Learn How This Marketing Agency Creates eBooks in Hours Rather than Days

As the CEO and the Chief Strategist of 3P Creative Group, a fast-growing marketing agency, Hannah Eisenberg understands that. Her agency follows one simple mantra to help their clients grow their businesses: Always provide value! Be the most helpful resource in your niche then your business will grow.

This unique understanding of modern marketing has helped 3P Creative Group as an agency grow significantly in the past few years. With clients spread between Europe and North America and increasing client success resulting in increased retainers, Hannah needed to find ways to be even more efficient while continuously improving the quality of her services.

A normal part of an inbound marketing retainer is the development of premium content marketing assets, also known as lead magnets - traditionally a very lengthy and expensive process involving an inbound marketing consultant, an account manager, a copy writer, an editor and a graphic designer.

What follows is the story of how Hannah and her team were able to condense the process of creating these valuable assets in hours, rather than weeks.

In their goal to help other businesses become more helpful, 3P Creative Group creates as many as 5 content offers each month for their various clients. These content offers could be anything from eBooks to checklists or how-to-guides, depending on the audience they are intended for.

A Problem Worth Solving

This type of content is valuable because it helps client businesses to solve real client problems as well as establish themselves as thought leaders by showcasing their industry expertise. By using these content offers as incentives, they encourage casual website visitors to become leads by swapping their contact details for content that is useful to them.

As effective as these content offers are in terms of lead generation, they had become laborious to create:

“We used to brainstorm and develop an outline, get approval from the client, and give the graphic designer general direction of what pages needed to be created. In the meantime, our team researched the topic further and created the content which was then sent to the graphic designer to put into the designed layout. Then we sent it for feedback to the client. Any feedback had to be changed by the graphic designer, but managed by the client-facing inbound marketing consultant. It was frustrating!”

This is a fairly typical workflow for any marketing agency when it comes to creating this type of premium content. The problem is that it is so resource intensive.

Relying on the continuous input of up to 6 different stakeholders, each step in the process has the potential to run long - impacting budgets and the agency’s ability to deliver results.

Hannah knew that if she could solve this problem then she would be able to give her agency a competitive edge by freeing up more resources and putting them to work where they would have a greater impact.

In her constant search for new ways to be more efficient and effective, Hannah found Beacon.

Reduce, Reuse and Recycle

“We use Beacon for top-of-the-funnel eBooks and guides wherever possible. Since it is easy to use, we can create an eBook within hours, instead of days - significantly cutting down the time and money spent on developing premium content.“

The process for creating an eBook now looks more like this:

The key to the simplification of this process comes from Beacon’s ability to utilise existing content during the planning and creation stages. Since most of the time, the agency creates specific blog posts that relate closely to the topic of the eBook, guide or other premium content asset, it makes sense to integrate that process - enabling the blog posts and the premium content to reinforce each other rather than be separate entities.

After the blog posts have been created, Hannah and her team selects the appropriate posts and Beacon will combine these blog posts and automate large parts of the design process so all that remains for the marketing team to do is edit and adjust.

“When I heard about Beacon, I was excited. Making the tedious manual process of copying and pasting blog posts and designing an eBook more efficient so my staff can focus their efforts on things that create value is awesome.“

“Without Beacon, I have to use my graphic designer who will then use InDesign or a similar tool that is not accessible to my inbound marketing consultant. There was a constant back and forth between the client, the designer and the consultant, which made the process much longer than it needed to be.“

By empowering their inbound marketers to own every stage of the eBook creation process from planning to delivery, the process becomes more manageable and streamlines as it does not have to rely on outside resources.

A New Approach

With Beacon as part of their toolkit, 3P Creative Group have turned their original process on its head. They now start by planning the content offer and working backwards to create the individual blog posts.

“We adapted our content creation process to be more streamlined and efficient. Now we consider using Beacon in the initial phase of brainstorming and outline creation phase. If it is a good fit, we can research, create, edit, and publish the content in the form of blog posts first and then create an eBook from those posts by using the tool.”

By using Beacon to create outstanding content, Hannah and her team are able to differentiate 3P Creative Group from other agencies.

“We have seen cost and time savings, shorter feedback cycles, and received overall great feedback regarding the layout and design of the eBooks.”

Onwards and Upwards

One of the challenges of running an agency is to maximise the resources that you already have. By utilising existing content and giving more power to their marketers, the future looks bright for 3P Creative Group. In the next 12 months the team will expand their services and begin to offer HubSpot COS website templates, campaign packs an in-person workshops.

Looks like Hannah and her team are well on their way to becoming the most helpful resource in their own niche.