We've never heard a digital agency owner say, "My team is too efficient!"
Instead, it seems like the opposite is true: agency owners are always looking for ways to make their teams more productive and successful.
Agency efficiency measures the effectiveness with which an agency uses its resources—such as time, money, and personnel—to achieve its goals. It refers to how quickly and accurately an agency can produce results while using minimal resources.
Higher efficiency indicates better performance in terms of output per unit of input. In other words, it’s how much an agency accomplishes in the shortest amount of time.
If you want to streamline your agency’s processes and get the most out of your business initiatives, this article will show you 11 ways to do it.
Before you work on your internal processes (e.g., time tracking, project management), pick the right tools.
The right tools for your business will vary depending on the type of agency you run. A few essential criteria include:
You want to find tools that support integration and automate workflows. This includes CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, accounting software, and project management tools.
Automation and integration platforms like Zapier might fit into your tech stack as well if you use and collect data from many different sources.
You want easy-to-use software that helps you measure progress, track costs, and optimize resources. It should also help you spend less time and money on repeatable processes (e.g., data entry, and timesheets).
Duda website builder, for example, is tailor-made for agencies and focuses on improving agencies' efficiency by allowing them to automate tasks like site creation and billing (for web design and other services). It includes client management and team collaboration tools for maximum efficiency.
As a digital agency owner, you probably have a lot of web design and management projects (we sure hope so). A site builder built for that kind of website-building operation is essential to ensure you’re doing more than just building top-performing websites for your clients—you’re also streamlining workflows and optimizing agency-client processes and communications.
These are all things you should be looking for in a website builder.
But it’s not just about website building.
Do your research and find those agency tools that optimize your existing processes and offer you the added value that helps you do your job better.
Managing process like accounting, project management, and payroll through spreadsheets is time-consuming and tedious. Automate these tasks with software that will reduce manual processes and errors.
You want software that can do the job without adding complexity to your day-to-day operations.
Depending on your company's size and needs, this will vary. Enterprise companies, for example, need customizable solutions with lots of additional features and programming capabilities.
If you’re running a smaller agency, you’ll probably underuse and overpay for software with too many functionalities. And your staff will have a hard time working with it.
If you make buying decisions without them, you might end up paying for tools no one uses. In the worst case, this might result in unexpected employee turnover or increased inefficiency. Get feedback on tools you’re considering, and make sure everyone is on board with your choices before proceeding.
It's important to remember that the right tools will dramatically boost your efficiency, but they won't fix deep-rooted problems. Make sure you create standardized processes before investing in new tools.
Too many tools can overcomplicate your business processes, cause redundancies, and make employee onboarding difficult.
When team members constantly need to switch between platforms, they aren't spending less time on tasks. Instead, they're spending time relearning each platform and switching between them as needed.
Within a digital marketing agency, there are a few essential tools:
There are also service-specific tools that you may need, including:
Some tools are robust and offer many different features. Salesforce, for example, is an all-in-one CRM and marketing automation tool that can be programmed to do almost anything.
However, it's important to note that the more features a tool has, the harder it is to learn and use. Its pricing will also reflect those features.
If you can find tools with simpler interfaces that offer exactly what you need, they might be a better fit for your agency, especially if it isn't a large enterprise.
Over 40% of workers spend at least 25% of their work week on repetitive activities that software can easily automate.
This excessive amount of manual work wastes valuable time and energy that could be used to focus on more important tasks like client interactions, content creation, and strategy. To improve efficiency, look for ways to automate mundane tasks like data entry, emails, reminders, customer support inquiries, reporting, invoicing, and scheduling.
For example, you could use automation to:
These processes are all possible without automation, but you’d spend much more time and energy on them.
Templates make it easy for your team to quickly get tasks done without needing to start from scratch each time.
There are five main things you can templatize to save time and energy:
When you have branded plug-and-play templates and standardized processes for these five things, you'll speed up the sales cycle, onboard clients and employees faster, provide a better service for your clients, improve your client relationships, and reduce the amount of time you spend on each project.
If you want to reduce your company's overhead and maximize your output, an arsenal of vetted freelancers is often a better decision than hiring in-house marketers and designers.
Outsourcing specialists in areas like web design, content creation, video production, and search engine optimization (SEO) can be a great way to quickly scale up your operations without having to hire full-time employees.
Benefits of a freelance workforce include:
Hiring the right freelancers can be tricky, though. Rates and skill sets vary wildly, even for similar search queries.
Be sure to vet them carefully and look for red flags before you bring them on board.
Here are a few red flags to be aware of:
If your clients are missing valuable information, a few things can happen:
To avoid these issues, you need an effective onboarding process that clearly outlines your expectations and sets up clear communication channels between your agency and your clients.
Start by examining your current onboarding process from start to finish. What can you do to streamline it? Are there any steps that are redundant or unnecessary? How long does each step take and is it the optimal amount of time?
Evaluate every aspect of your client onboarding process, including the initial contact, pre-engagement questionnaires and surveys, the actual onboarding call, and post-onboarding feedback.
Once you identify areas that could be improved, create a client brief with step-by-step instructions for each stage of the process. This will help ensure that your clients receive all the information they need quickly and accurately—without any surprises or miscommunications along the way.
You should also create a client intake form that details everything you need from the client before starting a project. This could include information about their business model, target audience, and desired outcomes.
Who likes getting on Zoom meetings every day?
We sure don't.
It can be easy to rely on daily check-ins with clients and team members, but this can quickly become overwhelming.
If you want extra time in your schedule, one of the quickest ways to get it is by limiting your communications.
Instead of daily meetings, communicate with clients and team members through a centralized agency management system (e.g., Asana, Monday). You can use this system to centralize all project communication, tasks, and documents. You can also use it to provide real-time updates.
This helps keep everyone on the same page without needing to constantly have calls or meetings.
If your clients need to get on meetings with you, use a tool like Calendly that automatically limits your availability based on custom parameters.
In addition to client communication, internal communication is vital to improving efficiency.
If you use an agency management system for your clients, you can assign tasks to different team members and keep track of their progress in real-time. This will help you stay on top of project timelines and make sure everyone is working together effectively.
You should also consider investing in a communication platform like Slack, where team members can quickly share updates and ask questions.
Slack also integrates with Google Suite, project management tools, CRM, and other software to make it easier for team members to collaborate.
Time tracking can be an HR nightmare if you have more than a few contractors or employees.
If you want a clear picture of how much money is flowing in and out of your agency because of payroll and measure it against performance metrics, you need to have a system in place that tracks time automatically.
There are plenty of tools out there, like Hubstaff, Time Doctor, and Toggl, that make it easy for you to track employee hours in real-time.
Using these tools, your employees can log their own time and the platform will generate automatic reports that show you exactly where your money is going and how productive it's making you.
These tools also help make sure that tasks are completed on time and give you valuable insights into the performance of individual team members.
On the client side, you probably use KPIs to gauge their campaign performance. But as an agency owner, you also need to track your own team’s performance.
There are a few essential KPIs to monitor if you want a clear picture of your agency's productivity:
By monitoring and tracking all of these metrics, you can quickly see what needs improvement and make adjustments to increase your agency’s efficiency.
Like most things, agency efficiency is an iterative process that requires frequent review and improvement.
Take a look at your workflows every couple of months to ensure that everything is running smoothly. Ask for feedback from both employees and clients in order to identify any bottlenecks or areas that need improvements.
The goal should be to optimize processes and make sure everyone is working towards the same goals.
To encourage honest feedback, you can do one or more of the following:
Running an agency is tough. Delivering excellent results for your clients isn't enough—to do that long-term, you need to retain employees, create internal systems that work, and stay on top of KPIs that tell you how efficient your agency is.
However, with the tips outlined above and a bit of iteration, it's possible to optimize your agency’s efficiency and produce more, with less.
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