#agency-life
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Thread
Agency peeps - how is your content team structured? I am a team of one with help from coworkers and freelancers, but my boss has asked me to start thinking longterm about how I will grow the team and formalize our process (from the content itself to when we hire vs contract, what elements of "content" fall under my team, like does email, does ad copy, etc) and I'm a bit at a loss as to where to even start with this. Documenting and formalizing the process of planning and creating content itself is the easy part and I can do that, but with the rest, I am not even sure as to how to start thinking about this
Hey Jessie - would love to help (i run a full service agency out of DC). Could you share the following so I can best give ya some tips. What role does your client play in the process? Are you doing the copywriting, scheduling, and community management? Is it a dual effort? Do the clients need to review copy/creative before it’s shipped or is it pretty relaxed in that you can push content out without much client involvement? If all the work is behind the scenes it can be done differently then if there is predictable client involvement (meaning you need to think about how it integrates with each client) Thanks! - Jeremy
Just here in solidarity with you. I’m in your shoes and figuring out long-term growth (ie a “wish list” of positions), trying to put a metric to determine at what critical point we need to hire more people, what roles and skills, etc.
There are also some great courses and interviews on Superpath on this topic to get you thinking.
We do pretty much everything, though it varies by client -- some clients have deep expertise of a niche area, so they provide the content and we do the keyword research, outline, editing, etc. Clients approve nearly everything that goes out. We're split into two marketing teams, each handling half our clients, and I'm on both teams (as the only content person). I'm thinking having a content marketer on each team would be a good first step, giving them the bulk of execution, freeing me up to do more strategic, big picture thinking, and general management. Beyond that it's hard to say, but I am not sure if I need a solid plan beyond that bc things change with our team structure fairly regularly around here.
Overall I'm just having difficulty organizing my head around how to scale my efforts with minimal help -- I can hire freelancers but we tend to go into periods where we want to limit cost on contractors, so that always throws a wrench into things. And I won't be able to hire anyone for at least 6 months. Ultimately I kinda feel like I'm in a hole as a team of one managing so many clients, where I'm just in short-term execution mode most of the time, and I'm not really sure how to start pulling myself out of the hole to get things on more of a long term schedule.