Even with a thousand fancy online tools, selling your product or service is still about reaching people. Dialoguing with people. Building a relationship with people.

Reaching the people you’re after and encouraging them to take action requires solid, high-value and original content – and often. The question for many organizations is “can you handle content marketing in-house?” or “how much can I do and how much should I outsource?”

A recent article says that the 73 percent of businesses felt coming up with new, fresh content on a consistent basis was a key challenge. In close running is the challenge of finding enough minutes or hours to get the content created and published, at 75 percent. Tracking and analyzing results was also a frequent issue with content marketing, as was keeping upper level management on board.

One way to answer the question of whether or not to handle content marketing in-house is to look more closely at the hurdles you can leap with some outside help as you map out high-value content creation strategies:

– A professional content creation service can give you the pinpointed strategy and direction you need to keep the original content on-track and ensure it uses effective keywords. The editorial calendar is one of the most useful tools you can implement across your team, and a content marketing professional can efficiently help you map out your keywords and the tools you’ll use for specific audiences.

– You may find you can locate relevant and useful new information online related to your industry, but a content creation agency can turn this into unique, compelling new articles, blogs, whitepapers or social media posts. In this way you can work together as a team to keep the great new content coming.

– A content creation professional can evaluate and guide you as you track and evaluate your results, using tools they’ve subscribed to and learned to use for maximum value. You may decide to run reports in-house related to your content creation efforts, such as website traffic and social media usage, but a content creation professional can tell you what these numbers mean your next steps should be to keep your online relationships as strong as possible.

Content marketing that has a team approach – i.e., your ideas and insights guided by a professional – keeps the task fresh, fun and effective, and keeps the focus on the people you started doing all of this for in the first place (your customers).