8 Things Your Agency Could Be Doing Instead of Managing Writers
It takes a lot of time to manage freelance writers -- here are eight reasons to outsource.
These days, your clients need a lot of content to pull off digital marketing campaigns. It's not enough to have a few blog posts or white papers here and there. They need to create an unending content flow for all your marketing channels, and to pull that off, they need writers. More than 76 percent of B2B marketers polled told the Content Marketing Institute that they're planning on increasing their content output, but increased content production comes at a cost: You end up spending all your time managing freelance writers instead of spending time doing these eight important agency tasks. What are those, you might ask?
1. Strategizing
You didn't sign up for herding cats; you wanted to run a digital marketing agency. The more time and resources you spend on making sure your freelance writers stay on track, the less time you spend on your strategy. Your clients rely on you to create a complete digital marketing strategy and keep up with new developments. The marketing world is changing at a rapid pace, and keeping up with the latest strategies doesn't work if you spend most of your time distracted by other duties.
2. Promoting Your Brand
Your clients aren't the only ones who need a marketing strategy -- your agency does too. You need to keep your own marketing funnel and sales pipeline going strong in order to maintain a steady workload. Creating lead generation material, following up with prospects and giving presentations are time-consuming tasks you need to focus on.
3. Building Client Relationships
Your loyal clients won't stick around if you don't value your existing relationships. Customer acquisition incurs up to seven times higher costs than customer retention, according to Loyalty Marketing, and loyal clients also spend more. If you didn't spend so much time managing freelance writers in-house, you could put more time into nurturing your client relationships and increasing the lifetime value of your client base.
4. Networking
Professional networking brings you new partnerships, vendors and prospects. Heading out to conferences, seminars and networking events requires a significant time commitment, especially if you want to get an "in" to the informal opportunities opening up after a long day at the conference. You can make some of your closest business connections when you share a drink and commiserate over a particularly boring presentation or the early start time of the next day's conference events.
5. Event Marketing
Another networking opportunity you have time for when you don't have to manage writers is event marketing. In-person experiences provide you with a way to get face-to-face with your prospects. This face time lets you connect with your prospects in a way an email can't approach, and you can gauge their interest levels through body language and facial expressions. A lot goes into creating an effective trade show display and presentation, and you don't want that time taken up with writer management.
6. Optimizing Technology Infrastructure
The marketing software industry is huge, with IDC predicting a $32.3 billion market in 2018. The right digital marketing tools increase your productivity, improve your revenue and provide deeper business intelligence. There are vendors for all-in-one solutions to highly specific tools and everything in between. Evaluating software solutions and researching how it works within your existing infrastructure requires multiple testing rounds, lengthy deployment periods and integration with other software packages.
7. Expanding Into New Markets
You have your eyes on expansion, whether you want to open up another office across town or across the world. You have lofty ambitions, but expanding into a new market requires significant amounts of research and planning. This is particularly true if you have your eyes on the globalization prize, as you need to tackle issues such as local work culture, business red tape and localization concerns.
8. Testing Marketing Effectiveness
You have more data than ever to gauge your digital marketing effectiveness. The number of key performance indicators you track increases with new data sources, your clients deciding they have the greatest metric in the world to monitor and the implementation of new marketing technology. You also go through split testing, usability tests and countless other ways to determine if your campaigns are getting the results they need. You go back to the drawing board and work on optimizing your digital marketing efforts if you fall short of the mark, and sometimes it takes a few tries before you hone in on what the target market is looking for.
You don't have an infinite amount of time and resources for your digital marketing agency. Your content production needs might be high, but if you continually scale your freelance writing team, you spend most of your time managing the writers instead of your digital marketing campaigns.
If you want to spend your time on these eight things instead of trying to ensure your content writers can keep up with your demand, look to services such as Scripted that specialize in handling the writer side of things. We have the specialized knowledge and skills required to effectively manage writers, leaving you with time to focus on your core competencies and growing your digital marketing business.
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