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Your content writer, should you choose to obtain one, provides the written material for your shop’s digital marketing efforts. Their work will appear on your website, your social media, your email, your blogs, your service descriptions…everything, really. If it requires verbiage, your writer will knock it out.
Everything your writer does is intended to drive traffic (no pun intended) to your shop and hopefully help convert that traffic into paying customers.
Oh Dieselmatic, you might be saying, I can do all that myself.
To paraphrase Dr. Ian Malcom, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Let’s look into why hiring a professional can make all the difference in your marketing.
WHY SHOULD I HIRE A WRITER?
Let’s get one thing out of the way—just about everyone can write to an extent, but comparatively few can write well. A professional writer with some experience under their belt will be able to boost your shop’s online visibility fairly quickly.
Here’s just a few of the tasks your writer might handle:
- Writing in your shop’s tone of voice and addressing your preferred customers in the way they’d like—and if you don’t have a “shop tone” yet, a writer can build one for you!
- Build out articles, blog posts, papers, and websites that your target customers will find interesting. Your writer isn’t just typing “HIRE US!!!!” over and over again; they’re helping your shop establish itself as an authority in the diesel repair field. In short, they’re helping you show off your knowledge.
- Creating SEO-optimized content to make sure the right kind of traffic lands on your page(s).
And those are just the top three—a solid writer can do all kinds of good work for you.
The biggest draw—the one no one thinks about until they’re doing the writing themselves—is that your writer, well, handles the writing. Words don’t just appear out of the void. It’s time-consuming work. Could you do it? Sure, give it a shot. But those are hours you could be spending on the business (or wrenching).
SHOULD I HIRE A PERSON OR GO FOR A CONTRACTOR?
All kinds of businesses grapple with this question. Bringing a person on staff has its advantages:
- They’re always available (er, at least during work hours).
- They are working only for you.
- They’ll develop an innate knowledge of your shop, your policies, and your ideal customers.
They’ll also require PTO, health insurance, payroll taxes…you know. All the other stuff associated with bringing on a full- or part-time staffer.
A freelance writer “frees” you from those obligations (sorry, I couldn’t resist). One of the biggest perks of hiring a freelancer is that you can contract with them as necessary; maybe they handle a big project (say, your website) one month, followed by blogs another month.
Some other perks:
- A freelancer can be more cost-effective, since you’re paying for work as necessary rather than a full-time employee.
- Along those lines, you may be able to get an extremely experienced and talented writer on a contract basis—a writer who would be out of reach or not interested in a full-time position.
A freelancer, however, is like a repair shop—they’re running a business. They have other clients. They will not be able to drop everything and jump on a project for you (unless you’ve got a favorable contract with them—contracts can change everything!).
As a side note, you’ll probably need to provide a basic diesel education to anyone you bring on, whether they’re full-time or a contractor. A good writer can learn to write about pretty much anything, but it’ll be on you to set aside some time to train them.
HOW MUCH SHOULD I PAY THIS WRITER?
Good writing is like good repair work—it’s not cheap. Payscale.com says the average employed content writer earns about $50,949 per year. A freelancer may charge hourly or by project, or come to a monthly retainer agreement with you that could be more or less—it will all depend on your needs.
CAN I GET AN AI TO DO IT?
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about the AI-powered tools taking the world by storm. You’ve also probably heard about autonomous trucks. Those vehicles are still something of a work in progress. So are AI writing bots.
A lot of these bots are quite talented. Are they ready to take over from established writers yet…well, honestly, not really. Generally speaking, while these chat programs can draw from a lot of knowledge, they don’t really know how to parse it yet—or deliver it in a way that your ideal customers will appreciate.
Stick to humans.
For now.
(It hurt to write that.)
OR, Y’KNOW, HIRE DIESELMATIC
If you’ve been following our “Components of Diesel Digital Marketing” series (which I just finally titled right now!), then you’re well aware of how expensive a proposition hiring a marketing team can be. Even if you score a bunch of awesome contractors, it’s still going to cost a pretty penny…and no matter who you hire, you’re probably going to have to educate them in The Ways of the Diesel.
Unless you go with Dieselmatic.
We only handle commercial diesel repair shops—and we’ve got an excellent grasp on the commercial repair world. When you work with us, there’s no need to teach us the difference between a spark and a glow plug, or remind us that we need to keep up with changing laws around DPFs. What’s more, you get a complete team to handle all your digital marketing needs (like SEO, social, Google Business, writing, and more) for less than you’d pay an experienced full-time writer.
How are your digital marketing efforts going? Want some help scoring more traffic for your shop? Drop us a line—we’d love to talk to you.
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