As a content agency, you probably are familiar with the difficulties of producing a consistent fresh stream of content for your marketing campaigns. You have to manage both clients and content creators in an effective manner to generate high-quality content that drives sales and profits for your clients. Here are some tips for streamlining the content creation process.
Stages of the Content Creation Process
The content creation process must pass through four stages. First, the client and the agency must develop the content marketing campaign. Next, the agency must engage with content creators to produce the content of the campaign. Then, the agency must approve all the content produced. Finally, the client must be happy with all the content that is produced and deploy it in a marketing campaign.
Clients have all the content knowledge. They have to share this knowledge with their agency and content creators for an effective campaign. Clients can slow up the process by being too finicky and picky about the content.
Content creators know how to produce effective content. They can educate and inform the audience. They can also produce highly persuasive content that sells or motivate the audience. The best content creators know how to forge an emotional and personal bond between the audience and the client. Content creators need a working knowledge of the client and his brand to do this effectively. If content creators don't get good instructions, they may have make guesses and judgment calls that move in the wrong direction.
Agencies know how to develop an effective strategy to promote the client. They have work with the client to develop a brand and the right strategy to promote it. They also have to work with content creators to make sure that the content is meets the requirements of the marketing campaign.
Agencies must be able to optimize the stages of this process to develop a successful campaign. The goal is to avoid producing content that must go through many revisions or even end up rejected. If the same content must cycle back and forth between clients, agencies and creators, the results is wasted time and money.
Effective Communications Between Clients and Agencies
Content agencies need to effectively manage their relationships with clients. Here are some tips for staying focused:
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Use targeted questionnaires to get information. Questionnaires allow your clients to think carefully about their responses. A phone interview may not allow the same reflection. Use phone interviews clarify responses to the questionnaires.
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Don't let clients dump too much information on you. Your clients may have a lot of info about their products and services that are not relevant to the campaign that they want to give you in lieu of reflecting on questions. This is not very productive. You need to get your clients to reflect on what sets them apart. You can help them through this process, but you can't do it for them.
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Set expectations clearly. Make sure clients understand that the goal is get content that attracts traffic and drives sales for the least investment. Being a perfectionist only adds to expenses without necessarily producing any gains in profit.
Effective Communications Between Agencies and Creators
In general, when working with creators, more is more. The more detailed the instructions for the assignment are, the more likely it is that the creator can hit the target on the first try. You don't want to leave the creator guessing about what is required and have to field a lot questions or ask for revisions.
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For large projects, set up clear general instructions. Give your creators all the information they need in a clear format. You can create text instructions, but making screen casts where you go over your expectations in a brief presentation also helps writers.
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Give your creators access to all the information from the clients. Once you define the topics for the content, you could interview experts from your client to give creators the best information on the topic. Creators will be able to organize and articulate this information in the best way.
As an agency, you not only have to design the strategy to promote your clients, but you have to effectively manage the content creation process. By bringing clients and creators together in an efficient manner, you can get consistent high-quality content for your marketing campaigns.
