Agencies are changing heavily with upcoming AI tools:
Generative tools like Chat GPT, Perplexity or Copilot assist research and,
when used correctly, provide astounding results that might need little additional work.
At the same time, it feels like this AI boom has also brought more attention to process automation in general.
I’ve been running agencies in digital marketing for almost 20 years - from a solo freelance role to leading a small team at my consulting firm solicom.net, to a team of 25 SEOs at my agency SEOLeverage.
Whoever has been running an agency knows about all the different processes involved; each of them might take 20 different steps to execute, involving 5, 10 or maybe even more different tools:
- Customer onboarding, CRM setup, Project management setup, Task lists, …
- E-mail sequences, Landing page generation, Copywriting, Content creation
- Concepts for visuals, visuals design, feedback loops, etc.
- Podcast preparation work, editing, show notes, social media snippets, …
- Website work, web development
- Strategy meetings, meeting recaps, Zoom calls
- Dashboard creation, reporting
- and so on.
Many agencies still work on most of them manually, with experienced staff clicking through the same apps day after day, week after week.
Wouldn’t it be better for your marketing strategists to spend time researching your clients’ competitive landscapes rather than setting up the next project on Clickup or Monday.com?
Increased competition
Every agency I talk to has been seeing increased competition in recent years: between more and more solopreneurs presenting themselves as agencies and more clients going down the DIY route with the latest AI tools, running and scaling an agency has gotten more complex.
To stay competitive while maintaining quality, it’s crucial to consistently work on optimizing your existing processes - or, as my business mentor James Schramko would advise business owners:
“zoom in”, improve things, and zoom out again.
In practical terms, this means:
- Pick a process
- Disassemble it into its parts
- Look at each part and improve it, automate it, make it more efficient
- Enjoy an overall improved performance
BPA for agencies
Process automation (often referred to as Business Process Automation or BPA) has been around for many years. Funnily enough, it’s never been really getting into most agencies' day-to-day management.
This is surprising, especially because many of the tools agencies use these days lend themselves very well to the automation of regular tasks, freeing up (human) capacities that can be used for more qualified work.
To automate our processes in my agencies, I’m following a framework I called IMPACTO, covering:
- Investigate
- Measure
- Processes
- Automation
- Condition
- Transformation
- Optimization
Applying this framework, we’ve been able to uncover, redefine, optimize, and automate, a series of processes over the years that were thought to be always in the realm of marketing experts.
This frees up my consulting experts to focus on high-level research and analysis work, knowing that the “mechanic” tasks are being taken care of by our smart BPA tools.
Start with IMPACTO
The IMPACTO framework starts with a thorough investigation:
Which processes do you actually have in your business?
In our case, our processes had been well-documented and updated for years in our SOPs (standard operating procedures).
In other agencies, this step might require some brainstorming with the different team members about what they work on repeatedly, as well as the necessary steps those tasks actually take.
What gets measured can be improved.
You won’t know if something has improved if you don't measure. The second step in IMPACTO is to measure a particular situation to be able to get a status quo and compare the result after an optimization.
Measurements can be quantitative (e. g., how long does onboarding take), but also qualitative (how happy are clients with their onboarding process).
A process can primarily be measured entirely, but specific steps might also be relevant to measure individually.
Processes and sub-processes
Every significant process consists in various sub-processes. Once you line up the trigger for a particular process and the sequence that follows, the image becomes more apparent.
The overall process might be
- Purchase (e. g. through stripe)
- Invoicing (QuickBooks, etc.)
- Welcome e-mail
- User setup
- Onboarding call
However, when you look more closely, the details are really important, e. g. Invoicing doesn’t only consist of sending an invoice but also of creating the client account in your software - and might right now involve a manual step to verify the client details, their tax number and so on.
The welcome e-mail might actually require a previous step of creating a username and password for the client so they can access their dashboards, which in turn requires secure access to their analytics account and ads accounts before.
Business Process Automation for agencies requires a specific design phase, where the individual details are documented, and the different cases are illustrated so everybody in the BPA project understands exactly what happens at which moment.
Automation - finally
Now that you know which processes and sub-processes are involved in delivering your agency’s service, it’s time to look at automation.
First of all, not everything should be automated.
Most agencies provide creative or knowledge work - and we know that critical thinking and creativity isn’t the strong suit of AI (at least not right now).
So, when looking through the processes, it is crucial to highlight the elements that absolutely need to be done by a human being.
Humans should mainly stick with
- processes that cannot be defined down to their last detail (e. g. design a logo)
- processes that require a huge amount of experience to handle
- processes that are different for each particular agency account
On the flip side, good candidates for automation are
- processes that humans are doing in a “mechanic” way (setting up users, accounts, projects, etc.), using templates to send e-mails, notifying team members about new projects, adding task templates to project management systems, etc.
Condition / Quality
Despite the opportunities with generative AI, the quality or condition of the end result must not be forgotten. Once automation has correctly replaced specific mechanic tasks in your agency, make sure the end result is consistent and high-quality.
Adding automation must never decrease the quality of the end result.
Transformation
Once you line up the processes, define them, pick up their elements, optimize them, make you agency overall run more efficiently, it’s natural that a transformation sets in:
Your teams and clients are going to get used to operating more efficiently.
They might even uncover additional opportunities where automation could also contribute.
Sometimes even new offer segments can be considered now that automation is a valid and proven option.
Your agency has shifted from the old “all manual work” to operating in a hybrid mode of high-qualified manual labor paired with strategic automation.
Your operations are set up for success in the growing competitive marketplace.
But you’re not done yet:
Optimization
The “O” of IMPACTO considers that a process is never fully optimized. There will always be things to tweak here and there to optimize further.
This is why the measurement is so essential, and also, an ongoing monitoring/optimization process should be implemented to consistently check if the current automations are still doing their job or need adjustments.
Your turn
Now it’s your turn - is your agency well optimized and automated already?
E-mail me and let me know: info@gertmellak.com!
