Content creation services
Content used to take an army of people, and now it takes an engine.
The question before you hire anybody is whether they let you produce more good pages, or just the same pages at a different price.
The old model
What the old org chart cost
We spent most of the last decade inside content systems at companies like Red Ventures that were good at this. Maintaining a site of a thousand pages, or five thousand, or ten thousand, took a small army. A GM in charge of strategy and monetization. An SEO lead setting the search strategy. A head of content who owned the brand, the voice and the editorial calendar. And under all of that, the writers.
The math never got easier. A good senior copywriter can do maybe 10 to 20 pieces a month, and a commercial site also has to refresh what is published to stay relevant for Google and now the AI search engines. So you get a large team, a large cost basis and a large org chart, and you are still chasing.
Put wages against that org chart and it adds up. Median pay runs about $72,270 for writers, $75,260 for editors and $161,030 for marketing managers, per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for May 2024, before benefits, software and overhead.
And the roles turn over, which never makes it into the plan. Gallup puts replacing one employee at half to twice their annual salary, and calls that conservative.
You scale it by adding people.
Base pay alone for a four-person content team at U.S. median wages: one marketing manager, one editor, two writers. Benefits, software and overhead sit on top.
Sum of BLS median wages, May 2024You scale it by adding data.
Most of what happens here is data engineering rather than AI services. Everything runs through code, so the system compounds instead of decaying, and the human review sits in the middle of production.
A2 Analytics — how we build itWhy now
Why the model can be rebuilt now
When we started A2 Analytics we had spent ten years in digital marketing and digital media at companies like Red Ventures. We had seen these content systems from the inside, right as the AI shift got going.
We had a strong conviction the whole production system could be rebuilt, with a different go-to-market and a different cost structure.
Built correctly, one system produces what the old org chart did, and keeps it current.
We run these builds like sprints. For Franzy, a franchise marketplace, we built the engine in about thirty days, and they saw the first results within two months.
The A2 growth engine
How the engine is built
Four stages. The first-party data goes in at the top and the human review sits in the middle of production.
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01 / First-party data layer
The assets already inside your company
Everything gets built around assets that already exist inside your company: sales data, routes if you run logistics, brand guidelines, whatever legal needs in there. Then the third-party data that matters in your industry, like weather, foliage or energy consumption. That is the nucleus of the product.
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02 / Branded CMS
A CMS built around your brand
A CMS that grows as new information comes in. It carries your brand guidelines and components we build with designers, so the pages look like yours rather than a template.
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03 / Production
Forge and Foundry run production
Two products we have built take the engine into production: Forge, which produces the articles, and Foundry, which builds pages at scale. We use API services where they exist, and we built the technology around the human review in the middle.
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04 / Continuous refresh
Refresh that’s already built
Because we architect everything through code, the refresh you will want in two or three months, with new inputs and new components, is already built, and most of the saving shows up there.
Why refresh compounds
Ahrefs defines content decay as a page losing traffic and rankings as it ages and drifts from what people search for. HubSpot ran the other experiment: updating and republishing old posts raised their monthly organic search views by an average of 106%.
Data engineering, AI capability, SEO research, technical SEO, design and production, in one system. What comes out is anchored in your own data and your team’s expertise, and it goes live far faster than an agency could manage.
Who it’s built for
Built for companies sitting on data they don’t use
We have largely specialized in service companies: home services, franchises, private-equity-backed firms, energy. They sit on data, customers and assets that never make it onto the pages people find on Google and AI search. Closing that gap runs through all of our content creation services, and we have built it in more than ten industries, including:
- Home services
- Franchise
- Private equity
- Energy
First-party data is the part that stays an advantage, because a competitor cannot buy yours from a broker. BCG and Google found that brands deploying all four of their advanced first-party-data activations saw 2.9x the revenue uplift of brands that deployed none.
What to expect
A checklist for any content partner
Four things worth pinning down before anybody signs anything. You would notice all four inside the first quarter.
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01
A working system in the first couple of weeks
The engine build takes a couple of weeks, sometimes four. By then you should be looking at something running rather than a plan, with the pace set by how quickly data, brand guidelines and your experts’ time come across.
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02
Pages only your company could publish
The output should carry facts a competitor cannot get: your pricing, your routes, your job history, your team’s read on a problem they have solved a hundred times. If a paragraph would sit just as well on a rival’s site, you are paying for words.
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03
Someone who can tell you what you can’t win
Before anything gets written, somebody should tell you which searches your brand can win and which belong to someone else this year. Production without that judgment is volume for its own sake, and volume is the cheap part now.
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04
Refresh treated as routine
Ask what happens to a page eighteen months after it ships, and listen for whether the answer is a system or a calendar reminder. Decay is quiet, so a program that looks once a year has already given it a head start.
Sources cited
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, May 2024 — median annual pay for writers and authors, editors, and advertising, promotions, and marketing managers. The $380,830 figure above is the sum of those medians for a four-person team.
- Gallup, “This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion”, 2019 — the cost of replacing an employee, at one-half to two times annual salary.
- Ahrefs, “What Is Content Decay?”, 2026 — the definition of content decay.
- HubSpot, Pamela Vaughan, “The Blogging Tactic No One Is Talking About: Optimizing the Past” — a 106% average lift in monthly organic search views on updated and republished posts.
- Boston Consulting Group with Google, Responsible Marketing With First-Party Data, 2020 (Asia-Pacific study) — 1.5x and 2.9x revenue uplift for brands deploying one and all four advanced first-party-data activations.
Work with A2
Tell us what you need to publish and we’ll tell you what it takes.
Tell us what first-party data you are sitting on and what you are trying to grow, and we will come back with what it would cost and what we think it produces.