What happens behind the scenes when you outsource content marketing to an agency? We think it’s worth understanding the blog process when the success of your content marketing investment is at stake.
Our blog process is one of our strengths. We believe having a strong, finely honed content process helps everyone do their best work by removing uncertainty and stress, and making costs and positive outcomes more predictable.
To show you what our blog process looks like, we’ll follow the steps we took to pull together the content strategy and production schedule for a client. You can see how it plays out for a typical article from topic pitch to initial search engine results.
When we welcome a new client on board, we send you an onboarding questionnaire. We ask you about your goals, preferences, industry trends, and so on. You can share with us any other documentation, like personas or content briefs.
Then, our strategist creates a Content Roadmap for your blog. This takes into consideration all the information you’ve provided and confirms that we understand your goals.
We put a lot of thought into the roadmap phase of our blog process, because it provides the reasoning behind the topics we propose for your blog.
We also understand that priorities and focus can shift over time. To help keep our team on the same page with you, we create a living document based on the questionnaire that you fill out when you begin working with us. We call this your “client notes”. You can update this document or leave comments as needed, and our whole team has access to it – one way we make it easy to work async.
Next, we propose several topics for your blog that support the roadmap, which you can approve or provide feedback on. We organize these ideas in your customer portal.
You can also add your own topics for us to write about. In fact, you can be as hands-on as you would like. Some of our clients regularly send their own topics or provide base content for us to work with. We encourage you to add your thoughts, even if they are unstructured, and our team can help you turn them into concrete projects. You can also add your own team members to the portal we set up for you.
Then, you review each topic. You can see the proposed title, scope, audience, target keyword and volume/difficulty rating, goal, angle, etc. Many clients approve all topics immediately.
Kevin Conti of Software Ideas, said, “You killed it with the topics, great job! All are approved.”
When you approve the topic, the system will add it to your content calendar, and you can see the status and due date at any time.
Your coordinator provides a single point of contact at SaaSpirin, managing the team of strategist, writer, and editor and keeping your content calendar on track. Our blog process is designed to create a productive rhythm from the start, and we hear overwhelmingly that it resonates with clients.
One client doubled their monthly plan with us before we even began writing, saying “I'm impressed with the research you guys did already.” (And that same client also doubled their organic traffic within six months!)
Once you’ve approved the topics, your coordinator then assigns a writer to work on your content from our pool of vetted talent.
When assigning a writer to your account, we look for experience in your industry or a similar one, plus a track record for delivering great content for other clients. Once we’ve determined that the fit is right, we keep the same writer on your project going forward. In the event that we need to change writers, our editor helps smooth the way for the new writer to get up to speed quickly.
Our coordinator assigns work to the writer according to your content calendar. The writer works with our editor to make sure every piece hits our high bar of quality before we share it with you.
Our editor provides input on tone, substance, and clarity, and confirms that the content supports the objective of the blog post. They make sure that each post reflects your blog’s voice consistently.
When the article is ready, we share it with you in Google Docs for your review. If needed, we fine-tune the article based on your feedback.
Clients leave comments like this one by Ferenc Fekete of VeryCreatives: “I love it! It’s full of knowledge” and this by Elium: “I'm very satisfied with the content you provide. It's clear and easy to read and I like the description for SEO.”
Once you approve the blog post, you can publish it or ask us to post it for you as an add-on to your plan. We’ll take care of the image, formatting, and all the little things that add value at that point. Learn more here: Publishing Blog Posts – A Behind-the-Scenes Look at What We Do.
As we continue working together, we look for evidence that our strategy is working and adjust when necessary. Many of our articles capture search traffic and play an important role in the sales process for our customers.
For the example article above, SEO indicators surfaced quickly. Ahrefs shows that it began capturing keyword rankings almost immediately, including for the target keyword, and has begun to accumulate backlinks.
The path to content marketing success looks different for different companies. That’s why we always align with you on strategy in the first step of our blog process. Then we execute, taking on the day-to-day headaches of content production, so you can focus on the big picture.
The process works. Robin Vander Heyden of ManyRequests told us they started to get signups from search in only a month and a half: “Happy customer here as well. Thanks for your great work! We love the articles, and we got our first trials from Google search last week after just 1.5 months of publishing content.”
If you’re interested to know what sort of results you can expect from blogging with us, see more samples of our work and read the following blog posts to understand the factors behind content marketing success.
Talk to us about content for your SaaS business today.