How to Create Content for Multiple Clients Like a Pro
Nowadays, marketers tend to wear a lot of hats. Not literal hats of course (we've never really spent much time studying that), we're talking about the tasks that digital marketers in agencies are expected to undertake. Quite often, marketers are tasked with content creation for multiple clients as well as day-to-day marketing tasks like SEO and social media marketing for the agency itself.
Are you currently managing content creation for multiple clients as well as your everyday marketing tasks? First of all, well done! We know that can be challenging. Not only is it hard to maintain creativity when working on lots of different projects, it’s also difficult to distribute quality content since work can end up pretty rushed. If you find yourself putting out poorer quality content way more often than you’d like and feel as though you've not got any time for the more important marketing asks, we've got you covered. In this article, let's talk about how you can make more time in your day and become the stress-free, organised marketing pro we know you are.
Plan Content Series
Writing fresh content that maintains quality takes time. So how can you speed up the creation of blog articles without sacrificing any relevance or value? One practical way is to plan topics for blog series, rather than just for individual blog articles. When first starting to work with a client, plan out top-level topics that are relevant to their business. For example, for our graphic design subscription service, a top-level subject related to our brand might be ‘social media post design.’ Once you've done that, you can then write on a range of topics that relate to that broad subject in the form of a blog series that goes into detail on all the smaller subjects i.e we would go on to write articles about LinkedIn carousel post design, a guide to social media dimensions and how to create memes for Instagram all from that one broad subject idea. It's going to be easier to have an in-depth knowledge of a subject when you do this, and it's also going to mean you don't need to spend time brainstorming new blog topics every week. Instead, you take one big idea and let that inspire you for a set of different content topics.
The main benefits of this are that you can cover different articles and include a host of semantically linked keywords as well as have plenty of relative backlinks to interlink within your site. In addition to that, you’ll have a lot of articles as suggested reading if the site visitor has landed on that blog page.
Practice Better Feedback
When you're working on projects for multiple clients in an agency, feedback is really important. The quality of the feedback process can really determine the complexity of the workflow and ultimately make a project that should have taken a few hours, take days instead. Your agency should prioritise creating a frictionless process for feedback. Tools like Loom where you can record in-window videos as you talk through a piece of work can help you to get your ideas across better.
Encourage your clients to send in complete briefs when submitting work to your agency. You can’t expect a client to automatically understand how to structure a brief in a way your team of designers will understand easily, so make sure to help educate them through your content! For example, most designers will benefit from seeing other pieces of design work the client loves and understanding the reasons why so that they can get a better sense of their individual style. The same goes for helping your clients to understand what makes the most valuable feedback, i.e. letting the designer know exactly the reasons why a design just isn’t exactly what they wanted rather than a vaguer ‘ it needs a few changes’ or ‘ can we see another version?’ When both the designer and the client are working on being thorough in their feedback, the design workflow can be sped up.
Create a Content Calendar
If you are creating content for multiple clients, it's important you keep track by using a content calendar. Some marketers prefer to have a printed content calendar, the likes of which you can find on Pinterest, and some marketers prefer a tool they can keep updated like the Hubspot content calendar feature or Asana. Whichever way you choose to have a broad overview of your content, you need to make sure you have that top-level view of the work completed.
By keeping track of past and present content plans, you'll be able to recommend your clients better on the next steps of their strategy as well as see what topics have regularly been covered already. You can also use this tool to see where your time is being spent most and to communicate where you might need some more help from your team.
Do You Need to Outsource?
Whether it's content creation for your agency or for a client, to create content like a pro you'll need to make sure you're both efficient when producing content and that the quality of that content is as high as possible. Only when this is perfect in your agency will you start to reap the benefits of loyal, high-value clients. Recognising where you can improve efficiency by outsourcing is a great way to achieve this faster.
Wherever you spot a bottleneck forming in your internal team and can't afford to scale up your team to resolve it - that's when you need to look to affordably outsource the task. To qualify your outsourcing company, you need to consider these three things:
1. How will you communicate with the outsourcing service?
The purpose of an outsourcing service is to save you time and money. If the agency you are looking to outsource to doesn't offer you the communication methods you need (think speedy and easily applicable to your current processes), then you need to look further for one that will genuinely work to save your company time. For example, our graphic design subscription plans offer users super-fast communication via Slack - meaning outsourcing your graphic design with us is pretty much identical to working with a colleague in the remote-working world. You send us a message and a designer gets back to you with more information. In addition to a dedicated Slack channel, all users get access to an app custom-built to help improve design workflows. In the app, you can submit a complete design brief along with a Loom video and examples of the work you love, and view all your current design tasks in one queue. In the queue, you’ll be able to see the active request being worked on by a designer and reprioritise this easily if needed.
2. Is the quality of the product or service adequate?
Next, is the quality of the service going to help you work towards your goals? Although affordability is important, it isn't worth sacrificing quality which in turn will damage the reputation of your agency. The outsourcing tool you choose should be able to consistently produce work of a value that is in keeping with your brand.
3. Is it a long-term solution?
Knowing how you plan to use your outsourcing agency is important so that you can plan your agency growth strategy around it. For example, lots of agencies use our service to build up a graphic design team and simply add designers to their plan when they need additional support instead of hiring in-house. If you're looking for a short-term solution to a workflow process, you'll require less ability to scale up from your outsourcing tool and vice versa if you're looking for a longer-term solution. Certainly, outsourcing tasks to resolve bottlenecks is crucial for creating a more efficient agency built to service more clients.
Communication Is Key
When looking to create content for multiple clients, understanding what they want is important. The only way to achieve content that the client is happy enough with to recommend your service to others is to nail down the brief. Before embarking on creating their content, learn key information like who their brand is, which tone of voice they prefer, what their values are and so on. To get to grips with how the content needs to be structured, ask questions like, where will this content be used? Who is this content targeted at what is the goal of this content i.e. brand awareness or building brand loyalty? When you communicate well with your clients and ask lots of questions, you'll find that you get into a much better flow when creating tailored content specifically for their brand and their goals.
Proofread, proofread... proofread!
Yes, this one does deserve three times for emphasis. Proofreading your content before sending it back to a client is completely necessary and needs to become a habit if you want to be a multiple-client managing pro. Make sure to take the time to read your content out loud (even though it may look a bit crazy!) as a way to identify grammatical mistakes you haven’t noticed before. According to content specialist Charlie Meyler from award-winning Manchester marketing agency, Embryo, "this is especially true for long-form content which is 2000+ words." Although taking the time to slow down and properly proofread might sometimes seem unproductive, it's going to save you time spent on amends down the road.
Use Keywords as a Starting Point
If you're struggling to come up with content ideas, refer back to your keyword research for the brand. Through conducting in-depth keyword research you'll know exactly what clicks with their audience, and you can use that as a starting point for building out a strong content strategy. Not only that but referencing industry keywords throughout your content will help you achieve the sound of an expert... even if you don't know too much about the subject.
These are just a few tips to help your content creation mission get as organised and efficient as possible and to make sure that every piece of content is as valuable as the last. If you'd like to learn more about how we help marketers like you with their graphic design, just get in touch today and learn a bit more about how our unlimited graphic design subscription plans work.
