Case Study: Digital Agency Triples Content Production Capacity

According to the Agency Spotter, there are over 560 thousand agencies worldwide.

And more and more of them provide digital services like website and software development, content creation and monitoring of social networks.

The M. Lincoln Digital Communication is one of them.

Founded in 2013 by Technology Manager Mikael Lincoln, the agency was built around the following vision: small and medium-sized businesses were increasingly seeking marketing agencies to generate business opportunities. 

At first, it offered marketing planning and social media monitoring, but customer interest quickly prompted him to add services such as website creation, digital marketing strategy, content production and distribution.

To maintain the quality of M. Lincoln’s services and himself apart from his competitors, Mikael personally took care of all work, with the help of a small team. 

However, as many growing agencies, Mikael eventually ran into a common question:

“How can I scale my services without losing quality and essence?”

5 Challenges Faced by Growing Online Agencies

To keep evolving, the business had to overcome some crucial obstacles.

Here are some of the difficulties Mikael found:

1. Scaling it’s services without losing the agency’s essence;

2. Reducing the amount of time spent in operational activities;

3. Increasing the team’s efficiency;

4. Monitoring tasks and deadlines;

5. Centralizing and keeping track of communications between his team and clients. 

The main challenge was represented by MiKael’s process:  to satisfy his clients needs and peculiarities he ended up adopting a combination of different platforms and tools that made his work even more complex and confusing.

Here’s the list of the tools he used to manage content production:

• Google Docs for content creation;

• Google Calendar for content management;

• Google Drive to store strategic documents and media files;

• Evernote;

• WordPress to publish content;

• Buffer to distribute content.

• Spreadsheets to keep track of ideas and content production;

• Emails for communications.

• A project management software to manage and monitor tasks.

• White boards hanging on the walls.

And Mikael’s routine looked a lot like this:

 

After a while he realized that was unsustainable and concluded that what he needed was a single tool that met the following characteristics:

1. Built specifically for content marketing.
2. Fully customizable
3. That unified all of his clients and collaborators (writers, editors, designers and SEO managers) in the same workspace.

The Solution: Contentools Content Marketing Platform

After a long and frustrating process, trying new tools and solutions, thanks to a colleague’s advice, Mikael found Contentools all in one content marketing platform.

The platform allowed him to:

• Map, organize and document all of his clients’ strategy in same place;

• Collaborate with his team and manage his freelancers;

• Schedule and automatically publish content on different channels (blogs, websites, social media);

• Customize and automate workflows between writers, editors, designers and clients;

• Monitor and manage his content production;

• Easily communicate and involve customers.

Thanks to his new process, Mikael increased his agency’s productivity by:

• Automating production notifications and reminders
• Automating publishing and distribution
• Centralizing strategic documents and communications
• Increasing customer’s involvement and participation
• Streamlining content production monitoring and management

All of the above allowed Mikael’s agency to become a lot faster, practical and visual..

New Process New Results

Having migrated all the agency’s clients and teams to Contentools CMP, M. Lincoln achieved outstanding results in the first month alone:

• Time spent on production and distribution management decreased by 75%;

• The number of tools used to provide services decreased by 100%;

• The number of emails decreased by 50%;

• The service capacity increased 357% – this means the same staff can triple the number of customer accounts they oversee;

• Quality and essence of personalized customer service remained intact.