How to Create Functional SOPs (That Your Employees Actually Use)

Everybody tells you to make SOPs as an agency owner. It’s the only way to grow, right?

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Your marketing agency needs SOPs. That’s a fact. But your agency doesn’t need to waste time creating documents that collect digital dust. If you make SOPs for every single task in your business, your hiring process will be a breeze. But, soon, you’ll find your employees and contractors aren’t even opening up those SOPs. They figured out their way to get the task done, and it’s more efficient.

All the time you spent on those SOPs is wasted—and it could have been used in a better way. At this year’s Traffic and Conversion Summit, Ryan Deiss talked about the importance of creating SOPs and not creating SOPs.

How to Create Functional SOPs

Functional SOPs are the brain of your business. We’re not saying that you don’t need SOPs. You definitely do. Standard operating procedures (SOPs) help you hire, move employees to different positions, and figure out where you’re inefficient. Especially as an agency owner, SOPs are your absolute best friend.

If you want to scale your agency from 5 clients to 10 and eventually 20+, SOPs are the way to do it. But only if you use them the right way. If you spend too much time on SOPs your employees don’t use, you wasted time that could have been spent on lead generation or deliverables.

Step #1: Choose the top tasks you need SOPs for

Audience profiling is a critical component of any effective content marketing strategy.

If you’re not aware of your target audience, you wouldn’t know what sort of material to create, where to post it, and where to market it.

It’s imperative to understand the people you’re trying to attract to your content. Try to find out what they enjoy reading and what attracts them to click.

Then, undergo a comprehensive examination of your marketing goals to develop a collection of buyer personas and demographic profiles.

Here is a step-by-step way to go about this:

Create Demographic Profiles: Marital status, educational level, family size, career, income level, gender, religion, race, and age should be included. When targeting companies, check for company age, yearly income, kind of produce, number of branches, number of workers, customer size, geographic area, and industry

Create Buyer Personas: These fictitious personalities are a “qualitative deep dive” that examines your audience’s requirements, objectives, wants, difficulties, beliefs, and attitudes based on demographic data. Pretend to be like your customers and use feedback forms. Then, think about how you could solve their difficulties or satisfy their wants

Provide Them The Content: Once you have determined who your target audience is, consider which social platforms they frequent, which keywords pique their interest, and what material they want. You may have to go through extensive trend research using web tools such as Google Trends

This was an important SOP for us because 1) we uploaded a new podcast every week (recurring task), and 2) we needed to create a consistent experience with our listeners (to move the needle on audience growth).

Step #2: Write down every step with an explanation

Each task that moves the needle and is done on a consistent basis has the green light for an SOP. In Step 2, don’t worry about anything but writing down every step of a task or process in as much detail as possible. Your goal is to be able to hand this document to someone one the street and have them be able to do that task or run that process.

Yep, your SOP needs to be that detailed.

When we write SOPs, we divide them into sections. This makes it easy for the person doing the task or running the process to know what they need before getting started and moving on to the next step.

At this stage, you’re just writing down everything involved in the task. The next step is giving your SOP the final polish.

Step #3: Delete as many words as possible

Each SOP should be as short as possible. The longer the SOP, the more complicated you’re making the task or procedure. Complicated tasks and procedures are the opposite of growth in a business. You don’t want your employees stuck on a single task all day because it takes them 30+ pages to get through the SOP.

In step 3, you have one goal: delete as many words as possible from your SOP. Shorten your sentences. Tighten up your explanations. Use more images. Make your SOP a seamless experience instead of a cartography class.

Our SOP for the Certified Partner Weekly Email is two pages long. It doesn’t need to be any longer for our email team to get it written and out the door. This SOP is broken up into two sections:

Procedure

Email Outline

At the top of the document is the schedule for ideating, drafting, reviewing, and submitting each week’s email. Below that is the email outline to follow.

Are Your Employees Really Using Your SOPs?

They might not be today…but they can be tomorrow. Just by simplifying how many SOPs you create and how you write them, your marketing agency can change overnight. You can go from putting out little fires all day long to knowing that any task/procedure moving the needle and happening consistently is getting taken care of.

As the owner, executive, or manager of a marketing agency, this is a breath of fresh air. If you’re focused on putting out the (consistent) little fires that come with employees and freelancers not using SOPs because they’re too complicated, bulky, and time consuming, how can you captain your ship towards smoother waters?

There’s a hard way to grow your agency and an easy way. Part of the easy way is creating functional SOPs so your employees actually use them. The other part is the realization that you don’t know everything, and you’re not supposed to. There are marketing strategies, agency growth tactics, and marketing knowledge that you don’t have—that could help your agency reach your big goal this year.