There is a phrase that states people who do not understand their history are doomed to repeat it; this is also true for a marketing agency. Think about it. There are many moving cogs ensuring that the agency is running effectively. How do you capitalize on what is working and improve your weak points if you do not understand them?
One of the best ways to understand and grow your agency is by properly documenting everything. Many businesses have a short life cycle, and many more have an even lower probability of success. Proper documentation could be the difference between creating a job for yourself and establishing a business with employees.
For example, Web 20 ranker is a white-label SEO agency with over 200 employees located at different ends of the world. One of the ways the company has scaled so drastically in the past 2 years is the commitment they have to document everything and find ways to improve its weak points. Check out video feedback about Web20 ranker and how they use their platform to improve internal operations just as much as they use it to help their customer base. They religiously talk about SOPs(Standard operating procedures) and how they constantly work to improve them.
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The Importance Of Documentation To An Agency
Process documentation is crucial because it helps ensure consistency and accuracy in how tasks are performed and improves communication and understanding among team members. It facilitates training new employees and the continuity of operations in the event of staff turnover. Most importantly, it helps identify inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement and can serve as a valuable resource for auditing and compliance purposes. Let’s look at this in detail:
Standardization: Helps standardize how work is done within an organization, ensuring all employees follow the same procedures. Documentation also ensures tasks are being completed consistently and efficiently.
Compliance: Many industries have regulations that require companies to document their processes. This documentation can be used to demonstrate compliance with these regulations and can help to avoid penalties or fines.
Training: Training new employees can often take up a lot of time. Such documentation can be used as a training tool for new employees in case of a turnover, helping them to amalgamate into the company quickly.
Auditing: Help in internal and external audits of the organization. It can help to identify areas for improvement and to demonstrate that the organization is following established procedures.
Improve the process: Allows for continuous improvement. Having a clear and detailed process allows the agency to see inefficiencies and bottlenecks, making optimizing and improving the process easier.
How To Create An Effective Documentation Process For Your Agency
When creating agency documentation, building on the current foundation of operations is essential. Start slow and steady and continuously build as the agency grows.
Prioritize High-Impact Areas
Every agency is different. Every good agency has clearly thought-out goals and ambitions. To create adequate process documentation, ensure you identify your agency’s core functions. Understand your strengths and weaknesses before any documentation commences.
Prioritize a few high-impact areas. We cannot stress the importance of narrowing it down to a few. The more high-impact areas you focus on, the harder it will be to implement the documentation. The reality is that these high-impact areas will often touch on many departments, and as you scale, they will still be the basis of more documentation.
Select A Documentation Format And Outline Expectations
Again every agency is different. Once you understand your high-impact areas and the goals you want to capitalize on, focus on the company culture.
Is your team more receptive to videos, text, or Slideshows? Who needs to be involved in the documentation process? How detailed do the documents need to be?
Sometimes, agency owners create process documentations that are not effective since they are not working in the department on a day-to-day basis. Consultation with team members who actually execute the process could present you with a quick solution. In this step, getting feedback from your team is the highest priority. Plus, the more your employees are involved in the documentation, the more they own the process and the more amenable they will be to use it.
Select A Platform
Where do you store the process documentation now that you have created them? The most important thing to remember here is to ensure that the documentation is readily and easily available to everyone. It is often more convenient to store the documentation live! Where work is done. This way, everyone can easily access it, and there is a lower chance of losing the documentation. You can decide to store them in the CRM; your agency uses Google Drive or an internal site. Where you keep the information is not as important as how accessible it is.
Now that you have proper documentation that is well stored and accessible to everyone, the last and perhaps the most important step is scheduled updates. Remember to update your process documentation continuously as the agency grows and tackles more issues. Hold zero-disturbance scheduled meetings to discuss improving the process and document everything. In the end, you will have a more effective process, all well documented, accessible, and practical.
