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As a content marketing agency, your success ultimately depends on your resources.
You attract, serve, and retain clients by creating compelling content that differentiates you among competing agencies and distinguishes your clients within their markets.
Your ability to create such content emanates from the creativity of your resources. The more creative your resources are, the more compelling your content will be—and the more successful your agency will become.
Resource planning helps you maximize creativity and optimize results by keeping your team members engaged and energized. In connecting them to the right projects, managing their workloads, and supporting their efforts, you will keep your resources happy, your clients pleased, and your projects—and thereby your agency—profitable.
Here are four examples of why proper resource planning is crucial for content marketing agency success.
1) You can best serve clients.
Your clients deserve the best. But you must have the best resources if you’re going to provide the best to your clients. You can’t properly plan if you don’t have a resource pool that shows you who is available at any given time. Assessing your resources allows you to identify possible staffing shortages, which could cause projects to fall behind schedule, go over budget, or disappoint clients. With this information, you can also spot potential shortcomings in abilities and expertise. If, for example, you have an opportunity to land a client who wants you to create healthcare content, it would be helpful to have qualified resources in place.
2) You can match team members based on skills and client needs.
Proper planning helps you analyze projects individually. With all the information in front of you, you can assign the resources who have the ability and capacity to work on the project. You can also assign resources based on their previous experience working with a specific client. By assigning a team member that the client already trusts, you will please the client and speed delivery of the project. For example, a resource who has already written multiple blog posts on the same subject for a client will likely finish the assignment faster, and more accurately, than a writer who must learn the topic before starting. Your team will appreciate such efficiency as well.
3) Employees don’t burn out.
Creatives want to create. But creativity ebbs and flows.
When it comes to your resources, new assignments may spark their desire to create content. But too much work will extinguish the flame.
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Proper planning helps you keep your resources happy by keeping them from burning out. You can ensure that they have enough work to remain engaged but that they don’t have more work than they can handle. A healthy challenge can inspire your resources, and thus please your clients. But too much work with too little time can cause creativity to wane and clients to complain.
4) Projects stay on track.
Creating and distributing content takes time. You must research, create, revise (perhaps multiple times), publish, and promote. Pressure mounts as deadlines near because keeping projects on time, within budget, and in line with clients’ expectations becomes harder with each passing day. The less time you have, the more you try to do.
You can only do so much before your projects derail. You must allot adequate time for each step in the content marketing process. Resource planning helps you ensure that each team member has the availability and ability to finish their work within the time provided. A real-time calendar that shows the current status of every project for your agency can be particularly useful in delivering work as promised. You can track red flags for overloaded schedules and unrealistic deadlines, for example. You also can monitor how time is being spent, how resources are performing, and where bottlenecks are occurring.
Creating great content enables your agency to grow and your clients to succeed. Your clients will reward your good work by giving you more work.
Resource planning will help you create the quality content that your clients expect. Your team also will be energized and your projects will be profitable.
We’ve provided just four examples of why proper resource planning is crucial for content marketing agency success. How has resource planning helped your agency succeed?
