When to Outsource Your Private School Content Marketing to an Expert

And the answer is: determine when to hire, outsource, or automate.

Hire vs. Outsource

There isn’t a clear-cut answer about when to hire and when to outsource. 50% of businesses outsource their content marketing¹. Ultimately, it’s up to you to decide what makes the most sense for your school and your culture. 

Consider the benefits of hiring and outsourcing to help make the decision easier:

The benefits of hiring

• You are investing in developing talent
• Employees are always available– you can control their schedule and workload
• There are more frequent opportunities for creative brainstorming
• Employees are immersed in your school and its culture every day
• You can oversee the complete process
• You are building a content culture, which can inspire all employees to help tell your story

The benefits of outsourcing

• You get instant access to a specialized skill– there is no learning curve
• It’s efficient– you pay only for the hours you need, and you free up internal resources
• There are no employee-related costs (annual salary/benefits)
• You can hire someone for the short term, with less commitment
• You benefit from their objective, outside perspective
• Your team can learn from their expertise

There’s also a third option: you can do both.

You might assign or hire a core team internally that can handle the smaller, tactical, day-to-day components of your school storytelling strategy, AND bring in a specialist to help develop your overarching strategy or to handle components of the ongoing content development that could inundate your team.

Tasks you might want to consider outsourcing:

• Projects that fall outside the current expertise of you/your team– especially if you simply don’t have the time to educate yourself or develop that new skill and do the work that needs to get done (for example, if you don’t have any writers on your team, you’ll same time and stress by hiring one for important projects)

• High-level strategic projects where an outside perspective is an asset, both in terms of seeing things differently, and in terms of providing an environment where multiple groups of stakeholders feel they can speak candidly (for example, when developing a school storytelling strategy or a website redesign)
  
• Ongoing projects that you struggle to get done, yet know that if you could provide the information to someone else, they’d be able to get it done faster and more efficiently (for example, monthly blog posts, website content updates, or email newsletters)

Outsourcing for the short term may also be a good solution if you want to hire someone eventually, but can’t find the right fit or expertise level for your company.

Whether you hire, outsource, or do both, a small school marketing team doesn’t have to be a stumbling block to impactful school storytelling. 

When to automate

When you don’t need to hire, or outsource, but you feel bogged down by repetitive or ongoing tasks, look into the possibility of automation.

By automating certain aspects of your school marketing, you free time in your schedule to focus more on tasks that need more attention and make a bigger impact. Some ideal tasks to automate are:

• Social media posts: Tools like SmarterQueue make this time-consuming task faster and easier than ever
  
• Enewsletters: Set aside a block of time to write more than one, then schedule them in your email service so they’ll automatically send on the date/time that you choose
  
• Emails: Create an automated series of emails that will be sent when someone signs up for your email list. Once the initial work is done, new subscribers will get the emails without any additional work on your part

What else can you automate? Take a look at your to-do list and see what tasks you might be able to make easier. Then look at the ones that can’t be automated. Can you hire or outsource to make your workload more manageable, and begin telling a stronger school story?

Cursive can help. Learn more about how to work with us.