As a marketing firm today, you already know all the powerful benefits custom content offers your clients. It is undeniable. Great content will help your clients:
So what's in it for YOUR marketing firm? By creating great content for your clients on a regular basis, you stand to get:
Seth Godin recently claimed: "Content marketing is the ONLY marketing left". While this may seem like a stretch, most studies do actually show that content marketing is, and will continue to be the dominant form of marketing. You need to make sure your agency has the pieces in place to take advantage of these trends.
A recent study by the Custom Content Council found that:
Make no mistake... each day, more and more companies are realizing that, in order to compete and win in today's environment, they need to produce lots of great, compelling content. These companies are quickly shifting more of their marketing budgets away from traditional marketing methods, towards content. Who will capture all this budget? Shouldn't it be you? An incredible opportunity has opened up for savvy marketing firms willing to become specialists in custom content development.
For all these reasons covered on the previous page and more, you know you SHOULD be producing lots of great content for your clients - so why aren't you? If you're like most marketing firms today, you probably have a love/hate relationship with content. You know that content is the key to online success for your clients, but the thought of actually managing content projects makes you break out in a cold sweat. That's because content projects can be notoriously complicated, time consuming, and an overall headache to manage... let alone make a profit from.
Because most marketing agencies lack three very important things:
The good news is, there IS a solution to your content dilemma. There's a way you can offer high quality content services to your clients, without all the headache, time commitment and expense that was previously required. In fact, in a relatively short time period, your content service could become the simplest, most profitable part of your business. All you need is the right system... a system that has the right process and talent built right into it.... but before we talk about this ideal system, let's first take a look at the current options you have for creating custom content for your clients, and why they don't work.
Let's dig into the reason...
Let's assume you understand your clients NEED content, and you see the writing on the wall about content marketing being the future. You're 100% committed to making your firm a first class content provider. So now what? You quickly realize that, in order to scale your content business, you'll need the right tools to make the process efficient and organized. You decide to jot down the various actions required for each client project, along with the tool/program you'll use to get it done:
Right about now, after identifying the 7th separate tool you'll need, your initial excitement is replaced with a sinking feeling. There are way too many tools to manage. You have neither the staff nor the time to manage or game plan all these different steps and nor learn the intricacies of the different platforms . And you still haven't even figured important content questions like:
You quickly realize this will NOT work. What you need is one comprehensive, yet simple system that combines ALL the necessary tools and writers you need to manage your clients' content projects from start to finish.
Let's imagine what this ultimate content platform might look like.
Over 3,500 Agency Users use Zerys to Build a Profitable Content Creation Agency
If you wanted to build the ideal content platform, the first step would be to identify a simple, yet flexible process. The ideal system would walk you through the process in a simple, step by-step format, and provide all the tools and people you need to get quality, predictable results every time.
Here are the required steps for any successful content project you may manage on behalf of a client:
Let's take a closer look at each of these steps in the process. and see how the ideal system would help you accomplish each one.
Once you've identified the general topics you'll be writing for your client, the next step in the process is to develop your list of actual page titles you'll be posting or assigning to the writer(s). For article or blogs, this would be the headline for the post. For whitepapers. e-books, or other forms of content, this would be the title of the document. While creating interesting, engaging titles can take time, it's definitely time well spent. Great titles are crucial for 3 important reasons:
The Ideal System would... make it easy to create interesting, engaging titles. It would allow you to manually create titles based on your general page topics, and would also have a title suggestion tool which would allow you to see what titles other sites on the web are creating - to give you ideas for titles you may not have thought of yourself.
After posting or assigning your titles to the writers, the next step is to review the content (if required) and forward to your client for their review and approval. The amount of time required for editing will be directly related to the quality of writing you're getting from your writers. As with anything else, the more you pay your writers, the better quality you'll get. The better quality the writing, the less editing time will be required. Once you've built a team of writers you know and trust, you may feel comfortable skipping the editorial review process altogether, and forwarding content directly to your clients. If you want to grow and scale your content development capability, this editorial process is one main reason you'll need an extremely efficient and streamlined system that makes it easy for multiple people to quickly review each page and either approve, request revisions, or reject each page of content.
The Ideal System would... streamline the content review and revision process. It would give you (the agency) the option to either have completed content sent to you for review, or directly to your client, or both. When the writers complete their work, the system would notify you and let you review the content. If it requires revisions, your editor could fix small issues, or the editor could choose to send it back to the writer to fix major issues.
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Content is no different than any other product or service you purchase. You get what you pay for. Your content packages should take this into account by offering your clients a few simple choices when it comes to quality VS price. The best way to do this is to offer three "Service Levels" where each level would cost the client more, but would provide them with additional benefits, the most important of which, is a higher-rated writer.
Here's an example of this type of content package offering. You could simplify the selections above by removing any of the columns above you don't feel are necessary.
| Service Level | Writer Rating | Initial Consultation | Research & Time Invested | Target Keywords / Page | Revision Requests / Page | Phone Support |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic |  |
30 mins | Standard | 1 Primary | 1 | 20 mins |
| Professional | |
1 hour | High | 1 Primary 1 Secondary |
2 rounds | 1 hour |
| Premium | |
Unlimited | Epic | 1 Primary 2 Secondary |
Unlimited | Unlimited |
You'll need to have an efficient way of keeping everyone on your team up-to-date on the status of the project, and what needs to be done next, by whom. If you're managing one content project, you might be able to get away with typing emails by hand. If you plan on growing your business, however, you'll need something completely automated that sends the right email template to the right person at the right time to keep the project moving forward at all times.
The Ideal System would... include a sophisticated email notification engine that would immediately notify your team, your clients, and your writers when their action is required for each client project. If the person does not take the required action, the system would continue sending email reminders until that person does take the required action. The system would allow you to have these emails sent directly from an email/domain of your choice.This would save you countless hours of time and would allow your content business to take on an unlimited number of clients in the future.
Use our award-winning, Zerys Content Success Platform to
create custom blogs, white papers, ebooks, and more!
Your clients NEED great content to succeed. If they don't understand this now, they will in a year or two when their competition starts passing them by. You have the ability to provide your clients with the custom content they need to compete and succeed in today's search and social media dominated environment.
With the right system, a proven process, and a pool of talented writers and editors at your fingertips, you can develop your firm into a first-class content agency, and develop a profitable source of residual revenue for your business. The opportunity is waiting. The time to act is now!
