An SEMrush survey asked content marketers what their biggest challenges were, and answers ranged from developing content that resonates with the right audience to keeping track of deadlines. The data, which is published in an infographic, breaks the challenges up by categories: content strategist, content writer, marketing manager, editor and project manager.
But what if you’re an agency? You might face challenges from all those areas and some that are unique to the marketing agency setup. Discover how white labeling content writing services can help you solve some common agency challenges.
Common Challenges Faced By Agencies as They Create Content
SEMrush’s survey calls out challenges such as defining ROI, managing the editorial calendar and communicating with teams—which probably sound familiar to agencies. But here are some extra challenges that you might face that single-organization marketing teams don’t.
Creating Content for Diverse Clients
Agencies must manage the process of creating content for a wide range of clients, and that comes with potential obstacles, including:
- Understanding regional content needs. Audiences across the globe don’t speak the same language or live in the same culture, and that’s even true within a single nation. Even within a single state or province, people from different regions have unique ways of speaking and might be concerned with different issues. The challenges faced by a consumer in a city are not always the same as those faced by someone in a rural area, for example, and if you’re working with businesses in all these areas, you must be able to create content for their disparate audiences.
- Regulatory compliance or industry specialization. Some industries are heavily regulated, and marketing teams must understand how to safely speak about goods and services without running afoul of those rules. For agencies, this can be especially challenging, because the regulations are unique across each industry, each nation and sometimes each state.
- Aligning with each client’s brand voice and business goals. Everyone wants their content to sound like them. And each organization or business has its own goals for what that content should do. As a marketing agency, you have to be able to pivot to meet those disparate demands.
Differing Quality Demands
High-quality content is critical for any online marketing endeavour. But quality is subjective, and agencies need processes and content writing capability to meet all types of quality demands.
Some clients want well equipped SEO but aren’t worried if the content is thought-provoking. Others want thought leadership that positions them as an industry leader. Still others want creative, brand-centric content or intense technology copy for a specific audience.
Whatever range your client list covers, a single writing style probably isn’t going to cut it.
Budgetary Restraints
Clients also all have different budgets. Some are willing to pay competitive rates for premium content while others want budget content to fill basic SEO needs. Managing all those numbers can be difficult, but agencies have an additional challenge: Finding a way to balance the budget when they also have to pay for the writing and cover other marketing expenses.
Scaling Up for Client Needs or Growth
Many agencies attempt to keep all content creation in-house to control some of these issues. But that poses major challenges if you want to grow your agency — or take on clients with large projects. In-house writing teams can get expensive as you add more FTEs to your teams, and if you try to run an in-house team with direct freelance help, you can find yourself spending a lot of time managing contacts, writers and processes.
How a Content Writing Service Solves These Challenges
Working with a content writing service can mitigate many common issues for agencies. Here are some overall benefits of Crowd Content’s writing service and how we help solve specific agency challenges.
Access to Diverse Writer Pools
For years, we’ve worked to create a diverse database of qualified, talented writers and editors—at all levels and with experience in all industries. Whether you’re looking for someone who’s adept at writing health care thought leadership or you want a team of fast, reliable writers to create short SEO descriptions, you’ll find the right workforce resources in our database.
When you resource from our writer database, you’re easily able to find writers:
- With different styles and voices
- With various experience and backgrounds
- Of various skill levels to meet disparate quality requirements
- Who can work as a team to develop content for a wide range of clients on budget and within short timelines
Flexible Prices
Crowd Content offers flexible pricing. Self serve pricing ranges from 2.2 to 12 cents per word, and you can add on optional services such as proofreading, editing and image research for additional fees. Enterprise projects, which include a project manager and multiple levels of review to ensure publish-ready content, are priced per project.
Our flexible pricing puts you in control of the budget, which is a huge benefit for agencies. Plus, you can take advantage of different prices for various types of work to help provide what clients need in a way that works with their budgets as well as yours.
Ability to Scale
Scalability is one of the biggest benefits for agencies working with a content writing service. You can tap into thousands of writers when you need them, but they aren’t on your payroll when you don’t. That means when clients ask if you can handle a content project, your answer can always be yes.
Some Best Practices for White Labeling Content Writing
Simply signing up with a content writing service doesn’t solve every challenge like magic, however. Putting a bit of work in to handle white labeling content writing ensures results that please your clients and help grow your agency. Here are just a few best practice tips.
Create Detailed Briefs
Content writing teams are only as good as the instructions they follow. When working with writers, ensure they know:
- Who they’re writing for, including brand voice and target audience
- What they’re writing, including whether it’s a blog post, article, SEO content or something else
- When they should write, including clear information about your deadline
- Why they’re writing, including business goals for the content
- How they should write, such as what keywords to include and what types of formatting and style requirements you have
Build Relationships With Writers
Take time to build relationships with writers. Give them feedback on what you’d like to see next time so they can continue to dial content in to meet your needs. If you find a writer that’s almost hitting the mark, you usually get a lot more value teaching from that writer how to come the final 2% than starting your search for a writer all over again.
Most writers realize that content creation is a collaborative process, and they’re happy to apply feedback. Once they’re an ongoing member of your content creation team, you might even be able to turn to them for help with research or coming up with new content ideas.
Understand What Services You Need
Make sure you understand what services you need before you start paying for them. It’s common for agencies to hire writers and then realize they need research, editing or other services too. But they didn’t include that in pricing, so writers aren’t willing to do extra without getting paid. Not planning ahead can throw a serious wrench in budget management.
If you’re not sure what you need but know you need outside help to keep growing your agency and attracting great clients, reach out to Crowd Content. We can help you build writing teams or connect you with enterprise services.
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