5min
Content is the lifeline of a website. Content like your articles, videos, interviews, and more should follow a workflow so they can all be published correctly on your site. This involves creating excellent content that plays on SEO; uploading all files in the right categories; and most importantly, following agreed-upon deadlines so your content reaches the top of its game. Be careful about allowing off-topic or off-quality pieces of content through or this can stall or even kill any future marketing initiatives coming from that source!
Having a clearly defined and documented workflow, however, facilitates the creation of content. This way, your team will be able to deliver high-quality content on time.
Let's explore the concept of content workflows and how you can create your own for better content management.
What are content workflows?
A content workflow describes the tasks that a person or team needs to perform to produce content. Furthermore, a content marketing workflow consists of a list of roles and responsibilities associated with content creation.
Workflows may seem weird and complicated at first, but once you understand how they function, you'll see why it's so important to use them when dealing with content. Workflows allow users to manage any task and not make a mess of things. An army of benefits, ranging from simple social media posts to complex marketing campaigns across multiple channels can be handled efficiently with the aid of workflows!
Defined content workflows can benefit content marketing teams by ensuring:
- Consistent, timely, and accurate content
- Deliverables and deadlines for content
- Content-related issues, such as inconsistencies or errors, are addressed
- Employee engagement increases as employees are better informed about content creation
- Content-related employees are expected to perform better
Each company may have its own content workflow. You must consider all aspects of your business processes, including what kind of content you create and your team of content creators.
Are you a small business owner with a limited team? Is it more important to focus on creating quality content over quantity? What kind of content is important to your business? List your top 3 pieces of business content and why they're important.
Developing a content workflow
When creating and managing a content workflow, we look at the process of how our content is created and published. Many of the tasks related to publishing content are manual and ad-hoc, so we need to automate and streamline these tasks to publish content more efficiently. We also examine how our content strategy is ever evolving and how we need to stay up to date on when we need to create more content or reuse content from previous projects, and archive content that is no longer relevant
- Process: Describe the process of getting content from the client, its partners, and onto the web.
- Tasks: Which tasks must be completed to make a client's content useful, usable, and engaging to its audiences?
- People: How do you ensure that a client's content is accurate, timely, consistent, contextual, and so on?
A content workflow is a set of methods you can implement that will allow you to create content for your website and social media accounts without having to do all of the work yourself. It's a scalable way to consistently produce high-quality content for your business without having to deal with the stress of creating it alone. There is no magic formula for creating high-quality content. What works for one company may not work for yours. However, the idea behind creating a content workflow is to create systems that make it easier for you to create quality content frequently.
Risks associated with working without a content workflow
Working without a content workflow can cause delays in publishing, missed deadlines, and errors in writing. Content that has gone through the workflow is more likely to be higher quality, have more input from different people, and be consistent. This can be especially important in writing sales copy. You want sales copy to be the same from page to page and from ad to ad. Having a workflow in place will help ensure this. You can make your workflow for your business or use a tool like Process Street to get it done quickly.
Web projects are more likely to fail if they lack a clear plan of action or defined workflow. Content workflows are driven by people and processes. In creating content, it can be difficult if you don't take both of these factors into account.
If a workflow does not specify who does which task in what order, it is impossible to make clear handoffs between team members. The copywriter will remain in limbo without knowing whose draft to send next, which will prevent them from completing before publication.
Content creation without a proper workflow also comes with the risk of wasting money, time, and resources. When you eliminate the bottlenecks or expensive problem areas with content production, publication, or content management workflows, you can save time, money, and resources while improving consistency and reducing inefficiencies.
What makes a workflow for content management effective?
Consider what goes into creating content when creating a workflow for content management. When creating your workflow, consider the processes, tasks, and people involved.
Process
Here we can look at the initial entry and exit point of content creation, approval, publication, and optimisation. This ensures that we have a clear line of sight when it comes down to finding ways to improve efficiencies to benefit our customers.
When a product is launched, it can be hard to manage all simultaneously occurring entry and exit points that one must take care of while going through the content creation process. But if we do a thorough analysis of where there are any gaps in the system and what operations aren't being streamlined efficiently, then we can easily identify areas for improvement that will benefit clients and their customers as well.
Producing and publishing content as quickly as possible increases its responsiveness and relevance. A tested, well-documented process is necessary for producing quality content efficiently.
Consider the approval process as part of your process. Making sure content is valuable and on-brand is easier with a system for content approval. You should appoint someone within your team to oversee improving all digital marketing content. Depending on who you are talking about, the title might be editor, editor-in-chief, subject matter expert, or editor.
Tasks
The tasks involved in creating content involve many different phases such as ideation, planning, research, writing, and publishing. It's important to include all of those stages when creating your workflow so that each section is covered, and nothing gets overlooked.
Each task will be different depending on the content to be published. The process of producing video content can include storyboarding, filming, editing, revising, obtaining approvals, finalising, and publishing it. Compared to a LinkedIn post, a LinkedIn workflow might look like drafting, editing, approval, and publishing.
Repurposing and reusing content is also essential to ensuring that content can be used across a variety of platforms. To ensure that content can be published across multiple platforms and social networks without requiring any wholesale changes, we use content production standards such as COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere).
People
How quickly and efficiently each content project is completed depends heavily on the content marketers on your team. Maintaining a smooth content operation requires each person to be in his or her "zone of genius" or completing tasks that match their skill set, talent, and interests.
Changing the way our clients manage content often begins with changing the way people manage content. Our goal is to help our clients maximise their value. To accomplish this, we ensure that the right content team member with the right skillset understands what is expected of them.
Ensure the right people are assigned to the right tasks by mapping out the newly defined process and assigning the responsibility to individual staff or internal teams. This is determined by considering the roles and strengths of each team member.
The entire team needs a way to communicate with each other to keep the process moving smoothly. The copywriter, for example, should be able to quickly speak with the content strategist to ensure they don't miss their deadline if one of the directions on the content brief is unclear.
Build your content workflow today
Content management can be a difficult job with many different moving parts that need to interact and coordinate effectively to run smoothly. If not managed properly, the whole operation can break down like the moving parts that hold your car together do when they are not working well together. So how can you manage content effectively? Well, in this case of content management control, having a workflow is paramount. First, start by creating a new pipeline with pre-production tasks and have production tasks feed into your pipeline tool's blogs! Then create integration points between your blog posts and external systems such as asset storage or custom apps, so all your content also appears there, including other social media networks! All of this puts you on track to generating well-expressed, useful, and usable content for users who want to read about it or hear about it or watch it online or offline!
With an efficient content workflow, your employees can see a clear progression of the process from beginning to end. Witnesses will feel empowered and have more ownership of the assignments they work on. In fact, our latest research with organisations shows that employing expert witnesses has led to improved morale in businesses, improved attitudes towards customers, and better work ethics for many different kinds of roles and experience within business settings.
