In business, content marketing is perhaps one of the most popular and cost-efficient strategies available since it does not directly cost your company money, as long as you spend enough effort and time. But if you spend too much time on the wrong things, it would also end up compromising the return or effectiveness. The solution to this problem is to create a good content workflow management for the overall strategy, but how would you do this?
What is exactly a content workflow?
In general, the content workflow of a strategy is the procedure that takes a separate part of the content from the earliest stage to the official publication. This process might include all the employees and managers who make a contribution to its development, editing, and the ultimate version.
What are the features of a good content workflow?
If your company creates a good or efficient content workflow, it would help achieve many pieces of great content more frequently and reduce the possibilities of trouble that would slow down the whole process. In other words, a good content workflow is usually the sign of maturity in digital marketing. Here are a couple of major features of a good content workflow:
- All members of the content team have a uniform opinion or idea about the task that the content would perform and the tone or style it would deliver once it is officially published.
- It is simple for all members of the production team to review and find the newest version of the content.
- All people who take part in the process of producing content can simply see how the content is currently progressing and who will be the next person taking charge of it.
- The production team would stretch across many specialty lines in order that any people from customer services or PR has the chance of submitting their ideas for the overall content.
How to improve the content workflow in your project?
Firstly, you should review the current content workflow by detailing each step in the process of creation of a piece of content. If the editor sends an email to the writer, for example, with a small question about the second paragraph, it is still necessary to include this matter in your list.
Check this review and find out any area that is repetitive or might slow down the whole process. For instance, if you send an email with the article’s copy to many people, they might have a couple of copies download on the PC. As a result, it might lead to some troubles with duplicate efforts and version control while editing the documents.
Once the problems have been identified, now it’s time to think up a solution that would resolve those issues. For instance, if sending an email would cause different versions to exist at the same time, you should use a cloud-based app. This would enable the documents to be stored just in a single place so that everybody could make notes and edit the similar version. There are lots of content workflow tools like TruEdit and Coschedule in the market. They can significantly improve the team collaboration and the efficiency of content creation process.
Lastly, keep in mind to keep a clear communication between all members of the team. You would create an editorial calendar for all so that everybody would update their status and the latest progress on the project.