Any given day delivers up a wide range of opportunities where you can increase business efficiencies by outsourcing. You can have your IT needs managed by outside professionals, hire an agency to help with human resources, and work with logistics companies to distribute your products. But have you ever considered alternatives to building an in-house content team? It’s a concept worth mulling over.

You minimize your overhead by outsourcing.

Producing your own content involves more than just generating blog posts, social media profiles and website pages on topics trending in your industry. As a practical matter, the term “content” refers to much more than just the written word; it includes video, podcasts and other material. So your marketing budget must include payroll for the professionals with expertise in generating a wide range of content. Plus, content creation is not the end result of the inbound marketing process. There are metrics to analyze, strategies to develop and implementation plans to create.

Maintaining your own marketing personnel to fill all these roles is expensive considering salaries, benefits and other perks. Space is also a consideration so you need to determine whether you have the real estate when looking at alternatives to building an in-house content team.

Hiring a third party content team enables you to avoid layoffs when demand slows.

Even a well-run content marketing strategy will have its ups and down in terms of demand. Slow periods may be based on seasonality, a sluggish economy or other issues, but the reason behind them doesn’t eliminate your responsibility to pay your content team. You’re still responsible regardless of how busy they are and layoffs are a regrettable solution. Most likely, there will be an upswing – at which point you need to hire, train and develop new staff. Outsourcing solutions can help you deal with the ebb and flow of demand without having to absorb the costs.

It’s easier to scale up without incurring problematic overhead.

Much like reductions in demand can impact your overhead, the need to scale up to meet company or customer needs can be a challenge when you have an in-house content team. Fluctuations that make your staff busy are great; those that strain them to the breaking point are not and more manpower may be necessary. However, hiring in response to demand swells can be time-consuming and expensive. Again, there will likely be a slowdown in business, which puts you in the just as unfortunate situation described above.

These are some of the main reasons you might want to look at alternatives to building an in-house content team. Whether you decide to hire an agency or keep things under your company’s roof, it’s important to make sure you have true inbound marketing professionals at the helm. It’s a mistake to think you can get away with re-purposing existing personnel and put them in charge of your content marketing.