Outsourced content can free you up, but if you lose brand voice, clarity or security, it backfires. Avoid content farms at all costs.
There’s a temptation to scale a business website’s content quickly by handing it off to an outside agency. There are some interesting services around, providing a lot more pages quickly and at a reasonable cost. But having agencies crank out content at scale can quietly open a Pandora’s box of pitfalls. Whatever they say, it’s likely they’ll just be pointing Ai content generation tools at our subject area and throwing a stream of muddled stuff back at us.
So that’s the most obvious danger: quality control, or the lack of it. General ‘content creation’ agencies are unlikely to grasp our brand voice, values, or tone as deeply as anyone in-house or an established PR agency who understands us. The result will be bland, off‑brand content that ticks increasingly outdated SEO boxes but little more. Will it help us be found more? Possibly. Will the visitors be impressed when they get there? No.
Then there’s the risk of ‘content chaos’. When multiple teams produce content without central oversight, we can end up with inconsistent messaging and conflicting claims. A recent survey found that the majority of people in marketing have seen reputational hits or customer trust issues when there’s been uncontrolled content creation.
Communication barriers make things worse. These agencies are often offshore (even if their representatives aren’t) and can be unreliable. They can vanish or reprioritise us if more lucrative clients appear. Nobody wants to risk being sent back to the start. Also, sharing customer insights, proprietary data or research with an external provider may be less of a possibility if we can’t put enforceable confidentiality terms in place.
Many of these risks echo from bitter experience. On one marketing forum I read the warning that outsourced content often “lacks brand empathy” — there’s none of the human-centered storytelling we’re all aiming for. Another contributor said that off-the-shelf agency copy seemed to “work for Google, not for our product page”. These real-world anecdotes underline a red flag: outsourced content may “hit the metrics but miss the connection”.
In the end, the real danger isn’t outsourcing itself, it’s treating agency-produced content as the finished product. We cannot leave them to it, so if we use external writers we need to be their sternest critics. If they already know our company or understand our area of technology, that management effort will be reduced significantly.