Boosting Content Creation with Custom Templates | ILABS Marketing

Do you have a favorite bakery or restaurant? There are one or two items you just can’t seem to eat enough, and they are always good whenever you go back.

Vanessa Martínezin Marketing

The consistent quality relies on a carefully followed recipe.

In the digital marketing world, we use templates as recipes to create tasty and engaging content. Templates help to organize your thoughts and research. They provide talking points and directions from the introduction down to the close or call to action.

Digital marketers must produce a consistent stream of emails and web content to promote themselves or their clients. By creating custom templates, you ensure the best marketing practices, plus they save effort, time, and money.

If you work for a marketing agency that continuously creates new promotional emails, builds new websites, or refurbishes old ones, creating custom templates will streamline your job.

In this article, we will share some reasons why we use templates when creating different content for our clients. We know from our experience that templates help achieve the quality and consistency you need when building a website or email promotion. Besides, they save time, and you will see positive results too.

Let’s begin!

Why You Need to Boost Your Content Creation

On December 1, 1913, Henry Ford opened the first moving assembly line for the Model-T automobile’s mass production. His revolutionary innovation reduced the time it took to build one car from over 12 hours to only one hour and 33 minutes. It revolutionized the way we look at every process.

Building a website or crafting an email sequence is much like building a car. Various parts and pieces must come together for them to work correctly.

A template is your digital assembly line. All the required elements come together in the correct order and sequence to achieve a completed project. Templates help ensure that we don’t miss or overlook any part while speeding up repetitive processes.

Written and visual content are the lifeblood of any digital marketing campaign. Templates help you reach five marketing goals, including:

Brand Awareness – Create unique content for each buyer’s journey from fashion to enterprise-level software.
Audience Engagement – Quickly add plugins, apps, or other features that encourage audience engagement by making it easy to join in on the conversation.
Lead Generation – Templates simplify the process of creating B2B lead-gen content such as landing pages, email promotions, banners, popups, and all different kinds of recurring digital promotions.
Loyalty and Evangelism – Developing a consistent brand message and experience using templates promotes brand recognition and loyalty.
Sales and Profitability – Templates save time, which reduces costs and increases profits.

Although the purposes differ, the creation process is essentially the same, and that’s why templates are so useful.

5 Reasons Marketers Need to Create Custom Content Templates

In our case, we have created templates that work smoothly for the different recurrent clients and specific kinds of content. Doing so saves us lots of time. For example, if we receive a request from client A to promote their product X, we already know what works for that category of products and for that client’s niche.

One of the biggest mistakes digital marketers make is thinking that they need to reinvent the wheel by creating something entirely new. I think it’s a waste of effort when much of a page or email sequence can be standardized.

Let’s look at these 5 reasons why you or your team should consider using custom content templates:

1. Reduces Rework Time

Having templates means that you don’t waste time building or writing the same content from scratch. You can use templates repeatedly by keeping the common elements and customizing only the parts relevant to the client. Templates provide consistency across the project because they already have the logos, fonts, and formatting. Don’t get distracted by redundancies. Invest your time in the more substantial parts of projects.

2. Increases Flexibility

Templates are easy to use and quickly updated to meet the client’s needs. A library of templates provides the flexibility to choose from a diverse set of preconfigured interactions without needing to add or change much of the code. Your work is not monotonous and increases your creative juices.

3. Simplifying Document Creation

What happens if you have someone inexperienced on board? Even they can help in the process of creating professional content in a short time with templates. The complex formatting and coding are already in place. Once you establish a library of templates, you’ll have more choices to create customized content quickly.

4. Provide Consistency and Uniformity

Standardization is critical to every brand, from fonts and colors to the general tone of voice. A custom template has all the brand elements such as logo, color palette, fonts, and image sizes laid out and ready to use. Customers expect brand consistency, and custom templates make it easy for content providers to deliver.

5. Reduces Developer Error

A template, by its nature, has been tested to get out the bugs before releasing it for production. You can be relatively confident that it will work as planned. Users can cut, paste, and upload. Developers have already done the heavy lifting and coding upfront.

Use Custom Website Templates, Not Website Builders

If you are building a new website, it’s tempting to use a website builder like Wix, Weebly, or Squarespace. They are easy for anyone to use and typically cost much less than a custom website. You can use drag and drop to build the site with little or no technical knowledge. Sometimes called Template Sites, they are becoming more sophisticated, allowing for an increased amount of customization.

However, with website builders, people have already downloaded the most popular themes thousands of times. Your site will look like many others. When it comes to customizing the website, you’ll have limitations with the graphic design, navigation, and other page elements.

The advantages of a customized template are flexibility, unlimited graphic, and functionality options. Yes, you’ll need a developer to code the template initially. If you are in eCommerce, using custom-designed templates is the only way to scale your website as you grow.

Once the template has all the coding in place, it’s not hard to repurpose it for a new product or client.

Why Use Website or Email Templates?

Other than the reasons we just stated above, templates for emails and websites streamline your process. A quick turnaround is crucial, especially when you have many projects and tight deadlines.

Because when it comes to communicating your ideas for new emails and websites, templates enhance your ability to put them into words.

Creating a custom design template for email campaigns and automation means you will always have a template that fits your client’s branding or messaging.

Email Templates Increase Productivity

With templates, you avoid spending lots of hours starting over from step one and allows you to focus in delivering engaging copy and amazing design. Spending less time on tedious prepwork means lower costs and more time making content that drives sales.

There’s no need to think about which elements to use or what kind of content to add to the email. You already have a detailed template that wows the readers. Using a branded template and personalized email content that speaks to individual subscribers makes for a winning email campaign.

Once you have tested a winning email, the entire team can use it for consistently high open and click-through rates.

Website Templates Speed Up Development Time

Templates also accomplish the same increase in productivity with websites. My team created a library of custom templates that have proven to work well for specific products or services. If we get a request to make a new site or revamp an old one, it’s easy. We just pick one from our library of templates, add new graphics, copy, and other fun or trending elements to quickly build the site.

The custom website templates we developed save us about 50% in labor costs and around 75% in development time. Templates are an excellent solution when you need to get a website published quickly.

Now that you have templates, how do you use them?

3 Steps of How to Use A Web Page or An Email Template

Here is our usual flow when we receive a request to create a web page or an email promotion:

Wireframing

There are many wireframing tools that anyone with no designing skills can use. For most client projects, we use Mockflow because we have a library of multiple templates for the different products and services that we usually help promote. These templates have worked every time without error. We just need to pick one and add the new copy and specifications for the design assets. After that, the designers can take over and perform their creative magic.

Creating a wireframe saves you headaches. How? You can get valuable design feedback from your client early on before sinking precious time and money into the final design and layout. Wireframes let your client see each aspect of the website, one part at a time, rather than putting the functionality, layout, text, images, and branding altogether first. It’s a lot easier to make changes to a wireframe than a finished website.

Designing

This is when a bunch of lines and text come to live. As the designers have already worked in a different version of this same template, they only need to create new assets and change the new page’s general feel. Our custom templates are quite flexible so, designers are free to change the aesthetics if it fits the same layout that they created before.

Designers like templates because they don’t need to spend time on repetitive tasks. They can concentrate on the actual design.

Building

Developers love custom website templates for the same reason as designers. They already have the base code in the templates and just need to update according to the designers’ piece of art.

Besides saving time, they also make it easier to review the pages and help to avoid errors.

Check for Support and Compatibility Before Choosing a Template

Templates are an efficient way to keep your brand consistent. Most of them are easy to use right out of the box. However, before you select the initial templates, be sure to check with the designers and developers to see if you can customize it the way you want. Otherwise, it could be more trouble and costly to customize that template.

PRO TIP: Check with the developers on the theme or template support forums before purchasing. If they don’t respond, move on to another one that has active support.

Customizable Website and Email Templates Make You Money

The templates we use streamline our content production process. Typically, we can get a request for email production wrapped up and sent in a single day. It looks great, it is catchy, and it converts.

A proven template allows more time to think about which design elements to add and how to display the content to maximize conversions. Our detailed template has the specific points that we want to mention in the copy, the type of art and design elements (banners, videos, etc.), and their placement outlined in the email.

Our current process is swift and easy now that we already invested the time to create custom templates. When we get requests to create a new website page, we just pick one from our library of templates and customize it.

The internet is full of generic templates, but it is critical to have a unique design for your brand or promotion. New or growing businesses must take advantage of the benefits of custom email and website templates. Custom templates are a professional shortcut to make your marketing simple, easier, and more profitable.