Some people in senior management roles aren’t aware that services exist to help with document-generation work. This is especially true in the semiconductor sector, where a large percentage of executives have a technical background. They simply aren’t all that familiar with resources people trained in marketing take for granted.
As a way to address this unfamiliarity, here is a list of five reasons you might choose to outsource to a writer with engineering experience.
1. ENTHUSIASM
You want your documents written by somebody who is jazzed about your products. While in-house people can often do the work, the fact is, payroll employees can get burned out. After a year or more of working with the same part and the same data sheet, the last thing some of these people want is another round of being buried in the details.
The independent writer with the background to understand your data sheet is a techie, and techies think new parts are fun and interesting. Since the details are new to the writer, your document will capture some of that enthusiasm in the language.
2. STAFF IS SWAMPED
You may have an understandable bias toward in-house resources, but we all know the reality of the business world. We are expected to do more with less, and that leads to overworked employees.
Even if the resources are willing to put in the extra hours, everyone has a maximum capacity Employees become jaded when work-life balance swings too far in the direction of work, and that can cause quality of work to drop.
Timelines also play a major role. If the team is expected to produce documents for three products simultaneously, they will automatically rank the work by priority they create if one is not given to them. The executives may weight each product equally, it’s inevitable that deadlines will slip somewhere.
An external writer with engineering experience can ramp up quickly to help carry some of the workload, and that might be just enough to allow you to hit your deadline.
3. ENGINEERS SHOULD BE DOING ENGINEERING
Where are your engineers most effective–writing data sheets or solving problems? You pay engineers to design, maintain, and debug. Many executives view taking engineers away from these tasks to get data sheets generated as a necessary evil they can’t get around.
How much faster could problems be solved if your engineers didn’t have to work on documents for hours, days, or even weeks at a time? An outside writer with engineering experience can focus on the documents, allowing your engineers to step into the background. Your staff simply provides the data and initial instructions, as well as answering an occasional question. This allows them to get back to the work you want them doing.
4. PAY AS YOU GO
Sometimes work comes in bunches. This month, your staff is overworked and faces deadlines on multiple important projects. They want you to hire another body to help with all the work, but you know this kind of thing comes and goes. Why hire an additional person if the workload to justify the hire is only in play sometimes?
Outsourcing some of the workload is the ideal solution to this problem. A freelancer works on your projects when you have too much work for the existing staff. When the workload recedes and you don’t need the extra set of hands, you don’t pay for them. The writer goes off to work on another client’s projects until the next time you need help.
This is where forming a business relationship with a writer can be valuable. It puts your company high on the writer’s priority list. There is also no need to bring the writer up to speed on how your company operates.
5. DIFFICULTY GETTING THE RIGHT LANGUAGE FROM A GENERAL COPYWRITER
There are a lot of great writers available for hire, so why choose a writer specifically with engineering experience? Why not just go with the lowest bidder?
Quite simply, engineers know how to talk engineering. If you are producing business-to-business documents for technical customers, then you don’t want to spend excessive time training the writer how to use the industry language.
Writing about an analog-to-digital converter is not like writing about a vacation resort. The nuances are different. They are so different, in fact, that some general copywriters will routinely no-bid projects involving technical products.
With a writer coming from an engineering background, that foundation of understanding is already there. Sure, you may have to explain the details of your specific product, but that aspect should go much faster than it would with a general copywriter.