You only need to spend a few days at a marketing agency to learn that they’re no stranger to moving parts.
You’ve got multiple clients to juggle, multiple projects for each client, multiple people from multiple teams working on each project, and multiple tasks for each team.
Yes, if you work at an agency, you’re a pro juggler.
However, for a lot of agencies, marketing your own business doesn’t come quite as naturally as juggling and marketing your clients’. All too often, it takes a back burner to looming client deadlines and improving those relationships.
If you want to practice what you preach to your marketing clients, you should treat your own agency like a client, and brand and build it just as strategically. For example, you’re probably recommending at least some form of content marketing to a lot of your clients, so you should be doing it yourself.
It can be as simple as a written company blog.
Creating consistent content can be the magic key to developing a strong brand online, which can help develop trust with current and future clients and bring new leads in for your agency. And of course, your main priority is marketing your clients, so you want to do it in a way that’s very streamlined and doesn’t take up a ton of your team’s time.
Here are four ways you can develop a company blogging process to accomplish that.
How to Save Time Managing Your Agency’s Blog
1. Assign System Owners
You likely have a lot of processes and systems set in place for managing client campaigns and content. Borrow that mentality when creating and organizing your own team’s blog.
One way to do that is to clearly assign “owners” and define teammate responsibilities for each part of the blogging process. The simplest way to do this is what Buffer calls the “Batman and Robin” method. Every project or big task should have a “Batman,” the person taking the lead and in charge of managing that project.
In the case of running a company blog, different projects to assign to your team might include:
- Managing the overall content calendar
- Corresponding with and recruiting guest contributors (including clients for any case studies)
- Creating screenshots, finding stock photography, designing social images, and any other design-oriented tasks
- Editing and publishing final content
- Promoting content on social media and through PR
You don’t need to have one person for each project, and that doesn’t need to be their only job. For example, a marketing team member could be responsible for both calendar maintenance and editing/publishing, in between other tasks for marketing your agency. But if you don’t have a lot of other design tasks for the blog, you can have it as an added area of focus for a member of a client design team.
The important part is that everyone knows who the “point person” for each part of your company blog is. If they’re not the person completing the tasks themselves, they’re responsible for seeing that they’re done by someone else.
2. Keep All Tasks in One Place
You’ll also want to closely track project management for your company blog, just as you would any client project. Your team is more likely to stay on top of their blogging game if it’s easy to do so, and that means staying organized.
Break down each step of each blogging management process (that you identified and assigned to team members in part 1) and track each step in one place. You should be able to easily see all content coming up soon in your pipeline, the status of each piece, what’s been done so far, and who’s responsible for what’s left.
In terms of keeping track of it all, you could either use an editorial calendar tool, or whichever project management app you’re using to communicate and work with clients. It’s always a bonus if you can use a tool your team already knows when adding a new system to their workload.
For example, CoSchedule has a lot of great built-in features for marketing and blogging project management, and will be easy to add in if you already use it for client blogs.
3. Batch As Much As Possible
A third way to systemize your agency’s blog workflow is to batch tasks wherever possible. This means doing multiple related tasks one after another, in one “batch,” instead of spreading it out more over time. It’ll allow your team to increase focus on specific projects, avoid multitasking, and get more work done faster.
Batching, in this collaborative scenario, would focus on allowing each team member to complete as many of their owned tasks for the blog at one time. This could be applied in multiple areas, such as:
- Guest contributor outreach: sending several guest blogger invitations once a month, instead of one-off invites here and there.
- Graphic design: designing several graphics – such as all of them for one post or one week’s worth of posts – at once instead of designing each one as soon as the content is available.
- Promotion: prepare all promotion at one time, for things from social media posts to email newsletters and individual email outreach, and schedule things to send later when necessary.
You obviously can’t guarantee the whole blogging process be batched. For example, an editor can’t do all of the week’s editing in one session if your process involves more than one round of edits. In that case, there needs to be some time for writers to address the first round before the second. But, an editor could edit multiple posts in one day instead of one-by-one, so their work can be batched a little bit.
Once you’ve decided who owns each part of the blogging process, see how you can order things to batch their work. Map it out in a Google document or spreadsheet with the rest of your blogging workflow to follow tip #2.
4. Have Regular Blog Meetings
In the vein of treating your own company as a client, you should have regular meetings and check-ins with the blog team, even if that’s just two people, or the team of one updating their supervisor.
This could take the form of a monthly editorial calendar meeting, a bi-weekly standup, or a permanent agenda item and dedicated section of your other regular marketing meetings.
You’ll want to get everyone working on the blog together for things like reviewing its performance, planning new content, and checking in on the status of content pieces in progress. One thing you’ll definitely want to do in each meeting is at least review the upcoming calendar together as a group.
Treat Yourself Like a Client
As you see, a thriving agency blog takes more than the casual behavior with which too many agencies treat their own brand in favor of their clients’. It’s time to upgrade how important you see yourselves.
In the end, you want to give it just as much dedication, if not time. But once you set the intention and game plan to run your own blog, you can treat it with the same systems and rules as you do the rest of the work, and it will become a natural routine to pay off exponentially.
