If you make a quick search on any freelance platform to hire a content writer, you’ll find a huge range of quality and price.
Considering there’s such a wide span, does it ever make sense to hire a top-tier writer, or is hiring an average writer at a lower cost good enough?
Because every budget has constraints and everyone wants to get more bang for their buck, a natural way of thinking about hiring a content writer involves balancing writer quality with the number of content pieces you can get within your limited budget.
I get it, more content for the same price feels good and conceptually makes sense. However, a major flaw exists in this point of view since content is not what you’re actually buying.
Content Is Not the Product
Why would a private equity firm (or any company for that matter) invest in content? To create opportunities for prospects to engage with their firm, in turn building their brand and opening doors for future investment opportunities
So while content may be the deliverable you receive when you hire a content writer, the product is actually engagement with your prospects.
This distinction is important because better writers create content that’s better at engaging your prospects. As an example, consider these two content portfolios:
- Two pieces of average quality content for $1,000 each that engage a prospect for 2 minutes on average
- One piece of top-tier content for $2,000 that engages prospects for 4 minutes on average
If you don’t take into account engagement, then the first option appears better—you get two pieces of content instead of just one! But when you consider the articles’ ability to engage their audience, the top-tier piece is doing just as well as the two average pieces of content for the same total price. Beyond that, the single top-tier piece of content is an even better option because:
- Better content quality will leave a better impression for your firm’s brand (because prospects don’t care about how much content you have, rather how good your content is)
- The more content you have, the more topics you have to come up with, the further you have to move away from your most impactful messages
This second point is worth elaborating on: the more content you create, the more topics you have to come up with. As you spiral outward from your core topics, the messages will become less and less impactful. So if you elect quantity over quality and hire a writer that’s “good enough for us,” what you’ll end up doing is investing more money in topics that are not as impactful. Compare that to the opposite approach, where hiring a top-tier writer means you’re investing more money in producing content about the topics you know to be most impactful.
Specifically for the private equity space, no prospect wants to feel like they’re interacting with anyone but the best. As such, you should never compromise when it comes to whom you hire to create content for you. A top-tier writer will create content that keeps prospects engaged longer and makes a better impression, yielding better outcomes for your firm.
