The Ultimate Guide to Content Management for Agencies: Tools, Workflows, and Best Practices
Even in the early days of running an agency, content management quickly becomes a major challenge. Particularly as you scale, projects grow in number and complexity. Hitting deadlines, maintaining consistent quality control, and tracking versions all consume more time and focus.
The hidden costs also accumulate. An agency can end up duplicating efforts and creating competing messages without knowing it’s even happening. Likewise, accountability gets blurry when there are many potential sources of blame for why a project might not have hit its benchmarks. Developing a structured approach to content management is essential to avoiding these pitfalls.
The Importance of Content Management
Content management is the method for handling the complexity of content-oriented projects. Whether you’re dealing with one big project for your organization or many projects for a variety of clients, you need to be able to address issues related to:
- Maintaining brand standards
- Messaging consistently
- Running a complete workflow
- Analyzing results for improvement
From choosing topics and keywords to editing and publishing content, you need to have a strong process in place. A good process depends on three pillars:
- Essential tools
- Proven workflows
- Best practices
Essential Tools
Content Planning Tools
An editorial calendar package is the cornerstone of content planning. Your editorial calendar should break projects into their key components, including title and topic, format type, publication date, SEO keywords, and authorship. You should also be able to track the project’s status in a workflow, allowing you to see drafts, edits, approvals, and publication.
SEO Planning
Many keyword tools can help you with your search engine optimization. Tools like the Google Adwords keyword planner, Semrush, and Ahrefs allow you to see how different keywords rank. You can also see how competitive the market is for certain keywords, giving you an idea of how hard it might be to rank on the first page of Google or Bing search for those terms.
Project Management
Collaboration is very important for many projects. Google Workspace is the go-to choice for real-time collaboration. You can use collaborative tools to review and comment on projects. Likewise, you can partition workspaces for different clients, allowing you to personalize your efforts to their needs.
Content Management Systems
A good CMS is central to publishing content. You should expect a CMS to include:
- A no-code WYSIWYG editor
- A/B testing
- CRM software integration
- Analytics
- SEO tools
- Version tracking
- Roles and permissions
WordPress is the dominant tool in the CMS space. Hosted and self-hosted options are available with paid and free options. Drupal is a distant second, if you want a proven alternative.
Proven Workflows
A six-step content production process provides a good workflow for content management. The six steps are:
- Brief
- Draft
- Review
- Revisions
- Publication
- Promotion
Roles are critical to content workflow management. A content manager often handles research, briefs, assignments, and deadlines. They sometimes have the help of an SEO strategist, who focuses on keywords, SEO technicalities, and optimization. A managing editor will monitor the editorial calendar while imposing quality control and brand consistency. Last but not least, copywriters create the content. Many agencies use some mix of in-house staff, freelancers, and content management services to fill these roles.
At Textbroker, we manage a large chunk of the workflow for agencies, building dedicated teams with content managers, editors, and copywriters. With a focus on personalized brand standards and domain knowledge, our teams work from briefs to produce top-quality deliverables on schedule and within a well-defined content production process.
Best Practices
Successful content workflow management depends on best practices. Standardization is essential, allowing you to automate repetitive processes and maintain quality control checkpoints. The best workflows are also highly reusable, allowing you to start and scale projects faster.
Standardization
Briefs, outlines, templates, and even meta descriptions should all fit within a standard set of best practices. As your managers and copywriters receive briefs, they should be able to quickly learn and apply your brand standards to achieve your project goals. If some projects fit into subcategories, there should be a consistent taxonomy for each type. Style guides and editorial guidelines should also be detailed in a way that makes onboarding new managers and copywriters as fast, efficient, and effective as possible.
Quality Control Checkpoints
You should have quality control checkpoints in place to edit content and copy, including fact-checking. There should also be a checkpoint for verifying that each piece meets your SEO standards. More than anything, there should be non-negotiable benchmarks that have to be met before content moves from one stage of the workflow to the next.
Automation
Agencies often bog down in repetitive tasks within projects. As much of your publishing calendar as possible should be automated. Your CMS should help you populate metadata, generate URLs, and implement analytics. Whenever content moves forward in the workflow, the system should issue automatic notifications. You can even automate templates for many projects.
A/B testing can be a particularly rich target for automation. Not only does automation simplify this type of comparison testing, but it also eliminates human biases that might distort data. This allows you to rapidly discover which versions of content connect with audiences. Likewise, you can feed the data into subsequent improvements of your SEO and content management practices.
Scalability Planning
Planning for scalability makes a big difference as an agency moves forward. The goal is to ensure that your processes will work just as well when you have 50 clients as when you have five.
Scalability depends on documenting procedures to allow repeatability across projects. As you identify and address bottlenecks, the procedures need to go into the documentation. You can use core documents and practices across clients while leaving enough room to personalize projects to their needs.
Establishing a staffing model is also important. You want to have a clear idea of what a typical project’s mix will look like when it comes to in-house team members, freelancers, and third-party content management services. Whenever you onboard a new client, you will have a well-grounded guess of the resources needed for their project launch.
Finally, make sure you have a centralized set of communication channels. If someone asks what your collaboration tool of choice is, for example, everyone in your agency should be able to answer instantly. Likewise, all team members should know the escalation paths for addressing everything from quality control to workflow breakdowns.
Getting Content Management Right
Effective content management relies on having your tools, workflows, and best practices in place. As an agency grows, its processes should make scaling easy. Coordination will always be a challenge, but a successful agency will develop a consistent rhythm for sourcing, creating, editing, delivering, and publishing content.
Contact Textbroker today to learn more about how our Managed Services can help your agency turbocharge its workflow!
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