Why hire a freelance writer? The immediate reason is to complete a task. A marketing department needs a white paper or a solution brief or a series of blog articles, and no one internally is available. So they look outside for someone who can get it done.

That answers the question, but only so far. Why does a company need that content in the first place? One big goal is to increase sales, or a suitable proxy, such as sales leads. For some kinds of content, that link is more obvious than for others. Take white papers. No matter how persuasive your sales engineers, if they don’t have a factual yet persuasive document to leave behind with—or email to—prospects, they will have a harder time closing deals.

But how do you actually determine the value of marketing collateral? Here’s a lengthly article from the Content Marketing Institute addressing that question in terms of return on investment (ROI). These experts recommend several ways to get started, including 1) measuring results at the top of the sales funnel, 2) experimenting at the bottom of the funnel; 3) identifying and measuring pain points in the conversion process; and 4) mapping each piece of content to specific goals.

More Leads, Successful Exits

As per my comments above on white papers, I like #4. On this page, I’ve even linked specific goals to various types of content. Of course, that again begs the question of metrics. It can be tricky. I once led content marketing at a SaaS engineering firm. One year we had a 76 percent increase in leads. Did that result from copy that I wrote? If so, which copy? How much did it result from feature and service enhancements?

Here’s one thing I have noticed as a freelance writer: A lot of my clients have been acquired. To be specific, three out of every five, or 61 percent of them over the past six years. That’s not happening because I wrote for them, to be sure, but the correlation is there all the same. The best explanation is that once companies—especially startups—achieve a certain velocity, their communication needs rise. At that point they need help in conveying their value to customers and suitors alike.