3 Efficient Ways for Agencies To Use Content

content workflow management system

As an agency owner, you already know that inefficient processes can cause serious frustration for your clients. In the worst cases, inefficiencies might even cost you the relationship.

Agencies have many moving parts — from media buying, prospecting, and account planning, to hiring, onboarding, and payroll — which makes it easy to trip over your own feet and fall into inefficient habits and processes.

To be profitable, a trusted social media marketing agency must tie all of its moving parts together and create a culture of organizational efficiency.

A culture of efficiency begins with an agency’s content. As an agency owner, you can efficiently use your content to drive conversions and net you a better return for your time, money, and effort. Below, I’ll show you three ways to use content efficiently to maximize your agency’s ROI.

Before you start creating content, you should draft a strategic roadmap.

After all, just because you’ve created a piece of content doesn’t mean it will make your agency any money. Instead, you’ve got to focus on narrowing down content ideas that will net you a high return on your effort, and create content around those money-making topics.

Of course, this is easier said than done.

Luckily, data aggregation tools are available to pinpoint profitable topics and structure your content in a way that speaks to your target audience. These tools will not only identify the keywords that your audience is searching for but will also help structure the content so that it’s more likely to be shared among your core demographic.

Your first step is to use a keyword research tool. When it comes to keyword research, we recommend using Ahrefs. With their 7-day free trial, you can find out how many people are searching for each content topic (or “keyword”) per month, how valuable this traffic is to your site, and how many clicks each search result generates for that keyword.

Finding the right keywords is only half the battle. To complete your roadmap, you need to structure your content to maximize its chances of ranking. For this, we highly recommend using the Content Editor feature in SurferSEO. This tool aggregates data from websites currently ranking for these keywords to determine what outline search engines like best on any given topic.

If you run a marketing agency, you shouldn’t focus solely on content creation — point-blank. There are too many high-level tasks and strategic priorities to focus on as an executive or senior team member. Either using AI content writing tools or outsourcing content creation to specialized in-house writers is an excellent option for those who have the time to train, onboard, and manage them.

Few agency owners have the resources to bring on a large team of in-house writers who specialize in high-value content creation.

Fortunately, there’s an easy solution.

Instead of using in-house writers, use an outsourced writing service. A content writing service is by far the most efficient way to create original content at scale.

By leveraging a content writing agency’s services, you can focus on the highest priorities of your business without having to worry about creating quality content to represent your brand.

Make sure to increase your capacity by researching how your competitors utilize content writing services, and creative web design and also click here to learn more strategies to get ahead of them.

Instead, the outsourced content writers will take care of that for you. For this, we recommend going with WordAgents, a content writing agency with 100% American writers. You can take this a step further by partnering with influencers and ask them to create content for you too. However, for that you need to find genuine influencers by leveraging an influencer audit tool. These influencers can then create stellar engaging content for your blog.

The main benefit of outsourcing content creation is that it frees up precious time in your schedule to focus on higher-priority tasks that will drive your bottom-line growth. By choosing the agency route instead of hiring in-house creatives, you save on employment insurance, benefit costs, and other employee-related expenses. Discover the most relevant agencies for your business and your requirements.

The writers you hire should create content that’s engaging, SEO optimized using SEO software, and checked for plagiarism.  You can head over to this complete guide about plagiarism for more information. They should also have experience writing 2,000+ word posts as they rank the highest.

For some examples of quality content, check this law firm SEO guide. It is a long-form post that is optimized for both SEO and engagement. It is also written to attract and convert a specific audience, law firms.

If you follow social media mogul Gary Vaynerchuk, you probably know his modus operandi is to pump out content every day, and lots of it. But, unless you have teams of creatives working seven days a week, Gary’s mantra won’t be efficient, cost-effective, or sustainable.

Even the most ambitious among us cannot create hundreds of pieces of original content from scratch every day.

There is a solution.

You can repurpose existing content to fit other formats. You can turn one larger piece of content into five, ten, maybe fifteen pieces of sub-content derived from the original. Using this formula can save you countless hours on a content marketing campaign and can result in a massive boom in content output.

Facebook and LinkedIn Groups are great sources of inspiration for trending and useful content ideas. Tools like LinkedHelper allow the automatic scraping of data from your favorite LinkedIn Groups. It even helps to automate interactions that will promote your account.

Similarly, you can also use Scraping API to scrape data from Facebook for trending content ideas.

For example, let’s say that you create a long, well-researched, and well-thought-out LinkedIn article about boosting your credit score. If this is an exceptionally long LinkedIn post — say, about 3,000 words — there’s plenty that you can do to repurpose the article for other platforms.

You can record yourself using a webcam recorder, reading segments of the post and attaching running captions at the bottom. Suddenly, a single 3000-word article can transform into ten single-minute creative videos that can be shared gradually throughout a couple of weeks. If you have shorter content, you can just convert the whole text into a video using AI tools

Next, you can turn the LinkedIn post into a series of 20, 30, or 40 tweets on your personal or corporate Twitter account and a series of Facebook posts.

After exhausting all the options above, you can take your content repurposing a step further by hosting a podcast episode based on the topic discussed in your original LinkedIn post.

Or, reach out to other podcast hosts within your niche to touch on the ideas covered in your original post. Frankly, the only limitations on how far you can repurpose your podcast content are the number of social platforms you use and your creativity.

The downside is that it takes a lot of organizational cohesion and good management to pull off a large-scale content repurposing operation (especially when it comes to starting a podcast).

For a project of this scale, you can use tools like Nifty to streamline the repurposing process and ensure that the project is well-managed from end to end.

Successful agency owners don’t let themselves get preoccupied with manually churning out content and hoping it takes off organically. For an agency to be successful, content campaigns must be thoroughly researched, scaled, and repurposed.

To do this, agency owners have to use the right tools to find high-volume, low-difficulty keywords that their target audience is seeking. Then, data aggregators and SEO tools can help take the guesswork out of article structuring and outlining.

Although in-house writers are great, they’re not as cost-effective as outsourcing to an agency.

Hiring a content writing agency allows you to focus on strategic-level tasks. At the same time, a team of dedicated writers works on carrying out your content creation responsibilities at a fraction of the price of an in-house employee.

Last, it’s crucial that you exhaust every piece of content. For every piece of content you produce, you should repurpose it for several other mediums and formats — for example, you can turn a LinkedIn essay into an infographic for Facebook, a slideshow for an  Instagram story series (don’t forget to add catchy captions with fun emojis to grab attention), and a couple of blog posts for your agency’s website.

By following these three tips, your agency can maximize its return on investment and drive bottom-line growth without putting all of its internal resources into content creation.