Challenges & Opportunities in Managing a Content Marketing Team: Skale Content Case Study

In the attempt to manage its remote off-page content team more efficiently, Skale has taken a myriad of researched, calculated steps that helped them to further increase the clients’ pipeline and MRR. 

Thanks to an improved management system and people with the necessary expertise, the SaaS content marketing company has become a pillar in the link-building community, a place to turn to get higher recognition and ranking in terms of SEO. 

Just a few months back, Skale was looking to produce more articles for link-building purposes, improve the quality of work that left the company, and manage the team more efficiently. Fast forward to today, and Skale has significantly ramped up the performance of its remote team by implementing a variety of strategies, making smart investments, and hiring the right people. 

Company

Skale.so is a specialized B2B SaaS SEO agency, one that builds and implements revenue engines for its clients. Led by a team with real SaaS experience, including people who worked as Growth leaders at some of the fastest-growing SaaS companies, Skale has proven itself to be a true path toward better SEO for its clients in a very short time. 

The company offers fast results by balancing short, mid, and long-term wins. It currently works with brands like Holded, Attest, and HubSpot in making SEO their number one channel for driving revenue. 

Industry

SaaS, Link Building, SEO Scaling

The growth challenge

• Low number of articles produced per month

• Insufficient management of the off-page content team

• Ways to check and improve the writers’ performance

Approximately 6 months ago, the brand’s mission was to increase the content team’s performance, produce more articles on a monthly basis, and offer the team opportunities for growth. 

Founded in 2020, Skale achieved a lot in a very short timeframe thanks to its strong mission, dedicated team, and honest strategies for growth. In 2022, Skale decided to make changes that would help them tackle the growth challenges it was facing.  

As it turned out, Skale needed a transformation of its content team management strategies and fresh, yet experienced additions to the team that will tackle these issues. 

The current Skale off-page content manager, Donna Gleize, described the reason for the changes as follows:

“Skale was in a moment of growth where they needed more writers to achieve their goal. Without a dedicated manager that was proving difficult. There was no one single-handedly able to take on the full role.”

At this point, Skale’s mission was to produce a lot more high-quality, original articles every month. Their goal was 400 content pieces monthly but at that point, they didn’t have a dedicated person responsible for hiring, onboarding, communicating, and working alongside the writers to ensure this output. 

The Skale solution

Skale’s first step toward solving the problem turned out to be the key to the company’s growth. At a point where the brand was ready to produce more articles and tackle bigger projects for its existing clients, it was essential to hire a person who would oversee the work of the team of writers and manage them directly. 

Prior to hiring Donna Gleize as the off-page content manager, there was no one single-handedly managing the team. One of the writers who’s been with the company since its launch stepped in whenever possible, and the other manager in place was managing an entire department. No one, at this point, had the bandwidth to actively and attentively manage a growing team of content writers. 

The solution of Skale was to hire a content team manager. This was the natural next step at a point where the company was experiencing consistent growth. 

At the same time, Skale wanted to use the opportunity and find more than just a manager. They decided to look for an expert who will take the roles of:

• Manager for the off-page writers

• Writing coach who will onboard and train the remote writers

• An editor who will ensure that their work is up to the company’s standards

After all, the idea wasn’t only to expand the team and produce more content. The base mission of Skale is to consistently produce human-created, quality articles that will lead to their clients’ SEO growth. They needed to ensure that a growing team of writers will have a proper leader with the responsibility to ensure that the output was up to Skale’s standards. 

In addition to hiring a manager, Skale expanded its use of tools for the organization and distribution of content. Thanks to the insight of the manager, Donna Gleize, who was directly included in the process, Skale was able to streamline the process for new and existing writers starting with the onboarding process and ending with the publishing of the articles. 

A few months after the management team evaluated the work of the writers and the current processes, Skale replaced the retroactive evaluation system with an ongoing evaluation. A plan is set into motion to implement more in-depth SEO training for the writers in the next quarter, and writers get frequent guidance on which tools to use to optimize their content creation process. 

Producing more articles per month would require one of two things:

• Giving more workload to the existing team

• Hiring new people to produce the extra articles per month

Skale did the latter, and then some more. They hired new talent based on the manager’s analysis of what the company needed in terms of niches and quality. Thanks to in-depth onboarding and carefully thought-out SEO guidelines, onboarding the new team members is working seamlessly from their very first weeks. 

To increase the number of articles produced per month and reach the newly set quota of the company, the team started hiring new talent and analyzing the work of the writers working for the company at the moment. Based on the analysis, the company replaced some writers with a more fitting choice and started using new criteria to find the writers they need in the niches they work in. The main criterion used was ‘someone who’s passionate about writing, hoping to break into online freelance content writing’. 

With this criterion in mind, the Skale new team members started with deep training from their first week. The company offers an in depth onboarding process with guidelines and an open door for communication.

Skale also changed its strategy for assigning work to the team to improve the quality of the articles produced by the writers. According to Donna Gleize, her motto is: 

“The fewer briefs each writer has, the better the quality”. 

Today, Skale manages 40+ writers with a consistent, yet limited amount of work that strays from, in the words of Donna, ‘the toxic content-mill-like culture of expecting people to produce two to three articles per day’. 

The Results

A lot has changed in the off-page content team since Skale hired a person for the managerial role. Some of the results that are visible today are:

• Low churn rate and higher SEO for existing clients. Today, the content the off-page department produces isn’t exactly the bait that attracts many new clients, it’s more result driven. The goal of the company is to create higher metrics for current clients, who are also happy, evident with a low churn rate. For instance, here is how Skale helped Maze skale their monthly organic signups in just 6 months:

• Higher article quality. Thanks to ongoing work evaluations and other strategies used to manage the team, the overall quality of the articles being produced is higher. 

• Positive feedback from the remote writers. The team has expressed its appreciation for the management’s hands-on approach. 

• A bigger team of writers who are encouraged toward creating a portfolio for other clients and future opportunities.

When asked about the most fruitful change made in the management of the off-page content team in Skale, Donna responded:

“I would say it’s the ongoing evaluation instead of the retroactive evaluation. With ongoing evaluations, it’s sure the writer will jump in and make the necessary amends”. 

The results show that there was a lot of room for improvement and a lot of work to be done without a person there to see it. With the solution that Skale found, the situation has improved greatly, and Skale is rapidly moving toward beating its growth challenges. 

The process is neither easy nor simple. For starters, a team of 40+ remote off-page content writers is difficult to manage. In such a big - and growing team, there is every type of personality, writing style, and level of experience. 

Retroactive evaluations require that every writer is innovative, ambitious, and strongly adherent to guidelines and rules. This is not everyone, especially in a team that grows. The introduction of ongoing evaluations is showing great improvement even with the least ambitious of writers.

Skale has seen results in the amount of content produced each month, too. The team continues to use the tool built by the co-founder Jake Stainer, which is updated regularly based on suggestions made by writers, the manager, link builders, and other people who use it. 

The new writers are showing excellent results and expressing their satisfaction with the management of the team at the company. They feel safer because, when hired, each new freelancer signs an NDA and a Contractor Agreement for their protection, and that of Skale. This is also very useful for freelancers who need proof of ‘employment’. 

Since Skale works with a remote, freelance team, no one is at obligation to hold on to the company as a client or continue to work for them. Seeing how people are continuing their fruitful collaboration with the company, it’s safe to say that the team is extremely satisfied and believes that Skale’s management system works. 

This is also evident in the praise and feedback that’s continuously encouraged at Skale. Writers are free to discuss their concerns, turn to Donna for any troubles, and share their thoughts on how the process - and the work, can be improved. 

All things considered, Skale has found a phenomenal solution that has allowed it to manage a big and growing off-page content team in a way that produces good results for the clients, the company, and its writers. While this isn’t easy, the solutions to the growth challenges that Skale was facing not so long ago are yielding higher results for the company and are slowly, but surely allowing it to reach its goals.