Five ways a writer on retainer can make your business more money
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Who’s the most valuable member of your business’s team? Your accountant who balances the books and keeps you on track? Or your lawyer who advises you on how to keep out of trouble? Maybe you see your staff as your your biggest asset because they are the ones doing the work that brings in the money each month.
The person who writes your documents might not be the obvious choice for this title, but they can have a bigger impact on your business than some other members of the team. Their expert wordsmith skills are what can win you clients, nurture your community and sell you to your customers.
Five ways a writer makes your business more profitable
A professional writer will ending up paying for themselves by making your business more money. Here are five ways they make your business more profitable:
Time is money: You know this better than anyone. By buying a writer's time to do those tasks, you have more time to do your work for your customers and clients
You win more business: A professional writer constructs more effective pitches, bids and tender responses which bring in more work for you.
Their sales copy actually sells: No matter how much you try sometimes it’s hard to sell yourself. Give that job to someone else and get a better response rate.
They can help nurture your community: When you are busy doing your work, it is hard to have the headspace to reach out to your community to lay the foundations for future work through eDMs, social media and discussion papers.
A website that people can follow: Your writer can pull together all your advertising materials - from your website to your printed brochures. Better written copy on these documents converts more leads into sales.
Why have a writer on retainer?
You have other key members of your team on retainer so you can call on them when the need arises, why not a writer? Paying them a monthly fee to set aside time to work just for you means you can bring them in when the going gets tough. Say you have a big tender response you need to get done by a strict deadline. You can call your writer in so that you don’t have to drop everything to do it. Or you can just set them on the regular content marketing tasks that you know you need to be doing but get lost in the daily grind.
How do retainers for writers work?
Generally, retainers work by you paying the writer up front for the month with the expectation that you will get a certain amount of work from them. Contracting them this way means that you get a discount on their hourly rate and a guaranteed relationship with them. They get to know you and your business and can jump straight into tasks because they aren't learning about you from scratch with each new job.
One way to think of the relationship is as a subscription where you pay per month to access certain services. You’ll get either a certain set of deliverables per month OR a certain number of dedicated hours.
Choosing a certain set of deliverables works well if you have a set of regular tasks you want to outsource like blog posts, eDMs and newsletters.
Choosing a number of dedicated hours is good if you have a variety of tasks that might change from month to month like bids, reports, papers or tender responses. However, if you don’t use your allocated hours each month, they don’t roll over to the next one.
Contact Jen for more information about how a retainer can work for your business.