Agreed fully about it being a choice between time and money — most founders have a good understanding on what their product is and the key messaging they should focus on in their content marketing efforts, but have little time to dedicate to getting it down on paper in a readable, engaging way, or dealing with the back and forth of outreach to guest blogs and social media engagement. They also don’t have the time to deal with onboarding and training a content marketing manager at such an early stage in the company.

My agency, Eucalypt Media, works with some really smart clients who undoubtedly COULD manage content marketing on their own if they had the time for it, but they’re being pulled in so many other directions at once. We work with them to develop a process that helps them develop well-written, comprehensive content around their subject areas and includes their own feedback, which often means conducting phone interviews or collecting outlines on each article from them before digging in to flesh it out. We also help them ID other outlets where their content might help them find a larger audience, and reach out on their behalf.

So, the question really isn’t whether you have the ability to do it yourself, it’s whether you can commit to developing the content and building and executing a game plan to make it work for you. I’d equate agencies to personal trainers — you still need to collaborate on the process (we’re not interested in low-hanging fruit SEO pieces with no purpose behind them), but your agency or consultant can help you come up with a plan that will get results if you both put in the necessary work.

We’ve seen a few common scenarios with our clients at Audience Ops:

– “What got you here, won’t get you there”… The founder(s) have been writing their blog posts for a while and it helped them get off the ground, but now as their company is growing, their focus is pulled in more important directions. So they seek a service like ours to “double down” on content, while freeing up their time to work on pushing new stuff forward.

– “Content is essential, but not an internal strength”… Most startups know how important it is to build up strong content assets and grow their email list, and they know they must start this sooner rather than later, but they’ve never invested the time to become great content producers themselves (and frankly are more interested in focusing on their other skills, like design or dev). With some money to spend, they see building up their content early and sustaining it through their first year and beyond as a smart investment, freeing them up to focus on what they do best.

The key for clients to be successful in both situations is to understand that it’s not just about hiring a writer to churn out X word counts every X days. Customer research and topic development matter more, and so does the content promotion. Whoever you work with on your content has to have these bases covered. And like Alex said, you should understand how these processes are managed.

Hope this helps!