B2B Proof Points
Every year, B2B companies invest as much as $5.2 billion into their content marketing programs. 91% of brand marketers agree that expanding content creation capabilities is important to their organization’s long-term success (Skyword). 73% of those marketers will rely more on freelance creators over the next 1-2 years (Skyword). 52% of B2B marketers report their organization has only a small or one-person marketing team (Content Marketing Institute). 50% of B2B marketers outsource at least one content marketing activity (Content Marketing Institute). Content creation is the activity B2B marketers are most likely to outsource, regardless of company size, content marketing budget, or overall content marketing success (Content Marketing Institute). The average annual budget for content marketing is $185,000, and 50% of marketing managers expect to increase that budget next year (Content Marketing Institute)
Here’s how they use it:
- B2B marketers, agencies, and publishers use content marketing to do four important things: build brand awareness, secure leads, nurture leads, and convert leads. It’s all about helping the reader understand the company, make a connection, and choose to buy.
- Here’s an image from the Content Marketing Institute’s 2020 B2B Marketing Benchmarks showing the types of content that are most effective at achieving these goals:
B2B writing is awesome because you have a lot of choice in how you use your writing skills. You can optimize for talking to people or not talking to people, being focused or being scattered, working with a team or working alone, working in one niche or working in many… Options are endless.
What to do with this information?
This is what people are talking about when they say freelancing is more secure. You can proactively create a client mix that has you as busy as you want to be. I recommend 30% Agency/Publication and 70% brands, dividing your brand work among 5-10 total clients. No one client should account for more than 25% of your income.
By your second year, you should get about 50% of your work from recurring clients or referrals. If not, there’s something going on you need to troubleshoot. Once you know who you help, you can also optimize your pay scale according to what you want or need
B2B WRITING FOR BRANDS
WHAT IS IT
When you work for a brand as a B2B writer, you support the company’s marketing team directly. Since the average B2B company spends about 26% of its total marketing budget on content, that means there’s a pool of several thousand dollars they might invest in content projects you could work on. They’re hiring you to fulfill the marketing strategy they’re working on, and they often know just what they want. (Though they’re open to your input if you have experience with achieving the outcomes they want).They might hire for in-house positions (salary), they might hire a stable of freelancers to support the marketing team (per-post or hourly).
You might think brands would only hire in-house, but sometimes depending on their goals, they get a lot more benefit from hiring a team of writers who can contribute. The bar for hiring a writer is different for each company.
FINDING IT
The title of the person who would hire you is something like the following:
- Marketing manager, content marketing manager
- Marketing director
- VP of marketing
- Director of marketing
The best way to connect with these folks is to strategically send LinkedIn invites and compliment them on their most recent blog posts. See if all the posts are from one writer, “the company,” or a variety of writers — that will clue you into how much work they might be interested in from you.
APPLYING AND INTERVIEWING
The process of working with a brand as a freelancer looks something like this:
- They’ll start you with one small paid assignment, like a ghostwritten blog post.
- The quality of your writing is important, but so is your working style.
- Were you responsive by email?
- Did you do what you said you’d do?
- How graciously did you accept edits?
- Is your client’s life easier, less stressful, and a bit more fun?
The process of working with a brand as a full-time salary position is much more traditional:
- Resume and cover letter
- Phone interview (short)
- Test writing assignment, followed by another 1-2 interviews
THE WORK
When hiring freelance talent, brands are likely to want to hire experts for specific kinds of content. For example, if you’re a white paper writer, tell them that! Then they can hire someone else for blog posts, someone else for social media, etc. This isn’t necessarily the case for getting paid to write by agencies, so it’s worth noting.
When hiring in-house talent, it depends on the size of the writing team, but brands are more likely to want a jack-of-all-trades who can help deliver all the content they might need. The exception is large companies where they might have an email team and a copy team, and then they’d be looking for a person who specializes in one thing.
EXAMPLES
From Superpath:
B2B WRITING FOR AGENCIES
WHAT IS IT
B2B marketing agencies also hire writers, but the nature of the work is different because you don’t work for one brand; you work for a marketing company that serves many brands, sometimes as many as 10-15 at a time (even more at large, conglomerate agencies).
When you start to work for a marketing agency, you might be “assigned” to a client. Over time they’ll expect you to learn more about their business, personality, tone, and style, and bring that into the writing.
Agencies can operate under different models: some only hire full-time in-house writers, some only work with freelancers, and some build on a hybrid of both worlds. An agency is most likely to hire freelancers on an hourly model, as they often charge their clients hourly. This isn’t ideal, as it puts a cap on your value (they’ll never cut into their acceptable margin to pay you more).
FINDING IT
The title of the person who would hire you is something like the following:
- Marketing manager, content marketing manager
- Marketing director
- VP of marketing or client services
- Director of marketing
The best way to connect with these folks is also to strategically send LinkedIn invites and compliment them on their marketing agency’s most recent blog posts.
- Look through their customer testimonials to see what kinds of brands they work with and the quality of the kind of work they do.
- Look through their employees and see if they hire full-time in-house writers, or if they have no writers listed (in which case they probably work with freelancers).
APPLYING AND INTERVIEWING
Agencies can have a reputation for being more cutthroat and performance-oriented. Delivering very high quality work on a short timeline is almost always the biggest priority. Appearances are also more important than with other organizations — a professional email signature and email address, nice video background, polished phone presence, all these things are relatively more important for agencies than other entities.
THE WORK
The most important thing to note about getting paid by agencies is that they’ll often expect you to be a “jack of all trades” when it comes to marketing format. A client might need a landing page, then an email newsletter, then a blog post, then social media copy to promote that blog post, as well as a LinkedIn ad. And the writer they’ll want to write it is you!
Some people thrive in this environment, learning about a lot of different things at once, but others might feel frustrated or overwhelmed by having to switch gears so often. This might be why so many writers treat marketing agencies as a training ground to learn all about B2B marketing, figure out what they like, and then move on to freelance and specialize after 1-2 years in agency life.
EXAMPLES
Click here to see Influencer Marketing Hub’s in-depth list of the top B2B marketing agencies. Give this list a look and consider pitching them your services if you want to expand your portfolio of clients, formats, and industries.
You’ll also want to note top content marketing agencies like Skyword, Animalz, and Influence & Co and boutique content studios like Fenwick and Campfire Labs.
B2B WRITING FOR PUBLICATIONS
WHAT IS IT
B2B marketing publishers are a fascinating hybrid of traditional journalism and modern digital marketing. Essentially, these companies create an ecosystem of excellent reporting on the B2B business world, publish 5-10 original pieces each day, then sell sponsorships of content and advertisements to companies that want to reach those audiences.
Here’s a fascinating scenario you might encounter as you start to work with these three different kinds of clients. It’s just fascinating: A brand works with their marketing agency to pay for a paid advertisement on a publisher’s website. You might get the assignment from the brand, the marketing agency, or the publisher to complete that piece of work! Which is why it pays to diversify your client mix for all three kinds of writing.
Publications are most likely to pay on a project or value rate, at least according to my limited experience. Some negotiate each piece of work, and some have an internal rate sheet that’s more of a “take it or leave it.”
FINDING IT
Publications sell writing as their product, so maintaining a high quality team of writers is essential to their business model. They often rely on their writers to recommend other writers to them, which is why building your network as a B2B writer is such an important part of growing in your career. Other writers are not your competition, they are helpers who can pull you into the ranks of good clients.
Publications are less likely to advertise for hiring writers, as they always want to maintain the image that they have access to talent and expertise that’s hard to find — if they advertised they need that, that could damage their brand perception.
APPLYING AND INTERVIEWING
For publications, the writer’s skill at writing and the writer’s subject area expertise is the most important thing. They’re trading on your ability to grasp a topic and deliver what their high level clients want — everything else is secondary. In the application and interview process, your portfolio and your ability to communicate during the process will stand out the most.
THE WORK
Publishers are looking for slightly different things in their B2B writers than brands and marketing agencies. These organizations put out high-performance pieces at a high volume, so they need a writer who can jump right in. That writer will come in, assess the topic and the goal, interview experts, and turn around an extremely high-quality first draft that resonates with an executive audience.
The most important qualification you can possess to work with these kinds of publishers is to be an extremely good writer and extremely easy to work with. That means you can write well and quickly, and you can respond to email and schedule interviews within 24-48 hours.
Connecting with and doing a great job for these publishers is an excellent way to get paid to write, but it can come at the cost of predictability. Because publishers sell content as a product, the timelines are often very short and they can assign you to a project on short notice. For some writers, that’s exhilarating — for others, that is frustrating.
EXAMPLES
Some of the most prominent publishers today include Industry Dive, FierceMarkets, and SmartBrief.
There are also many niche trade publishers that also offer sponsored content opportunities for brands, so when you’re considering different ways to get paid to write, you can typically research your niche to uncover even more opportunities.
CONCLUSION
Use this information to figure out 1) how you want to work or 2) what you want to learn.
See brands, agencies, and publications as tools for you to build the business you want to build. How do you thrive: Under pressure, or in relationship? What do you want to accomplish: Big bylines, or long-term results? There’s an option for you no matter what you want.
Not sure at all? Start with brands. Brands are the most forgiving when it comes to learning the ropes, starting at a lower rate and working your way up, and delivering little wins that build your confidence. It might seem like pitching yourself to a brand is actually the biggest risk, but it’s the biggest upfront risk. Agencies and publications might plug you into more regular work, but it comes at the cost of higher pressure and the assumption you’ve perfected what you’re doing (after all, they’ve built a product/business model off of excellent writing already).