Business Idea: Content Marketing as a Service – Part 2

Continuing with yesterday’s business idea on Content Marketing as a Service, I wanted to flesh out the concept a bit more as the post generated a number of good comments and tweets. As the idea isn’t hard technically, the real challenge is customer acquisition and execution. Let’s look at some pros and cons of the potential business model:

Pros

• Broad, growing market need to deliver fresh content for inbound marketing
• Readily available market of journalists and marketers that can produce high quality work as freelancers (potential for stay-at-home moms and dads as well to be part of the content contributors)
• Economies of scale, expertise, and proprietary technology will enable delivery of the service significantly cheaper and more effectively compared to doing it in-house (think about the SecureWorks model)
• Marketing departments have budgets with discretionary spend
• Proliferation of online marketing tools is overwhelming for many marketers

Cons

• Difficult to convince marketers and executives that the content marketing as a service startup will be able to speak intelligently about a specific business and industry due to potential jargon and lack of domain expertise
• No barriers to entry
• Potential 3-6 month time period required to see value (visitors will come right away but marketing qualified leads could take time)
• Trust issue with giving access to WordPress account, Twitter account, Facebook Page, etc for the outsourced service provider to execute the work

Marketers and business executives need this type of service. I expect to see it on the market within 12-24 months, if not sooner.
What else? What are some other pros and cons of the content marketing as a service idea?