Why scale my content marketing agency?
A popular quote captures the importance of scaling up your content marketing agency in one simple phrase: “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.”
In business, this couldn’t hold more true. If you stop trying to acquire more content marketing clients and improve your existing relationships, you’ll slowly find yourself losing customers with your revenues going downhill.
The only way to survive in today’s competitive business environment is to establish a consistent growth mindset, and do everything you can to grow your business day in and day out.
What challenges are involved in scaling an agency?
Scaling a content marketing agency is not easy, and there are often a wide variety of challenges owners and managers face leading their company towards success.
Let’s discuss common agency challenges such as low profits, customer churn, hiring freelancers, and managing workflows effectively.
Low profit
When you begin scaling your content marketing agency, your business will often have a significant amount of overhead, additional staffing costs, and expenses directly related to investments in your growth.
Since growing your revenues takes time, this may lead your agency to experience a low-profit cycle where your expenses are greatly increased. Navigating through this cycle and overcoming the initial “growth pains” of your agency is critical.
Customer churn
As your agency grows, some customers won’t align with your processes, procedures, or strategy any longer. You can’t keep all of your clients happy every second of the day, and it’s expected that you’ll have some customer churn as you start scaling and growing.
Hiring great freelancers to produce content
One of the most challenging aspects of successfully growing a content marketing agency is finding the right freelance talent. You have to determine whether they have the qualifications required for your content and verify that they produce excellent content consistently.
By establishing a strategic partnership with a content creation platform, you can start bringing in reliable and high-quality freelancers to your team.
Managing workflows
As your order volume begins to increase exponentially, it can often be very difficult to keep up with your previously established workflows without a reorganization or restructuring of your internal processes. Ensuring that your agency has the right workflows in place to scale and handle increased volume is key to successful rapid growth.
The 5 key elements to scaling a digital agency
If you’d like to rapidly scale up your content marketing agency, five key elements must be implemented consistently.
We’re going to walk through each element in detail and show you how you can begin to implement these into your own business to begin scaling higher than you ever imagined.
The elements we present below are designed to help your agency with the talent, tools, and training required to achieve that fabled “exponential growth.”
1. Prepare for growth
If you expect to see rapid growth in your agency, you have to prepare for that growth upfront to avoid any growing pains or potential mishaps.
Begin to think about how you’re going to restructure and reorganize your internal workflows and content creation processes. How will you handle an increase in content production demand from your growing number of clients? Think about the additional expenses you’ll incur, and how you’ll handle a period of reduced profits while growing your revenues.
2. Optimize your workflow process
The content production workflows and processes you started with likely won’t take you to the next level. Depending on how you’re currently managing your workflow process, it might be difficult if not impossible to handle a rapid increase in clients and content production demand.
Take the time to optimize your workflow processes before you begin scaling, and you’ll be much happier and more successful in the process.
3. Simplify customer onboarding
When you’re only dealing with several clients at one time, onboarding them individually and taking extra care to answer all of their questions and concerns is a great way to build a client-agency relationship.
When you begin scaling, however, you’ll no longer have the capacity to onboard each client one by one. Think about how you can simplify your customer onboarding process, and potentially automate certain elements of the process.
4. Optimize content production
Is your content production process efficient? Do you have a way to handle freelancer churn, decreased content production due to external factors, or an unexpected event that leaves you without writers for a while?
All of these are potential events that could happen and should be planned for. Slow down and think about how you’re going to optimize your content production process to increase efficiency and improve output.
5. Use efficient software & tools to your advantage
As an agency owner or manager, there’s no shortage of time-saving tools and software out on the market.
Are you currently using content production software that ensures your content is properly optimized for search engines? Are you taking advantage of project management tools to manage your workflows and reduce clutter? There are hundreds of ways your agency can save both time and money by properly utilizing the software and tools available on the market today.
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