As the CEO or marketing leader at a B2B business, you know that content marketing is an essential component of your growth strategy.
COVID fundamentally reshaped the marketplace, driving a dramatic shift in B2B buyer behavior away from traditional processes and toward an end-to-end digital journey.
To generate awareness, engagement, and sales in this new, digital-first world, requires excelling at content marketing.
But where is all that content going to come from?
Many companies are struggling to hire the people they need for day-to-day operations, let alone finding “spare” time to produce content.
One solution is to hire a ghostwriter to do the heavy lifting. They generate relevant material for your in-house team to edit, polish, and publish.
This approach creates heartburn for leaders who worry that the content won’t sound authentic or won’t contain the depth of information needed to engage and delight their target audience.
I’m going to show you eight reasons why that isn’t the case.
In fact, I’ll argue the opposite. Ghostwriters can produce better, more effective content than your in-house team.
Here are the eight reasons why ghostwriters succeed:
1. Personal motivation
2. Financial incentive
3. Objectivity
4. Building and tapping into networks
5. Asking great questions
6. Sharing whatever they discover
7. Practicing and honing their skills
8. Refusing to settle
What makes a ghostwriter put extra effort into producing content for you?
Like anyone else, they want to prove that they’re good at what they do. This increases the odds of you hiring them again and telling your network to hire them as well.
They’re entrepreneurs, running a content production business.
Whatever motivated them to embark on the journey of self-employment now motivates them to succeed at writing for you.
If this ceases to be true, they’ll switch off their keyboard and find something more rewarding to do.
What motivates a member of your team to write great content?
Sometimes you get lucky. You discover a team member who is both great at the job you hired them to do and loves to write. Boom! Winner!
Unfortunately, those people are few and far between.
For the rest, it’s not what they signed up for. At best, they want to score some bonus points on their next performance review. At worst, they want to check the box and move on.
No need for a long explanation here. Ghostwriters sell what they write. If what they write is rubbish, it won’t sell.
If what they write is excellent, they can raise their rates and earn referral business from satisfied clients.
Are you offering your in-house writers a bonus to produce the best possible content?
Is that true even when you’re “borrowing” time from subject matter experts and other contributors whose day job is something other than writing?
Financial incentives will help you get better work from either source, but it’s a primary driver for your ghostwriter to do their best work for you.
We all have biases. About almost everything.
Even a ghostwriter will have an opinion about whatever it is that your company does, but I’ll wager they’re a lot less biased than your technical expert who’s been in the business for years.
A ghostwriter can set aside their biases more easily and report objectively on the topic at hand.
The content you publish for the early stages of the buyer’s journey—where a prospect is learning about their challenge and exploring potential solutions—is most effective when it’s unbiased and overtly helpful.
It’s easier for a ghostwriter to produce this content than someone in-house who fervently believes in your solution and has a hard time even saying your competitor’s name without spitting.
If you want a ghostwriter to spin a particular narrative, they can still make that happen. Just be aware that their greatest value lies in producing material with more facts and less opinion.
Where do ghostwriters find their information?
Well, Google, obviously, like anyone else.
Except that Google doesn’t tell the whole story. It misses the nuance. It doesn’t tell you the “what you really need to understand here is” stuff.
That comes from humans who are in the know.
Ghostwriters can tap into that sort of knowledge because they’re great at building and maintaining a network.
This requires more than just amassing followers and connections on LinkedIn. It needs to be an active network—one they interact with regularly—made up of people who are themselves very well connected.
Only then can a writer plug themselves into multiple, distinct sources, each with valuable insider information to share.
In-house writers seldom develop and nurture the same breadth and depth of network. And if they do, they aren’t incentivized to spend as much time keeping it alive.
Some in-house experts are afraid to ask questions of their network in case it makes them seem, well, less like an expert.
Ignorance is bliss. Especially when you’re tasked with writing on a topic about which you are ignorant.
Many ghostwriters have a background in journalism. This equips them with a nose for the story and great investigative and question-asking skills.
Experts will often reveal way more to a non-expert than they will to a fellow practitioner.
If you don’t know, ask. There’s no such thing as a dumb question when you’re an outsider trying to learn. Experts will often reveal way more to a non-expert than they will to a fellow practitioner.
In-house writers often start with a pre-conceived idea of what the content should say. They only ask questions to fill in blanks or reconfirm what they thought they already knew. This leads to confirmation bias and narrows the scope of the piece before it has even been written.
Ghostwriters start with a blank sheet of paper and perhaps a hypothesis. They ask questions and begin sketching out a story. They ask more questions, trying to color in the picture. They ask contradictory questions to see if the hypothesis holds water.
They challenge established wisdom because they can do so without looking stupid.
The more relevant and helpful your content, the greater the value it brings to your reader or viewer.
Ghostwriters know this. They want to uncover, explore, and explain as much information as possible to make their piece comprehensive.
That’s the sort of content that ranks well on Google, grabs and holds a prospect’s attention, and performs well for their client.
In-house experts hate telling you everything they know.
If you knew what they know, they’d be less of an expert. In some companies, knowledge is still power. And power is something to hold onto, not share.
This affects what in-house experts write. They dumb things down, leave out valuable details, and turn insights into generalities to “save the good stuff” for proprietary use or sharing with VIP customers.
The resulting content is less engaging and less effective than what a ghostwriter can produce by asking great questions, exploring the full extent of a subject, and putting forth a piece that captures everything they have learned in a useful, digestible way.
How much time do your in-house writers spend writing?
How much time should they spend practicing, to become better writers?
I’m sure the answer to both questions is “not a lot”.
Conversely, ghostwriters write for a living. They spend a lot of time writing and, if they’re smart, a fair amount of time trying to become a better writer.
Writers practice by submitting entries to competitions, messing around with writing challenges that are outside their normal genre, and keeping up non-work writing habits like journaling, personal blogging, and participating in writer’s groups.
They also read. A lot.
Great writers like Stephen King spend more time reading than writing. It fuels their creativity, broadens their thinking, and arms them with information to bring into the work they create.
The same holds true for non-fiction ghostwriters. They are better, faster, more effective readers than most of your employees. This lets them ingest, digest, and synthesize information quickly and effectively, fueling the content they produce.
Great chefs would rather throw a good plate of food in the trash than serve it to a discerning patron because good isn’t good enough. It must be great.
Ghostwriters worth their salt (pardon the pun) operate similarly. They won’t let a piece of work leave their desktop until it passes their high bar for acceptability.
In-house writers are seldom devoted to the craft.
They’re less rigorous about grammar, sentence construction, pacing, or word choices.
They’re satisfied with sending a decently written piece that covers the salient points.
A ghostwriter wants to hear that every piece they submit is really well written, exceeds the client’s expectations, and is something that could not have been produced in-house.
They refuse to settle for something that’s just okay or good.
Professional writers want their writing to stand on its own merit. They want it to stand out among pieces written by less accomplished authors. They never want to hear that it’s “good enough” or “could have been better.”
If you work with a ghostwriter who is happy with any of those things, fire them immediately and find yourself one that cares about their craft. It might cost you more, but the content they produce will be incomparably more polished and effective.
Ghostwriters can produce more effective content than team members who are part-time contributors because:
Don’t be afraid to hire a ghostwriter to reduce the content production burden on your team. Pay them to produce high-quality copy and let your team fine-tune, approve, and publish the work.
Footnote: Unless you have a full-time editor on staff, be sure to produce and share comprehensive brand guidelines so that third party contributors understand the voice, tone, and style in which to produce your content.
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