For agencies, friction is the enemy. Wrinkles in the website design process can limit your team’s capacity to accept new clients and increase the time to delivery for those you currently have. By contrast, a streamlined process can maximize your revenue potential by unlocking additional capacity.
If this sounds like advice you’ve heard before, you probably have. According to Statista, 48% of enterprises reduce their operating costs through the automation and streamlining of existing business processes. Agencies, like all other businesses, stand to benefit from improving their operational efficiency.
Transforming your agency into a productivity powerhouse won’t happen overnight. It’s all about working smarter, not harder. While exactly what that looks like will depend on the unique structure of your business, there are certain things most agencies can do to expedite their workflow.
Choose the Right Tools to Streamline Client Communication
A well-structured content collection form can help you extract vital business details, like business hours, locations, and relevant images before the design process even begins. Gathering all of this content up front is an excellent way to cut down on back-and-forth communication between your team and your client, especially when that information is vital to the project.
Sometimes, back-and-forth communication is a necessary evil—for example, when soliciting feedback or design reviews. Instead, invite your clients to collaborate on the website itself using built-in feedback features like commenting. You don’t want to compromise on collaboration features like these when selecting a website builder—it’s life-changing.
On-page commenting comes in handy even after the site has shipped by making it dead simple to find where you need to update content. Of course, if your business model supports it, giving clients restricted access to update content themselves is another great way to save your team some time.
Regardless of your strategy, putting in the effort to master client onboarding can save time in the long run.
There’s a Right Way as an Agency to Leverage AI for Content Creation Workflows
Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, as well as platform-native AI like Duda’s AI Assistant, can transform your team’s productivity when it comes to content creation. Instead of beginning with a blank screen or, worse, “lorem ipsum” text, AI offers a foundation of copy to work from. With intelligent usage of prompts, you can create copy that is well-suited to your client’s business vertical instantaneously. Your team still needs to apply that “human touch” to ensure AI-generated content is accurate, engaging, and on-brand.
Website builders with integrated AI tools take this productivity boost to the next level. These tools eliminate the need to copy-and-paste text between multiple tabs and often do not require you to fiddle with prompts to create verticalized content. In-editor AI tools bring additional benefits as well, such as the ability to modify the length and tone of content on the fly.
Utilize Custom Templates and Sections to Slash Repetitive Work
Virtually every website supports templating of some kind—and for good reason. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel with every website you build, especially considering clients in the same industry are very likely to have similar needs. For instance, all of your roofing clients are more than likely going to want their contact information and service area readily available.
For agencies, creating a library of custom templates and reusable sections is an excellent way to reduce repetitive work without compromising on design.
Using your industry expertise, you can create custom templates using marketing, design, and SEO best practices for the specific verticals you serve that align with your agency’s unique design philosophies.
Reusable sections, on the other hand, empower your agency to work more granularly. By investing the time to design an extensive library of reusable sections, your team can rapidly assemble new websites in a fraction of the time.
Maximize Your Efficiency with Advanced Automations
If you’re looking to squeeze every drop of efficiency out of your design process, automation is key.
Start by developing a centralized “source of truth” for your client’s website. This may be a Google Sheet, Airtable, or built-in feature of your CMS. Regardless, the goal here is to be able to update information like business hours once and have that change propagate throughout your site in the form of variables.
Taking this to the next level, you can combine your source of truth with third-party APIs or Zapier to allow your clients to update this information directly. You may, for example, create a form that leverages APIs to automatically update business information, create pages, or even, at the highest level, generate entire websites.
For example, consider that “source of truth” spreadsheet mentioned earlier. Using Zapier, you could integrate Google Sheets with Typeform or Google Forms to update business information based on responses. This updated information would automatically populate across your client’s website, without your team ever lifting a finger.
A more sophisticated example may make use of APIs to generate simple websites that can be improved upon later as an upsell. In this scenario, a developer may utilize a tool like Duda’s Instant Sites feature to prepopulate a template with data collected from a form to create a site. This can be expanded upon with upsell opportunities to publish the site as is or further refine it with the help of an agency—all without ever lifting a finger.
Make Operational Efficiency a Priority
These are only a few of the ways you can accelerate your process. Identifying opportunities to integrate reusable elements, AI, and automation into your workflow requires a meaningful amount of self-reflection. Ask your team for their perspective; what inefficiencies do they see? Then, how can these concepts help you to overcome them? Remember, small improvements add up.
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About the Author
Santi Clarke, the head of Content & Communications at Duda.
Santi Clarke is a seasoned marketing leader with a passion for digital transformation. Santi has over 12 years of experience leading digital marketing and content teams around the world, from SaaS startups to global enterprises. She is currently the Director of Content and Communications at Duda, the website builder for professionals.