Warning: Your Agency’s Productivity Will Skyrocket with These Tips (No, Really!)

The more chargeable tasks and projects you complete, the more revenue your agency earns. 

The less time you spend on administrative and non-billable work, the more attention you give to worthwhile client engagement.

Productivity always translates to profitability. However, remaining ultra-productive is often simpler said than done, especially as you grow your company.

Let me help you out. Here are five ways to boost your digital agency’s productivity:

1. Manage your tools.

As a digital agency, you likely use different tools to complete your tasks, deliver services, and operate other business aspects. 

These tools can include platforms for video creation, content marketing, internal collaboration, and so on.

As your agency scales, your toolset also grows, increasing the need to manage them effectively. 

Organizing your tools helps you better streamline your completion of tasks associated with those platforms.

Managing them is also crucial to ensure your company’s cybersecurity. If you keep using outdated software, you can overlook vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit. Your files can end up corrupted, illegally modified, or stolen for cybercriminals to profit from on the dark web.

Failing to manage online tools can even hurt your administrative costs. Let’s say you discontinued using a SaaS without terminating your paid account. Unalerted, your finance team ends up still paying for the subscription.

Or, you might have installed several related tools without realizing you can use one comprehensive SaaS. You can save both cost and effort by using one platform that covers several functions.

To manage your SaaS and other offline tools, assign one department to take charge of all that, e.g., IT. Then require the director to collaborate accordingly with your finance team.

You can also use robust SaaS management platforms to supervise all software information and updates, including terms and conditions and dates of start of use.

This way, you get a better overview of your tools and can better manage your usage.

2. Manage your engagements and related tasks.

Like any other business, running your digital marketing agency involves numerous tasks and projects. If you don’t supervise them close enough, you can lose track of deadlines and agreements, overspend, and ruin your reputation and client relationships.

Get a firm hold of all your projects and clients with reliable, professional services platforms. 

These tools assist you in planning, documenting, and implementing your projects and services. They can automate your business processes and help you track outputs against your objectives and performance metrics.

They also integrate project and service information, calendars, contact management, billing, and accounting, among other functions. 

Your clients can even complete tasks on their end through the platforms’ built-in self-service portals. They can set appointments with your agency, pay their periodic bills, and others.

Managing engagements in this way relieves you of administrative burdens and increases your focus on implementation. It also heightens your visibility over your projects and services.

3. Hire the right people.

Your organization consists of people who can make or break your company’s performance. So working with the best people for the job is crucial to make your agency run optimally.

Hire excellent talents according to your business requirements. Depending on what they are, you can diversify your team’s level of expertise and previous work experience. 

This helps enhance your working environment, administrative expenses (e.g., salaries), and even business sustainability.

Your team can consist of: 

• Experts with proven excellent track records and years of rich practical working experience
• Specialists with intermediate skills and industry knowledge, and 
• Novice talents with the relevant capabilities and backgrounds.

Of course, you need to examine their professionalism, diligence, integrity, and other essential aspects. You want people who can dynamically finish their deliverables on schedule and be resourceful and efficient. Include other traits needed for their jobs.

Once you have them on your team, do the following to retain them:

• Motivate and execute clear working agreements
• Collaborate with them closely through always-active communication lines
• Keep the group cohesive and harmonious
• Offer competitive pay and benefits
• Cultivate a healthy company culture, including personal and work-life balance.

4. Create a project wiki

A project wiki is an open-source document (usually web-based) containing all relevant information your team should know. It serves as a handy reference with details members can look up anytime. 

Creating a project wiki helps you and your team stay on the same page without holding physical meetings every time. 

It also serves as an excellent alternative to email threads often drowning out critical information. It prevents teams from wasting time browsing through thousands of messages before finding what they’re looking for. 

Let us say your video production team discussed tools and ways to speed up a video. Instead of emailing your list, write it on a wiki and publish it in your internal company file repository, chatroom, collaboration platform, etc.

Set up project wikis with these steps:

• Gather all information valuable for the team’s knowledge
• Organize and explain the information in easy-to-understand terms
• Insert any necessary web page links
• Keep the documents in secure but quickly accessible storage locations
• Craft wiki templates for easy customization later
• Regularly visit and update your wiki as needed.

5. Pick the right clients to engage with.

Client engagements can positively or adversely impact your digital agency’s productivity, depending on their manner of dealing.

Some can be a headache, while some are pleasant to work with. To maintain your company’s productivity, choose the latter and watch out for these discouraging client types:

• Clients from industries you have not yet fully explored or aren’t confident to handle
• Clients expecting you to accomplish more work without paying the premium
• Clients refusing to pay your intended rates and insist on discounts, etc.

You don’t need to say “yes” to every work opportunity. Choose only those that align with your mission and help bring you to greater heights, not pull you down.

Pursue maximum productivity for your digital agency

With these and other strategies, you can raise your digital agency’s productivity to the maximum. 

While doing this can require some process modifications, the rewards will be worth it. Your team can work more efficiently and cheerfully, engagements are smoother to handle, and your profits can go sky-high. 

There’s no better time than now to pursue this productivity-boosting game plan and achieve your company’s goals fast.