Digital marketing agencies are constantly bouncing between different clients and marketing strategies. Because of this, agency workflow can often become unpredictable and inconsistent. But with the right strategy in place, any digital marketing agency can achieve optimal productivity and cohesion.
Step-by-Step Guide for Creating a Digital Marketing Agency Workflow
Learning how to create a good workflow within your agency is the key ingredient to running a highly collaborative and successful team.
Whether you’re a new digital marketing agency looking to lay down some healthy workflow roots or an experienced team simply looking to refresh its workflow strategy, this list of 10 steps can help you to find your way to productivity excellence.
Step 1: Define Your Goals and Objectives
When you frame your objectives in the right way, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to achieve them. Instead of allowing your goals to morph from one month to the next, settle on some clear objectives and use them as beacons for moving forward.
What is it that your agency team wants to focus on right now? Growing its audience? Migrating onto different platforms? Reaching a specific revenue goal?
Whatever your goals might be, make sure you – and your team – know exactly what they are so that every opportunity can be taken to achieve them.
Step 2: Identify Your Target Audience
Painting a clear picture of who your target audience is can help employees produce work that is specifically catered to them. If you don’t know exactly who your work is meant to target, how can anyone’s output be expected to strike a connection with consumers?
Hold regular meetings where audience development is the centre of the conversation. The more you know about your audience, the easier it will be to work together to draw them in.
Step 3: Research the Market and Competition
Research is the heart of any successful business – digital marketing agencies included. Keeping a close eye on current market trends and what competitors are doing to meet them will help your agency maintain its edge in the industry and prevent your work from becoming outdated or stagnant.
Step 4: Develop Your Services and Strategies
Whoever said, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” clearly never worked in marketing. Continuing to find ways to innovate your services and strategies is one of the most powerful things you can do.
The digital marketing industry waits for no one. There is a veritable mania of trends, content, and consumer behaviour patterns constantly unfolding online, and your agency should be doing everything it can to evolve alongside them – not sit on the sidelines like a digital wallflower.
What new strategies are gaining recognition? Which services are becoming popular? If you want your workflow to be charged and productive, these are the questions you need to be asking.
Step 5: Create Your Digital Marketing Agency Workflow
Once you’ve gathered enough information about what needs to change in your digital marketing agency’s workflow, don’t be afraid to set it in motion. Create a workflow system that makes sense for your agency, not anyone else’s. Teams are as unique as the people working within them.
Step 6: Set Up Your Technology Platforms
It’s the 2020s. Everyone should be taking full advantage of that, technology-wise. Agencies like yours no longer need to rely on manual processing, so make sure your technology platforms are set up and ready to help you achieve both internal productivity and external growth.
Some of the best technology platforms all digital marketing agencies should use include:
- Content scheduling
- Task delegation
- Project management
- SEO management
- Web analytics tools
Utilising these tools will not only make your agency more competitive, but it will increase collaboration and communication between employees. In turn, this drives up productivity and engagement.
Step 7: Define Your Processes and Procedures
Every agency has its own approach to internal processes and procedures. For example, your agency might subscribe to the Agile, Kanban, or Scrum system. How does information get passed down between team members? Who assigns tasks? Defining these processes will generate better workflow.
Step 8: Establish Your Team Structure and Roles
While we’re on the topic of processes, let’s talk about team structure. There are lots of different ways to go about structuring your agency team but finding the right one can be a challenge.
To make the most out of your workflow, each team member should have a clear and uncomplicated understanding of what their role is and why they are there. This adds necessary organisation to the agency and ensures everyone executes their role as efficiently as possible.
Step 9: Create Your Brand Identity
Brand identity forms a significant part of any successful brand – and digital marketing agencies know this more than most. But taking the time to cultivate your own brand voice (distinct from those you help other brands create) is something you must take seriously if you want to rise above the crowd.
When looking for a great digital marketing agency, clients should immediately be drawn to yours for its uniqueness, professionalism, and clarity of vision. Hone in on your voice and project it loudly.
Step 10: Implement Your Digital Marketing Agency Workflow
When you’ve done the research and determined what needs to change in your team’s workflow, it’s time to implement those changes. You can achieve this by clearly communicating shifts in strategy to your agency team members and providing them with everything they need to achieve them.
Create A Working Agency Workflow
In summary, digital marketing agencies that want to improve their workflow need to focus on developing clearer goals and objectives. Plus, they need to set up useful productivity tools and establish a team structure that allows everyone’s strengths to shine.
Digital marketing agencies play a key role in keeping the online world spinning, which is why creating a strong workflow is so important. With a healthy workflow, your digital marketing agency can gain the momentum it needs to operate smoothly both behind the scenes and in front of the audience.