Episode Details

Have you thought about offering content creation as a service but not sure where to start or how to charge? Content is a huge part of almost everything we do for our clients, but often times its the client themselves that hold up projects by not providing good (or timely) content. When you take control of content creation, your agency can help you be more successful in achieving the clients' goals. It may seem daunting to add content creation as a service, but it can also be very rewarding in the long run.

In today's episode, we discuss:

• #1 benefit of offering content creation as a service.
• How to charge for content.
• What type of content are agencies creating?

Today I had the opportunity to sit down with my good friends at Verblio, Steve Pockross, CEO, and Paul Zalewski, Vice President of Marketing. Paul and Steve know a lot about content. After all, they run a content agency sourced with over 3,000 copywriters. Recently, Verblio sent out a survey to thousands of agencies to get a better idea of what agencies think about content creation, how they use it, and best practices surrounding content creation. Their findings may come as a surprise, but learning from them can help grow your agency and get better results for your clients.

Steve and Paul say that as agencies, we should not expect clients to have the ability to create their own content. Yes, they might be the expert in their industry but they are not always successful at writing about it. According to Verblio's survey, of the agencies who felt their content was successful less than 20% of them curated content from the client. What does that mean? Well, it means that although the client is the industry expert they suck at writing about it! :) Let's be honest, clients are busy and writing is hard. So even though they mean well, they put writing on the backburner because it's a difficult, time-consuming task.

The solution is for you, as an agency, is to take control over the content creation. By either writing in-house or outsourcing it, you can speed up your project cycle by half. For example, in most cases, a website build that would normally take 6 months, can be completed in 3-4 months when the agency is not waiting on the client to write and handover content.

Okay. You've decided you're going to start offering content — good! But how much do you charge? Well, according to to Verblio's survey 87% of agencies who felt they have a solid content creation service include the cost for it in their monthly retainer. And the vast majority of those agencies felt as though content was a major profit center for them. This is a key point because, as an agency, it might be easy to think content creation is an area where you can be competitive and price yourself lower than the competition. But when you spend the time and dollars it takes to do a great job you can make money on it. So, why race to the bottom?

Verblio's survey indicated that the average agency is marking up content 200%. Why walk away from that kind of margin but undercutting yourself on pricing?

There are 3 general options when it comes to charging for content:

1. Build it into your retainer. I find this approach usually works the best. Figure out how much you are going to charge for content and make it part of your retainer agreement.
2. Charge content as a separate line item. Here, you make content a monthly charge but are transparent about the fee.
3. Charge a la carte. Charge on a per-piece basis. The downside is, this has a tendency of making content look like an extra instead of a necessity.

Typically, when you make content a part of your service offering and show the benefits of inc