing interesting sources, and delivering the results you need.

Watch for burnout

By nature, freelancers are accustomed to some workweek chaos, often varying between falling under or well over the 40-hour threshold. When you click with a creative who checks all your brand’s boxes, your first instinct will be to give them as much work as possible.

Give your experienced writers the opportunity to pitch their own ideas.

Instead, try to set them up gradually. Ask contributors about their upcoming schedules and map out a plan over the next few months. Discovering someone who fits your brand is great, but remember that the ultimate goal should be to build a team (even if that team is small.) Establishing a level of balance protects your company in case one freelancer makes an unexpected exit.

Don’t just demand revisions

After all the pitching, revisions, and legal reviews, content production can feel like an exhausting process. That process drastically improves, however, when brands bring freelancers into the conversation as soon as possible.

Don’t just prescribe changes. Help them understand why an idea is off or a description is incorrect. The more they comprehend now, the closer they’ll get to perfection on the next assignment. Transparency is ultimately a timesaver.

Brands and freelancers have the same end goal: to produce high-quality content. Investing in your creative team should be more than just paying them on time (though, trust me, that’s essential too). It’s about creating an environment where people feel valued as professionals, regardless of whether they’re in the office or working remotely a thousand miles away.

The post 5 Smart Ways Brands Can Get More Value From Freelancers appeared first on Contently.

Though many marketers and publishers still lean heavily on stock photography to illustrate their work online, that reliance may eventually change. This year, Getty Images partnered with AI platform Cortex to determine which colors, framing, imagery, and keywords work best with different demographics. According to early results, marketers who use AI to find imagery “outperform their industry benchmarks by up to 300 percent.” Many agree that the stock photos we often see adorning corporate hand-outs and Powerpoint presentations aren’t the most dynamic. Technology could help find better alternatives.

Bad stock photography is so immediately recognizable in its bland, stiff-looking lack of context that it inspired its own subreddit. All of that stilted imagery seems to be set in a world where every wall is stark white and every team of coworkers uses a single laptop to get things done simultaneously. Oh, and that one woman is there—you know the one—the model who looks absolutely psyched out of her mind about Curves gym, Costco, salads, adding Spanish to her resume, and boxing during the holidays.

Because they’re often categorized by a basic emotion or environment when they’re collected, stock photos often end up in the uncanny valley, a place where human-looking figures do inhuman-looking things. They can look as though an alien or an algorithm mixed up a bunch of random facts about humanity and spat out a strange combination like “too happy businessman.”

“The images look divorced from the average person’s daily life,” Dubler said. “They can’t really convey a brand’s message to consumers, and we live in a world where most consumers want to experience a brand’s personality.”

The data backs him up, at least in the sense that visual content is rapidly becoming more important to brands and consumers. Contently’s 2018 report on visual content, created in partnership with Libris by PhotoShetler, demonstrated an increasing demand for better photography and video. Seventy-five percent of respondents said they always use a visual in their content, and 70 percent said they noticed an improvement in their marketing’s ROI after adding visuals. But where are small companies supposed to find images if stock photography has become so cliché?

A curated collection

Part of the reason stock photography lives on is the fact that it’s readily available online, and it’s often comparatively cheap (and sometimes free). Using stock photos is easy for small brands whose content strategies are in their infancy, and it looks feasible enough for companies that still underestimate the importance of unique design. Contently, full disclosure, uses some stock photography, but also incorporates custom graphics and original photography.

When we choose stock images, we typically use Unsplash, a photo service with curated collections. After some time spent testing out our options, Contently’s team concluded that Unsplash offered more artistic and editorial style than the standard stock schlock.

Annie Spratt, a curator at Unsplash, told me that her team searches for visuals in their database which “feature more creative and soulful imagery” than stock photos. “The biggest clichés have to be the accentuated over-expressions and the lack of creativity,” Spratt said. “There’s a real lack in imagination when you search for a stock photo of ‘happy’ only to find hundreds of photos of grinning people who always look pretty unnatural and slightly creepy.”

Readers on the internet know within a few nanoseconds whether they find an image effective or not. As Unsplash contributor Andrew Neel wrote recently, “Our brains process images 60,000 times faster than text.”

Photo by Roberto Nickson / Unsplash

In order to parse through images quickly and choose appropriate visuals, Spratt pointed to Unsplash’s unique collections. “Warm & Muted [comprises] over 500 warm-toned images that are more muted and moody,” she explained. “Just Add Type [allows for a] blank space, and the images are perfect for typographers, calligraphers, and hand lettering specialists. One Color collects striking imagery that features one main color.”

Freelance collaboration

If you want to ensure your content has the brightest and most engaging photography adorning it, going right to the source isn’t a bad idea.

Contently’s talent network doesn’t just include reporters and bloggers; we foster connections between brands and visual artists who can customize and elevate their content. Working directly with a photographer who can study a brand and express its mission through their lens offers an advantage, especially when you consider most companies are drawing from the same pool of stock images.

Photo by Nick Karvounis / Unsplash

“Avoiding stock imagery leads to better returns on investment and cost effectiveness,” Dubler added. “It helps set your brand apart from the countless others using stock images.” For example, financial services company Deluxe sends photographers to showcase exemplary customers for a content hub they call Small Business Revolution. Amtrak’s branded magazine, The National, features original photography, and in some cases, original art from cartoonists. Red Bull’s Red Bulletin features original travel and lifestyle photos in almost every piece of content.

When you’re choosing a great photographer, the freelance hire ought to be an artist who can think on their feet. ” Nothing too fancy or overproduced,” Dubler said,”and their images have to feel like they came out by chance or were found through intuition. Someone who enjoys telling stories will produce the right photos, whether that story is branded or not.”

The post How to Be Better Than Bad Stock Photography appeared first on Contently.

Prior to joining Contently, I worked on digital strategy for some of the world’s top magazines. In other words, I spent most of my time coaxing brands like Vogue, Glamour, and GQ to embrace online publishing—and it wasn’t always easy.

In order to convince the old-school print executives to adopt a digital strategy, I first had to learn how their departments created content. And one of the most surprising moments was when I realized that their editorial processes were incredibly laborious.

It was an insane amount of work. While many employees produced content inside of the “Vogue House,” executives still hired freelancers to write in-depth features for Vogue. Commissioning just a few pieces of freelance content each month was so time-consuming that many magazines had a whole job dedicated to coordinating them. A commissioning editor would typically spend about 160 hours a month wrangling freelancers to produce—at a maximum—six articles.

That observation stuck with me.

Today, if you’re a marketer trying to run a content team, that time commitment would decimate your operation. If you spent all your hours finding external contributors and editing their work, you wouldn’t have time to create sales-enablement content, analyze engagement data, develop a long-term content strategy, or even just write your own stories.

But that commissioning editor function is still important. Unless you have a budget big enough to hire a team of in-house writers, freelancers are an essential part of your content operation. At Contently, we think it’s possible to handle all of those responsibilities on your own, as long as you invest in the right marketing technology.

To show you how this breaks down on a per-story basis, I decided to take a closer look at how much time marketers and editors are committing to their freelancers. Here’s a comparison of many hours it takes you to finish a story with a freelancer on your own versus how long it takes using Contently.

Finding the right contributors

On your own: 2 hours

If you’re starting from scratch, expect to spend a few hours, at least, finding new freelancers.

Certain veteran marketers may be able to pull out a Rolodex of writer friends and ask if any are up for writing a niche brand story. But if that’s not the case, you’ll likely have to put out some calls on social channels and do research online for writers who have written about the same topics that your brand covers.

The big challenge here won’t be finding talented writers. It’ll really come down to identifying freelancers (since many will be staff writers unable to do work on the side) who are open to content marketing (not all journalists are interested in working for brands). What if, for instance, you need an experienced journalist who can play nice in an interview with your stern CFO? Journalists don’t typically put “good at interviewing mean people” on their LinkedIn profiles.

With Contently: 15 minutes

Our intake process includes a data-driven content strategy that’s ready for you on day one. Part of that includes curating a team of contributors from our freelance network who have the right expertise to manage any request, no matter how specific.

All of these contributors have already been reviewed before they’re added to your team. Our talent team puts these freelancers through four rounds of rigorous vetting. We read their work, consider their publication titles, put them through a training course, and run their published work through our Tone Analyzer technology to ensure they are a good match for your brand voice. Depending on your industry, we’ve likely worked with them before and have performance data to further corroborate our decisions.

You just have to look through the list and start thinking about what stories you want to produce.

Defining the story and checking availability

On your own: 1 hour*

The better the story brief, the less editing you’ll do down the road. How many words do you want? How many images do you require? Can the author use the first person? Speaking of, what is your tone? Is the goal brand awareness, thought leadership, or conversion? A good brief will impart all this info and more.

Assuming you have accurate contact information for a freelancer—which isn’t always the case—you’ll probably reach out over email, LinkedIn, or Twitter. Go the LinkedIn route, the process looks something like this: Send an InMail, where you’ll need to describe the project in enough detail to get them to respond. This is usually more difficult if the freelancer has steady work from editorial outlets like Wired and The New York Times Magazine.

Let’s say you and the writer are on the same page—you still have to worry about schedules. Maybe you can get started right away, or maybe the writer emails you an answer like this: “Sounds good, but I’m in Alaska for my brother-in-law’s wedding and working on another project, so I can’t start for two weeks. Is that okay?”

When your writer is back from Alaska she’ll have a flurry of questions. She’ll want to know about byline policy, syndication rights, and the approval process. Will she need to approve her sources prior to the interview? How many rounds of revisions are you expecting for a set price? By the way, what’s the turnaround for being paid?

*Note: The estimate is conservative. Don’t count on hearing back from a freelancer right away. It could take a few days, which is a problem if your project is time-sensitive.

With Contently: 15 minutes

Your brand editor will either assign the story directly to a writer on your team—who has been trained to accept or reject the project within 24 hours—or open it up to a team of relevant writers who are each eager to get first dibs.

We felt it was important to build a place for freelancer expectations into platform, so after you finalize your conditions—and your account manager inputs this information into the system—this requires zero effort on your part. Writers review your terms before accepting an assignment. Plus, all of our contributors sign our Terms and Conditions before joining the freelancer network, so you’re covered on the nitty-gritty legal details.

Beyond story logistics, we provide data that guides freelancers. Our Tone Analyzer runs an analysis of your brand’s content and assesses your collective “voice” based on five framework traits: expressivity, formality, inflection, authority, and emotion. It then tells you, on a per-story basis, how well that text aligns with your standards.

Managing content production

On your own: 45 minutes

As the person responsible for your content operation, it’s your job to uphold the integrity of the brand. You have to pay attention to everything from SEO to plagiarism to proper multimedia embeds. Those responsibilities drill down to really specific tasks that can drain your time, like double-checking to make sure hyperlinks work correctly and go to reputable sources. Depending on where your audience comes from, you may even have to preview the content for both desktop and mobile to ensure it’s formatted correctly on different devices.

With Contently: 15 minutes

Editing is a process. There’s no technological solution that can replace the human element of spending time with an article to make it more creative and coherent. However, technology can be really useful for identifying commons issues that editors can correct to be much more efficient.

In our Brand Assist feature, contributors and editors can see exactly where they’re using broken links or passive voice. Armed with this snapshot of what details need to be tightened, editors can get right to work addressing the problems.

Additionally, Contently has a zero tolerance policy on plagiarism. To ensure content is 100 percent original, we scan each story with plagiarism technology and have employees approve the software scan.

As far as optimization goes, we have SEO tools that check for headline relevancy, keyword placement, and approximate reading time. Once you’ve ensured your piece is optimized—you can push it straight to your CMS.

Paying your contributor

On your own: 1 hour

Traditionally, you have to ask for an invoice, review it, then submit it to someone in your accounting department. Payment is rarely a swift and easy autograph signature when you have to keep track of the taxes. Depending on how many freelancers you use or pieces of content you produce, this commitment quickly adds up.

With Contently: 0 minutes

We have a standardized rate card that all our contributors see when they sign up. That means there is no awkward negotiation or hard sells from freelancers.

During the assignment stage, your Brand Editor will look at your rate card and add the right dollar amount to the workflow. Voila. Once your contributor submits a draft, the rate gets paid instantly through PayPal, which handles tax logistics.

Total Time:

On your own: 4 hours 45 minutes

With Contently: 45 minutes

Saving four hours per piece of content is a lot. As you bring on new contributors to scale your content operation, that number could balloon to the point where you don’t enough time to handle your core responsibilities. What happens if, after all of that, your story doesn’t perform? The cost of entry to find someone better and explain your brand is just too high. As Vogue, GQ and the rest of the print publishers will tell you, running a top publication is a serious numbers game. So make sure you do the math before you start investing.

The post How to Save 4 Hours on Every Piece of Content You Create appeared first on Contently.

“We didn’t want to actually create a newsroom inside the company, because it wasn’t feasible, and it wasn’t the right approach,” Marco Bardazzi, executive VP for communications at Eni explained a few years ago. “We wanted to have people around the world working with us and to have a pool of talent that was much bigger than what we could build in-house.”

[Full disclosure: Eni is a Contently client]

However, there is an effective solution for this problem: freelancers. Companies cut back on costs with the freelance model because instead of hiring a handful of generalists with limited experience, they gain access to dozens of diverse creatives who have dedicated their careers to specialized storytelling. But how do brands find the right freelancers for their marketing needs?

There are typically three reasons why these companies request talent:

1. They need to scale their content production with more high-quality contributors

2. They want to cover a new topic that requires niche expertise

3. They have a unique project that has to be turned around quickly

At Contently, we’ve refined a talent selection process that includes technology and human oversight. Our talent team uses TalentMatch, an algorithm, which filters and recommends contributors based on expertise, reputation, and tone. The team then vets the contributors and trains them to better understand how to work with brands.

To illustrate how we work with brands to build a freelance team, we also created an infographic that breaks down each step in the process. Check out the infographic below, and click here to learn more about how Contently works.

The post Infographic: How Brands Can Build the Perfect Freelance Team appeared first on Contently.

Since we’re fortunate enough to work in the heart of one of the world’s best food cities, we wanted to take advantage of the incredible number of options for just about every cuisine imaginable. But New York’s respected culinary reputation is about more than just an abundance of choices. In theory, all of those choices could be average or subpar. What makes it worthwhile for our lunch crew is that when there are so many places to choose from, the change of finding a fantastic spot is that much greater.

At Contently, one of our key differentiators is giving clients access to our network of over 100,000 freelance creatives who come from different countries and professional backgrounds. Similar to grabbing lunch on Wednesday, the sheer number of options is only half of the appeal. The other half is building a process that can identify the right contributors for our clients.

Our talent team, which staffs our clients with contributors, used to spent most of the time manually sifting through thousands of portfolios of freelancers. Now, though, we’re using internal data collected over the last few years to improve our staffing processes so that brands can become better and more efficient publishers.

1. Getting new clients off on the right foot

In 2016, the Contently talent team paired 5,952 freelance contributors with our clients. This number looks great, but it’s also important for us to constantly track which freelancers are most active and productive.

To figure this out, we worked with our business intelligence team to pull data on the number of stories and pitches each contributor submitted. Then our developers integrated this data within TalentMatch—our internal search engine that uses an algorithm to categorize contributors based on which publications they’ve already written for and how many clips they have.

With more insight on our contributors, we can see who is ready to go and who still needs to prove themselves. Perhaps most importantly, we can provide new clients with active contributors who will deliver high-quality pitches right out of the gate.

Our long-term plan is to do this for all clients, no matter what. That’s why this data is so important. It always gives us a snapshot of contributor productivity across our network. If we only staff contributors who have written for us in the past, the talent pool won’t grow. As we bring in new clients with different needs, we’ll ideally be able to match them with new contributors who have proven to us they’re ready to take on more freelance work.

2. Introducing a contributor scoring system

In the past, there was not a way for Contently editors to rate contributors based on their first drafts or responsiveness, which led to some issues. Clients could rate contributors, but they could’ve been basing those ratings on drafts that were heavily edited. As a result, the talent team had no way of knowing if a freelancer getting a lot of work was truly worthy of their recommendations. Now, every editor has a customized rubric for grading contributors and tracking the quality of stories.

Today, editors evaluate drafts on five criteria: spelling and grammar, structure and organization, sourcing and fact-checking, responsiveness, and professionalism. With a library of quality data, we now have concrete information that guides us when figuring out who is most responsive for rush projects, strongest at fact-checking whitepapers, and most professional for phone calls.

3. Only staffing trained contributors

Staffing accounts has always been a balance. For our network to keep growing, we need to give new contributors an opportunity to work with clients, but we also understand that we can’t afford to put freelancers on accounts if they don’t understand our process. If they have strong portfolios, they’re given plenty of opportunities to complete our training courses. When a contributor doesn’t complete the training, we lose faith in their commitment and ability to impress our clients.

Thanks to our developers, we now have data on training that lives in the Contently platform. It’s also mandatory for every contributor to complete our training course before being added to an account. Gone are the days when a contributor isn’t familiar with how to pitch through the platform, how long they have to complete revisions, and what constitutes plagiarism.

4. Staying ahead of pitch requests

One of our newest product features is pitch requests, a tool that lets editors and decision-makers notify contributors if they’re looking to cover a specific topic.

We want to ensure that pitch requests are never met with silence. In response, we’ve set up alerts that tell us when pitch requests are set to expire with fewer than three responses. These notifications go to both the talent team and editors on the account so we can intervene before the publishing schedule gets delayed.

Intervention works like this:

1. The talent team makes sure the request provides sufficient information
2. We check existing pitches for potential matches
3. We search a database of previously declined pitches for any good ideas that fulfill the request
4. We package up our findings and send them to the publication’s editor
5. The pitch request has more responses, or the client knows how to tweak future requests to get more responses next time

When building a content program that needs to grow quickly, the stakes are high. Recruiting the wrong freelancers, taking the time to educate them, and spending extra time on revisions can greatly hinder the ability to publish quickly. Having access to contributors, or restaurants, is a start—but only valuable so long as there’s tools to pick the best.

On rare occasions, we make a bad decision on Wildcard Wednesday (the Uncooked Turkey Burger Fiasco of 2015). But when that happens, we know to avoid that place going forward and make up for it the next week with one of our favorite spots.

Now excuse me, but it’s time to grab chicken parm.

The post 4 Ways Contently Uses Analytics to Connect Brands With the Right Freelancers appeared first on Contently.

However, those protagonists didn’t really need luck. When we break down their victories, we can see that they channeled all of their effort into preparing a strategy that would help them be successful.

Such preparation applies to everything from boxing to intergalactic warfare to content marketing. (You saw where this was going.) As brands increase their content investments, it will only get harder for them to outperform competitors. B2B brands already spend an average of one-third of their marketing budgets on content. In 2017, 39 percent of brands plan to increase this investment, making it that much harder to separate yourself and drive ROI.

As companies prepare to kick off their content programs in 2017, it’s important to look at the strategic levers that could impact their investments. Since luck will only get you so far, here are five factors to consider for the upcoming year.

Don’t underestimate infographics

Brands tend to fixate on blog posts—and for good reason: Text articles are an efficient way to communicate complex ideas and expertise. With the right research and tone, they can be an important differentiator for brands. However, if you invest too heavily in text, you miss out on the opportunity to stand out by trying other mediums.

When Contently’s data scientists dug into the numbers from over 3,200 pieces of client content, the results were surprising. Infographics reached 54 percent more people than blog posts. Not only did they reach more people, but the median cost to reach one reader was significantly cheaper—$0.04 for infographics versus $1.77 per blog post. Infographics also had a 73 percent completion rate while blog posts hovered around 66 percent. The largest percentage of infographic traffic came from “internal” sources, which means audiences were coming to this type of visual content after previously poking around on a site.

This doesn’t mean you should abandon blog posts. The lesson here is to think about how infographics can enhance the user experience for your audience. While infographics may, depending on the design, cost more to produce upfront, their effectiveness often makes them a savvier investment.

What happens inside downloadable content matters

Let’s say you’re developing an e-book with a $4,000 budget that will cover the costs of freelance talent, social distribution, and email and webinar campaigns. Your marketing team will probably measure the e-book’s ROI by looking at clicks, leads, and sales generated by signups from the gated form.

If you’re an executive, you’re interested in those end results. But for the people focused on content creation or marketing distribution, these triggers don’t reveal much about which parts of the asset resonated most with readers. What topics garnered the most attention and highest engagement rates? What pages did people return to or skip over?

The next step in the evolution of downloadable content is to understand exactly what happens when someone reads that e-book. This insight will give more context to those high-level ROI metrics. At Contently, we use our Document Analytics tool to look at engagement on a granular level by tracking time spent per page and relying on heat maps for clicks and mouse placement.

Tech should support your editorial workflow

A workflow moves a piece of content from ideation to publication. We recently wrote about why workflows are vital to the editorial process, ensuring quality remains high while limiting unnecessary bureaucracy. The big difference in 2017 will be the way brands capitalize on technology to enable this process.

Instead of waiting for a vague email from the next person in the chain of command, workflows managed on one platform will allow each person to clearly understand her step in the production process—with attached deadlines to hold people accountable. At Contently, I know a writer will be knocking at my door if I sit too long on a story. The same goes if I have to get an image approved by design.

While we often think about technology taking the human element out of processes, it can have the opposite effect. The right technology brings order to the publishing process, freeing humans to do what they do best: create.

Algorithms will redefine talent selection

While most brands know which topics they want to cover and how much they want to spend, finding the right contributors for a content program can be overwhelming. On the Contently platform alone, there are over 100,000 freelancer profiles. That’s why our data science team realized the only scalable and sustainable way to pair brands and freelancers was to build an algorithm that could act as matchmaker.

After the data science team combed through thousands of talent profiles, using algorithms to search for key SEO terms and parsing them out by industry and topic, it became much easier to narrow down which contributors would be best suited for particular publications. (From here, contributors can also be filtered by location and experience.)

Aside from reducing the time it takes to complete an assignment, talent algorithms can help ensure you find the person who is the best fit for a specific job, something that will be crucial in 2017 as more companies pursue content marketing.

Tone analysis is important for brand governance

Tone isn’t just about deciding what to sound like or a tool to differentiate a brand from industry competitors—it becomes a mechanism to ensure content remains on-brand.

On TCS, we’ve started using an internal tone analyzer to track this consistency. The site’s tone has remained steady over the last three years, even as we’ve brought on new writers and editors.

This doesn’t mean our posts lack diversity. A piece on Facebook Live is very different from a story about headlines. We’ve just had a reliable balance of different voices and perspectives, all while making sure our coverage stays within the confines of our long-term strategy.

The big takeaway here is there’s no magic fix that will make you a great content marketer. A little luck won’t hurt, but to succeed in 2017, you’ll have to plan ahead and, ultimately, make sure you’re supported by the right tools and strategy.

The post 5 Factors That Could Impact Your Content Strategy in 2017 appeared first on Contently.

Starting a marketing summit at 8 a.m. is ambitious. But xAd, an ad-tech firm based out of New York, didn’t have to worry.

At eight on the dot, the lobby of Skylight Modern, a venue in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, was already full of guests. It was a big day for the employees of xAd who were looking to connect with current and prospective clients over the company’s location intelligence technology. The packed summit, called “On Location,” took place on September 22. It was the company’s first conference and included new product demos as well as a number of ad-tech panels. The goal was to entertain and inform an exclusive group of data-collection experts in tech, retail, fashion, and advertising.

After breakfast, guests were directed downstairs to a larger, darker space with hundreds of cushioned chairs. Plastered across the walls were inspirational quotes from tech giants like Carly Fiorina (“The goal is to turn data into information and information into insight”) and Alan Kay (“The best way to predict the future is to invent it”).

High ceilings accommodated ten-foot industrial lighting trusses. And toward the back of the room was the “Location Lab,” where people could play with the company’s mapping software, called Blueprints, on desktop computers.

xAd hoped the summit would be one to remember, which is why its marketing team enlisted freelancers to cover the event for the company’s website. Jessica Meyers, marketing manager for xAd, handpicked writers with ad-tech and data-collection expertise from the Contently freelancer network to report on the panels and overall experience. In addition to covering panel topics, the event was an opportunity for the writers to learn more about xAd and where the company is headed in the future.

“Our summit gave us a great opportunity to nurture specific Contently writers and educate them on our company as well as industry-specific topics,” Meyers said. “Our team was confident that our longform content was in good hands so we could focus our efforts on making sure the event came together.” 

The reporters were assigned to cover specific event tracks: the general session, a data panel, and a lifestyle presentation.

“We invited clients from our agency, programmatic, channel, and brand direct divisions,” said Kimberly Konstant, VP of brand and buzz at xAd. “We trusted that our partnership with Contently would yield great content about the event with a quick turnaround.”

Tessa Wegert, a veteran Contently freelancer, covered the first two morning sessions on “Turning Data Into Action” and “The Future of Location.” Almost as soon as the panels commenced, she began conceptualizing the stories.

“My goal is to find a balance between reporting on the event and covering the key points for the people who weren’t able to make it,” Wegert said. “Because there were new product announcements, I’ll also include a few of the themes that are important to xAd.”

A few weeks after the event, xAd published Wegert’s article on the company blog. (The articles are positioned from the xAd team, so they do not reveal Wegert’s byline.) In “‘Big Data Is Not a Strategy’: 5 Tips for Making Location Intelligence Work for Your Brand,” Wegert breaks down how to translate the concept of big data into a strategy with specific action items—a valuable subject for xAd’s target audience.

A few weeks later, xAd published Wegert’s second piece, “How to Gain Consumer Context by Using Location Intelligence in 2017,” followed by a story on augmented reality by Haniya Rae, another Contently freelancer who covered the event.

The goal of the coverage was to fuel conversations about location-based advertising and communicate its importance for brands. It appears the strategy is working.

Two hundred marketers attended the summit, but the results of the conference extended well beyond the attendee list. From September to October alone, xAd event coverage played a role in boosting blog traffic up to 4x and increasing social media engagement by 36 percent. Part of this success can be attributed to Wegert’s location intelligence article, which was the most-viewed story in October.

For the xAd marketing team, stories about the conference served not only as a tool to spark social engagement, but also as a source of evergreen content. “Contently writers helped us extend the life and messaging of the event with focused blog posts that can be shared months after,” Konstant said. “The outcome of this partnership is that we have content that long outlives any single-day initiative.”

The post Contently Case Story: How Event Coverage Helped xAd Boost Site Engagement appeared first on Contently.

“We want to sound like Vice.”

As a content strategist at Contently, I hear this type of editorial ambition all the time: Brand X wants to be like Vice, Vox, The New York Times. Brands now understand that the voice and tone of their publications will impact audience development. They know that an influx of branded content across the web means their voice and tone are often the most important competitive differentiators.

Yet one of the biggest challenges companies face is deciding what they want to sound like. How do they know if they should model their voice after Vox or The Economist? Are they more research-focused like The New York Times or listicle-based like BuzzFeed? Even if brands decide on a tone, their publications can still struggle to staff the right creative team to bring this decided voice to life.

To address some of these identity issues, we built a tone analyzer at Contently. Here’s how we began.

The tricky business of tone

If you’ve ever been in an argument, you know that tone can determine the meaning of a person’s words and impact your ability to find a resolution. Tone is what we use to interpret if “I’m fine” actually means someone is upset.

In a single piece of writing, tone can be described as the writer’s attitude or approach to the subject matter. It can express a particular mood, feeling, or character. For an entire publication, tone establishes the ethos of a company and the values of its authors.

Sometimes, it’s easiest to recognize characteristics of tone and style when they’re not quite right. Many brands come to Contently because their previous efforts to sound authoritative and professional come off as condescending or detached. Others want to develop a more approachable personality if they have a reputation for being unrelatable.

When deciding how to move forward with tone, our clients often reference a blue-chip publication they want to emulate, but whose editorial focus has little or nothing to do with what they offer. For instance, a company that sells insurance may want to sound like a notoriously colloquial political mag.

When that dissonance shows up, brand marketers need to be able to give guidance to their creative teams. Especially when working with freelancers who write for a variety of publications, it is crucial to prep creatives on the right tone for their audience. Articulating that they want to be more Vox, less Wall Street Journal is an important distinction—and one that writers will understand.

But the result of these high-level instructions too often leads to a road of strategic dead-ends. Lofty comparisons are full of paradoxical concepts that make it hard to publish. When a consumer packaged goods brand wants to sound like an episode of Last Week Tonight With John Oliver in its video product launch, or an insurance company wishes to capture the je ne sais quoi of Real Simple, what does this mean for the people creating and measuring the impact of this content?

Time and again, there is a disconnect between creatives who have the right tone but the wrong expertise. (John is a former Vox writer, but he knows nothing about the complexities of insurance.) The reverse can also be the case. (Joanna is an insurance expert, but she writes like a dry academic.)

Our goal on the strategy team is to marry tone and expertise so an insurance company, for example, doesn’t have to choose between risk assessment knowledge and punchy prose.

Enter the tone analyzer.

The tone analyzer test

The Five Factor Model, or the “Big Five,” is a personality classification system that bases its framework on major traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional range (sometimes called “neuroticism”). The model emerged in 1961 and came from psychologists Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal at the Air Force’s Research Division.

Building on the work of earlier psychologists who extracted nearly 18,000 words from the dictionary that related to human personality traits, Tupes and Christal reduced this list and lumped the remaining terms into five key groups based on recurring factors. Today, the Big Five remains a useful set of building blocks in understanding not only who we are but also how we communicate.

At Contently, we’ve taken the principles of the Five Factor Model to construct our own tone analyzer that will make pairing writers and brands more data driven. Because we’re analyzing content, rather than actual people, we’ve given each traditional trait a new, more editorially friendly name.

How does it work? The analyzer scrapes a website for as much text as possible, then assigns this aggregated content with a numeric “score” for each of the Big Five personality traits. The process is the same for analyzing a writer’s body of work. Scores range from zero to one.

By assessing the trait scores, we can detect the character of the publication or writer, and match the two accordingly.

The publication score

As a test, I ran Vice’s three most-shared pieces over the past year (this, this, and this, if you’re curious) to get a sense of the publication’s tone. Based on these articles, Vice scores 0.79 for expressiveness, 0.26 for formality, 0.28 for sociability, 0.15 for empathy, and 0.32 for emotion.

Using the Big Five personality key, here’s what we can deduce from these scores:

• Expressiveness 0.79: A high score for expressiveness suggests Vice’s writing is imaginative and that writers are willing—and allowed—to take risks.
• Formality 0.26: The low formality score lets us know the tone lacks authority. It is extremely laid-back and casual.
• Sociability 0.28: A lower score for sociability reveals Vice is restrained and confident in its approach, as opposed to being highly empathetic or open to new ideas.
• Empathy 0.15: Low empathy signals a significant amount of skepticism and comfort in embracing confrontation.
• Emotion 0.32: The low-to-middle emotion score points to a somewhat relaxed attitude. The site doesn’t rely too much on data.

The writer score

Once we go through this same process for creatives, we can pair writers to a brand publication based on that company’s desired tone. It’s worth noting that the point of the tone analyzer isn’t to just find writers with the same voice. If a brand wants to be more emotional, it might target authors with a higher emotional score than its own.

For the second part of the experiment, we scraped the portfolios of three of our TCS editors to find out who would be the best fit for Vice Magazine—or a brand that wants to mimic its tone.

Senior editor Jordan Teicher and associate editor Dillon Baker both ranked high in expressiveness, meaning, like Vice, their writing is imaginative, capable of explaining abstract concepts, and uses anecdotes to strengthen the narratives. But Jordan’s sociability and empathy marks were too high for Vice. [note]Fun fact: He’s written three stories for Vice[/note] Dillon’s formality, sociability, and emotion scores were significantly different from Vice’s as well.

Meanwhile, marketing editor Erin Nelson ranked low for empathy, meaning she is comfortable writing punchy prose that gets the audience to question the status quo, which lines up well with Vice’s approach. Her expressiveness and sociability splits were also close.

When we look at the differences, we see Erin most closely resembles the Vice voice across the five factors. (The closer to zero, the better the score.) If this were a real Contently staffing situation, and Erin had the most relevant industry experience for the brand, the tonal analyzer would suggest she’s the best person for the job.

Toning up

Ultimately, many factors play into the “talent matching” process at Contently. Finding the perfect team of writers for your content operation depends on the depth and relevance of their experience, location, availability, and more. But when a brand considers how it wants to sound, the tone analyzer can help quantify abstract goals and get team leaders to think about the type of writers who can create content that fulfills those goals.

So if an appliance company wants to sound as relatable as Vice Magazine, it’s our job to make sure the content creators can bring the right edge, even if they’re talking about blenders and washing machines.

The post This Tone Analyzer Could Help You Sound Like Your Favorite Publisher appeared first on Contently.

“Now we’re restructuring and hiring two hundred content marketing people globally,” said Katrina Neal, the head of content marketing for Cisco’s service provider segment. The move signifies not only a change in marketing tactics, but also an effort to refocus the company around storytelling.

Cisco isn’t the only one to make this move. In recent years, brands have increasingly used content to empower departments across the organization. General Mills created its own blog when traditional outlets were slow to pick up PR coverage. Shoe retailer Zappos launched a YouTube series, #ZapposCulture, to boost internal company morale. Basecamp, a web-based project management tool, published a collection of articles on Medium, titled Signal v. Noise, to attract top developers and sell software.

Content has rapidly become an integral part of the brand experience across every department and every industry. What follows is a look at how brands are shaping their teams to maximize their resources and drive ROI.

Multimedia newsrooms

If there’s one top trend in media today, it’s video. Time spent with digital video continues to rise, with over 224 million Americans expected to watch an average of 75 minutes of video a day by 2018, according to eMarketer.

In June 2016, Facebook’s vice president for Europe, Nicola Mendelsohn, even predicted that Facebook would be “all video” in five years.

As a result, brands are realizing they need to move from content marketing 1.0 (the blog post) to content marketing 2.0 (multimedia)—and staff accordingly.

JPMorgan Chase was an early adopter of the multimedia newsroom model. Chase’s homepage hosts stories that range from an in-depth profile of LeBron James’s mentorship program to an expose on the differences between sparkling wine and champagne. In a multi-part project, “Revitalizing Brownsville,” Chase examined topics from the justice system to local entrepreneurship in Brownsville, Brooklyn. In both cases, documentary-style videos accompany longform essays. But they didn’t pop up overnight. Chase took its time constructing a newsroom, building a foundation of content governance and cross-department communication.

“We had to set up our infrastructure and then show the organization how it could work,” Brian Becker, Chase’s executive newsroom director, explained in a Contently interview. “We needed to prove that content could improve marketing’s effectiveness.”

American Express is another company that focuses on longform and multimedia coverage, looking at small business achievements on its blog, OPEN Forum. “The Journey,” for example, chronicled 90 days in the life of a small beverage company called Buchi Kombucha.

Similarly, Capital One launched the Spark Business IQ digital magazine to share articles, white papers, and other small-business resources and stories, including “The Resilience Series,” which celebrates entrepreneurs. And financial institutions aren’t alone.

Marriott Hotels is well known for its commitment to audience-first content. Dubbed “M Live,” Marriott’s content control room is run by a team of media veterans—two from Disney and one from CBS—who monitor nine screens that track the brand’s social media campaigns, international bookings, and editorial calendar. From the newsroom, Marriott has created a successful TV show, The Navigator Live; award-winning short films, such as Two Bellmen; and an online magazine. It’s even dabbled in virtual reality.

“We hired a lot of media, took a lot of people who were previously storytellers, turned them into marketers,” said David Beebe, Marriott’s vice president of global creative. “It’s all the same thing today. You can’t argue with the fact that people aren’t engaging with traditional [advertising], and this is the way to do it. You have to try it.”

While the B2C world might seem like a more natural fit for a multimedia newsroom, B2B brands are also following suit. Take athenahealth, an electronic health records (EHR) software company. Its newsroom has two arms: a digital magazine and a video studio. The magazine is run by seasoned journalists, and the video studio is staffed by former public television producers who create a steady stream of content from the company’s daylight film studio.

“You know how they do the morning programs with the window [in the backdrop]?” Jacqueline Mow, the director of video production at athenahealth, said in a recent interview with Contently. “Our thought was to create a daylight studio like that.”

Athenahealth’s studio has thus far produced everything from internal communications videos—like a “Gangnam Style” dance video with CEO Jonathan Bush—to three-second animations and competitor mockumentaries. It’s also worked with outside agencies to create popular social campaigns, like the (real) doctor ZDoggMD’s rendition of Jay Z and Alicia Keys’s “Empire State of Mind,” which ran as part of athenahealth’s #LetDoctorsBeDoctors initiative.

Modeling after sites like FiveThirtyEight and Vox, John Fox, athenahealth’s executive director of content, is set on producing news-oriented health care stories at scale. As with Marriott, the publication’s goal is to enhance brand awareness and authority.

“We are always trying to explain the network,” Fox said. “What better way to explain athenahealth than to make the power of the network visible—to manifest stories through data and what we spring from it?”

Freelance teams

As content marketing grows in popularity, many brands are supplementing their in-house team with freelance creative talent.

Coca-Cola’s online magazine, Coca-Cola Journey, has amassed an audience of millions of readers each month and launched sites in 19 global markets. Editor-in-chief Jay Moye and his small editorial team regularly tap sports, food, and business reporters in Contently’s network to scale their storytelling operation. “We’ve really tried to carve out a beat system with our [freelance] writers,” said Moye. “It’s nice to know who we can go to for certain stories.”

Tapping a network of seasoned professionals allows companies to cover a wider range of topics in greater depth for a fraction of the cost of hiring full-time employees. It’s becoming an increasingly popular way to expand the capabilities of in-house content marketing teams.

AARP’s Media Sales department used a freelance videographer to document a coastal trip down the Pacific Coast Highway as part of a native advertising project with its car rental partner, Avis. Athenahealth sources political and biomedical writers to cover shifts in health policy and medical advancements for its digital magazine, athenaInsight. The Trade Desk, an ad-tech firm, has developed a consistent infographic cadence with a freelance designer from Brazil. And career services startup Better Weekdays used freelancers to publish more than 100 stories on the company’s blog in one year.

“I’m an okay writer, but I don’t have the time, and it’s not the same as people who do this for a living,” said Better Weekdays CEO Chris Motley. “The thing ROI doesn’t account for is time—and that’s the key point.”

(Full disclosure: JPMorgan Chase, Marriott, Capital One, American Express, athenahealth, Coca-Cola, AARP, and Better Weekdays are Contently clients.)

The post How Content Marketing Teams Are Evolving in 2016 appeared first on Contently.

But later that week, something strange happened. The second client asked for the same writer to be removed from the company account. A contact said, “She’s just not getting what we’re trying to do.”

For obvious reasons, the feedback confused the account manager. How can the same freelancer have a knack for nailing one brand’s voice while consistently missing the mark for another? The answer, at least to me, is fairly simple: The first client was willing to give honest feedback to the writer; the second client expected her to turn in near-perfect drafts on the first try.

This example may sound like a convenient hypothetical, but it’s true. I would know. I was the account representative who worked with these companies—and several others—that frequently requested new writers. I saw marketing departments that were hesitant to relay candid feedback, opting instead to sweep away minor problems and solicit the services of new writers.

From a short-term perspective, that approach can seem appealing. More fish in the sea, right? Our freelance network consists of 60,000 people, so our clients have plenty of talented contributors to choose from. If one freelancer doesn’t quite get it on the first assignment, the next person can perfectly capture the voice right away.

Yet more often that not, marketing departments are turning their backs on promising creative talent. Even worse, marketers are creating more work for themselves. By repeatedly bringing on new freelancers, they’re going through the same introductions, the same onboarding process, and the same legwork that it takes to repair a problematic piece of content. When you’re not giving clear and honest feedback to your freelancers, you’re going to have a hard time scaling your content program.

Why does this happen? For starters, brands—especially those new to content marketing—may not be familiar with the editorial process. As any editor will tell you, it’s very much a process. It’s normal for articles from your favorite publications to go through five, six, seven rounds of revisions before going live. But to a first-time publisher, that can seem daunting and abnormal, which leads them to make knee-jerk reactions when a first draft needs work.

Perhaps more importantly, there could also be a lack of trust when brands start collaborating with freelancers. What happens inside company walls is sacred, which can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy of “No one really understands what we do.” While there’s definitely some validity to that mindset—at least initially—it’s also very limiting. Brands need to help make their freelance content creators a reliable part of their team, not just a gun for hire.

“Brands aren’t always able to successfully articulate what exactly they want,” said Danny Borderick, a managing editor who has worked on several Contently accounts. “Look for tangible things that can be addressed, and try to avoid stringing together subjective adjectives.”

This goes well beyond just revising stories. Soliciting story pitches from your writers is one of the most effective ways to build your content pipeline. If a writer pitches a story that is off the mark and you simply move on, you could be missing an opportunity to give feedback that will lead to great pitches in the future.

“As long as you’re asking the right questions, you can get great stories out of otherwise unimpressive pitches,” Broderick explained. “I love it when a client says, ‘Make it look like this,’ and shows me a perfect example of what they’re trying to create. Many writers and designers are able to imitate rather easily, and this is not a bad thing. It means you can build a whole team of contributors who are prepared to consistently deliver what you’re looking for.”

Of course, giving direct feedback can be difficult, and in some cases, candor and criticism can bruise egos. But in most relationships, openness is beneficial in the long run. “It’s in the freelancer’s best interest to please you so they can get more work in the future,” Broderick said, “so they’re much more willing to adapt than you may think.”

In the rare cases a contributor refuses to talk through feedback, there’s a legitimate reason to pursue new talent. But if you’re always waiting for a freelancer to strike lighting on the first try, you’re just going to be sorely disappointed. Be honest, give feedback, and trust that your freelancers have the experience to learn and adapt—after all, these are professional creatives.

To close the loop on the story of our two clients, we encouraged the dissatisfied company to leave comments on pitches and stories that directly addressed concerns. As expected, the freelancer took the notes in stride and tweaked her approach. They gradually got in sync over the next few months as work ramped up. By the time the client wanted to commission a series of longform stories to close out the year, the freelance writer whom they wanted off the account was now their first choice.

Brian Maehl is the talent development manager at Contently.

The post The Biggest Mistake Marketers Make When Working With Freelance Writers appeared first on Contently.

But there’s one buzzword that probably doesn’t get enough burn: talent. Marketers are realizing that you can’t just ask anyone to run a blog and expect her to suddenly turn into Kara Swisher or Jane Pratt. While some brands hire in-house editorial talent, others are turning to freelance content creators as a nimble way to scale their marketing efforts with experts who have the right voice and experience.

But finding talent is much easier than finding the right talent. The sheer number of freelance creatives on the market today can make finding contributors a lot like spotting Justin Bieber in a sea of tatted blondes. Contently’s freelance network alone has grown to roughly 60,000 self-employed creatives.

With so many options out there, how can brands build the perfect freelance team?

Data to the rescue

At Contently, we realized the only scalable and sustainable way to pair brands and freelancers was to build an algorithm that could act as matchmaker. It doesn’t help us or our clients for people to waste time and resources manually sifting through thousands of freelancers.

Each of the 60,000 freelancers on our platform create a portfolio to showcase their clips and add in a brief bio that teases their expertise. From these portfolios, we have access to over 1.2 million clips that have been published in just about every media outlet you can think of, as well as data that shows the social shares for every piece of content

For example, Russ Banham is a writer who regularly contributes to freelance projects for financial brands through the Contently platform. His profile includes the article “Why CIOs Should Be Happy About Shadow IT,” which was published on Forbes and generated 901 social shares. All of this information, along with data from Banham’s other 155 articles, goes toward the algorithm.

For people like Banham who work with our clients, we also have internal data that tracks factors like on-time percentage, engagement, and how often the freelancer communicated with the client. Outside of the Contently platform, third-party tools like Klout help us track social media influence.

With this information, we can measure each freelancer in specific ways that are important to brands, just as Pandora categorizes music on a very granular level through its Music Genome Project. We then use the insights to accurately pair brand publishers with the freelancer best suited to join their operation, whether for a single project or as a regular contributor.

We can measure each freelancer in specific ways that are important to brands, just as Pandora categorizes music on a very granular level through its Music Genome Project.

When you break it down, algorithms recognize that people desire things—whether it’s music, restaurants, clothing, or freelancers. The thing about data sourcing is that once you get past the term “algorithm,” the process is actually quite intuitive.

Finding the golden nugget faster

As a data scientist at Contently, I continually have to ask: Why does this feature exist? What do these algorithms help us achieve?

The answer, in this case, is simple. Brands are able to quickly and accurately acquire talent to meet their content creation goals.

If you’re a marketer from a national doughnut chain looking for a writer to cover a story about an event hosted at our franchise in Austin, all you have to do is tell the algorithm that your need someone located in the Austin area who is familiar with the food and culture beat. That quick input will save you from needing to fly out a marketing or PR representative from your headquarters in Boston, who may not have time to churn out a story.

Once the algorithm makes recommendations, our internal talent managers can then work with the clients to sort through the short list of candidates and make final choices.

The application of this feature is broad. Brands can use the freelancer network to find creatives for a specific assignment—like the hypothetical Austin doughnut event—or to staff an editorial team for the long haul. The same process can even be used to source pitches from potential contributors.

The point of this project is to refine the way brands approach staffing so they can focus on the big picture. And just think, with technology guiding these talent decisions, you won’t need to call upon Larry from HR to write your snackable content ever again.

The post Why You Need Technology to Find the Right Creative Talent appeared first on Contently.

When you’re recruiting top freelance creatives, it helps to understand them. On our sister site, The Freelancer, we just published the results from our extensive survey that captures how today’s freelancers feel about their own careers as well as the state of the freelance economy as a whole.

Here are the three important takeaways from the study that marketers should know about.

1. They’re in it for the long haul

More than two-thirds of respondents (67 percent) plan to keep freelancing for at least the next 10 years, which is very important for both freelancers and the people tasked with hiring them. Why? Because it signals a shift in the way we should view the freelance community. The data suggests creatives are no longer just using contract work as a way to land a full-time job in the future—although that may be a result of staff jobs disappearing. As freelancing continues to shed its stigma as a second-rate career path, there will be more highly skilled creatives available to deliver on ambitious projects for publishers, marketers, brands, and anyone else willing to pay a fair rate.

2. They’re underpaid and looking for more work

This takeaway may not shock anyone, but it’s still useful to look at income data and get a sense of what exactly is plaguing the freelance community. Right now, money is by far the No. 1 issue for freelancers—34 percent of respondents reported that securing enough work was their biggest day-to-day challenge, topping all other factors including cash flow problems, time management, and loneliness.

In our survey, the median income for all respondents, which only counts freelance earnings, is between $10,001 and $20,000. When only looking at full-time freelancers, median income jumps up one interval, to between $20,001 and $30,000. Both ranges are well below the average U.S. salary (about $47,000) and the average salary for writers and editors (about $67,000).

For the right price, publishers will be able to attract the best talent out there. But without that, the quality of the freelance talent pool—and the health of the freelance economy at large—won’t be able to improve.

3. They’re still open to full-time employment

Yes, a majority of freelancers plan on committing to long-term self-employment, but that doesn’t mean they’re against taking full-time work if the right situation presents itself. In our survey, 68 percent of respondents reported they’d at least consider taking a full-time position in their field, including 30 percent of people who would definitely accept. Those stats could dictate how marketers approach compensating their freelancers over time.

In a recent Content Strategist piece on staffing a marketing team, Contently VP of Content Sam Slaughter stressed the importance of rewarding freelancers who consistently do great work. “Hiring your best freelancers in full-time roles is smart business,” he writes. “As freelancers prove themselves (and our content drives more and more results to the bottom line), I’m often able to make the case for them to come in-house.”

Obviously, budgets have limited flexibility. However, it’s crucial for marketers who rely on freelancers to think about ways to continue nurturing talent as time goes on. Freelancers may be committing more to long-term self-employment, but the security of a steady paycheck and benefits will always be a strong source of motivation.

You can read the full version of “The State of Freelancing in 2015″ here.

The post Study: 3 Freelancing Trends Marketers Need to Know About appeared first on Contently.

Working Not Working surveyed 500 freelance art directors, writers, designers, developers, producers, and photographers, asking them to name the one company they’d give up their freelancing freedom to go work for. One hundred and eighty-seven companies earned a vote. Working Not Working published the top 46 answers on their blog, and, somewhat surprisingly, the list included quite a few brands.

Brands Freelancers Would Give Up Freedom For

Via Working Not Working

There are a number of entries here that may stand out to you: Red Bull, Nike, Adidas, Google, Partner and Spade, Patagonia, NASA, and Tesla, amongst others. What’s the common thread besides their cool reps? They all make pretty awesome content. (And those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.)

“Some of the places on the list, like NASA and Red Bull, shocked me,” Justin Gignac, co-founder of Working Not Working, told our sister site, The Freelancer. “People simply want to be a part of a brand they’re excited about.”

This study alludes to one of the unsung advantages of creating great content as a brand: Once you get a reputation for doing great work and reel in a big audience, it becomes much easier to attract top talent. This is something we’ve experienced in recent months at Contently as we’ve strived to produce more high-quality (and occasionally brutally honest) content and built an audience of over 150,000 readers.

Awesome content: It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

For a far doper timeline, follow @JoeLazauskas and @Contently on Twitter.

The post See Which Brands Freelance Creatives Would Give Up Their Freedom to Work For appeared first on Contently.

What Top Brand Publishers Look for in Freelancers

At last week’s Contently Summit, we went around the room asking the publishers present what they look for in freelancers. Check out what they said and pick up a few tricks for your own writer search. Read it.

Serendipity! 5 Brands That Scored an Accidental Viral Hit

What’s better than slaving over a piece of content for months and having it finally pay off? Doing absolutely nothing, but having someone else’s creative genius score you a big content marketing win, writes Jon Norris:

Many brands work for years without ever feeling the sweet embrace of a viral hit; however, an ever rarer beast is the unintentional brand booster—the viral video that just happens to feature you. Impossible to plan or predict—and tricky to capitalize on—the inadvertent brand content moment is the albino unicorn of viral marketing. Read it.

‘Don’t Trick Them; Don’t Piss Them Off’: The Sponsored Content Debate Heats Up

Publishers are excitedly adopting sponsored content offerings like it’s the cutest puppy at the pound, but the ethics surrounding sponsored content remain murky. Contently Associate Editor Jordan Teicher reports:

When it comes to sponsored content, what counts as honesty? A large company logo placed prominently atop an article page? A “Paid Post” disclaimer? A change in font?

These questions were at the forefront of the “Truth in Advertising” panel that kicked off last week’s Contently Summit. And the most crucial part of the issue may actually be what wasn’t said. Though a lively debate around sponsored content has echoed across the Internet these past few months, there still aren’t widespread, agreed-upon best practices for labeling sponsored content. Read it.

How ‘Smartcuts’ Can Change Your Content Marketing

In his latest piece, Contently co-founder Shane Snow introduces the concept of Smartcuts and how it can transform your content marketing efforts:

What did Ben Franklin, The Second City comedy school, and history’s fastest-growing media company have in common? Their unconventional success follows a set of patterns that research finds among overachieving people and companies across industries. Boiled down: history indicates that regardless of the industry or discipline, whenever there’s “The Way It’s Done,” someone eventually comes along and finds a smarter way, and that’s how innovation and above-average growth happens. That’s how we got The New York Times, Disney, the Internet, Apple, 3M… even America. Read it.

Write Stories, Not Press Releases: Microsoft and AmEx Reveal How to Win the Storytelling Arms Race

With OPEN Forum, American Express has built one of the most successful brand publishing platforms in the world. Similarly, Microsoft has been one of this year’s standout brand publishers thanks to Microsoft Stories and its impressive collection of longform stories. So what’s their secret? You’ll have to read it to find out.

Contently arms brands with the tools and talent to become great content creators. Learn more.

The post Content Marketing Catchup: The Sponsored Content Debate, the Storytelling Arms Race, and More Must-Read Stories appeared first on Contently.

This Week’s Top Stories in Content Marketing

1. 5 Ways to Offer Awesome Content without Pulling Your Hair Out (Clarity)

If the challenges of blogging haunt your dreams, The Brazen Careerist’s managing editor, Alexis Grant, is here to help. She’s put together a tactical guide to help marketers and business owners publish awesome content. Among her tips: aggregate content from others (like this weekly roundup), give someone else’s content your own spin, ask your community for guest posts, curate and share community content, and get help from content creator.

We’d add that while these strategies are all an important part of any publisher’s content mix, but telling great, original stories has to be at the core of everything you do.

2. 5 Strategies for Effective Networking in the Digital Age (AdKnowledge)

Content Strategist writer Brian Honigman explains why content marketing is more than just blogging — writing is a means to effective relationship building, which is crucial for individuals (and companies) looking to expand their spheres of influence. Content lets you scale your networking and business development efforts (in an incredibly high-value way). Learn how Brian bring sit all together.

3. Why Related Links Are Getting So Racy, and What Publishers Should Do (AdAge)

At some point, every branded publisher has to explore driving traffic through recommendation widgets like OutBrain; likewise, most every traditional publisher has explore hosting those widgets it as a revenue source.

AdAge points out that these advertising channels are becoming quite racy (“Hot Hockey Wives!”), which is troublesome for brand publishers and traditional publishers alike. In steps the IAC’s nRelate; the ad-tech company will be launching a new feature to give publishers more control over sponsored content ads, which should be a huge step for this important content distribution channel.

4. Brand Tweets that ‘Honor’ MLK Backfire (Digiday)

On Monday, people all over the world honored Martin Luther King Jr. for his bravery, strength, and vision. And some brands tried to hijack #MLK Day. Don’t do what these brands did. The big question: Who was the bigger offender, Hats.com or PornHub?

5. How to Start Your Own Freelance Career and Be Your Own Boss (The Next Web)

As brands become media companies, they’re racing to get top freelancers on their side. This article will help you understand how freelancers are positioning their careers, and now you can attract the best talent. (One idea we embraced this week: Paying writers upon submission of their work.)

6. LeVar Burton’s Plan to Revolutionize Reading with Tech (Mashable)

I’m going to argue that Levar Burton’s “Reading Rainbow” is a big reason why Millennials are such huge consumers of content. Unfortunately, PBS canceled the show in 2009 (I’m still upset), but Burton hasn’t given up the dream. Last year, “Reading Rainbow” launched on the app store. What’s next? Burton wants to port the experience to the web to reach educators all over the world.

Until next week!

The Content Strategist is our brand’s story. What’s yours? Let us help you find the answer.

The post Strategist Six: This Week’s Top Stories, Like the ‘Hot Hockey Wives’ Problem appeared first on Contently.

This move is part of the escalating brand publishing arms race that Contently Co-Founder Shane Snow wrote about last week. If brands want to win, they’ll need the best journalists and multimedia storytellers on their side. To do that, brands need to trust their talent and take care of their needs — from cash flow to ethics and empowerment.

In the past year, we’ve seen that start to happen. Wired Magazine editors are flocking to brand pubs. Elon Musk convinced Hamish McKenzie to leave PandoDaily for Tesla. And in joining Yahoo, Katie Couric might have secretly become the biggest brand journalist since Kurt Vonnegut.

Why Brands Need to Pay Upon Submission

But one person does not make a media company, and brands need many quality storytellers if they want to compete. Brands can attract the best freelance storytellers by not only paying quality rates, but by also paying them the right way.

Think about it — would your boss at a full-time job withhold payment until they’d approved your work? Freelancers shouldn’t have to play by a separate set of rules, and they should be trusted to make revisions after they’ve been paid.

According to research by Freelancers Union, there are some 42 million people in America who work as part-or full-time freelancers in some capacity. Reports indicate that about a third of creative workers — including journalists and writers — are freelancers, while many more are un- or under-employed. Part of Contently’s founding mission is to empower freelance journalists to do what they love; solving their cash flow woes is one more step toward fulfilling that mission.

We believe that this change will give the brands we work with a key advantage in attracting the best storytelling talent on earth and winning the brand-publishing arms race. And we hope that all brand publishers will follow suit — not just because it’s right, but because it’s the smart thing to do.

What’s the deal with the Content Strategist? At Contently, storytelling is the only marketing we do, and it works wonders. It could for you, too. Learn more.

The post Paying Talent Upon Submission: A New Weapon in the Brand Publishing Arms Race appeared first on Contently.