B2B buyers consume an average of 13 pieces of content before making a purchase decision. That’s a lot of content. Equally, many other organisations like educational institutions, fintech companies, and healthcare groups need to publish accurate, and up to date content regularly.
But how do you go about producing more high-quality content without piling in more resources and time? The key lies in creating a well-defined and detailed content workflow that everyone working on the content follows.
That way when it’s time to scale up your content production, there’s a clear set of processes and guidelines that everyone knows inside-out. Today, we’ll dive into how a content workflow impacts your marketing efforts and a step-by-step guide to creating a workflow that your team members and stakeholders will actually follow.
What is a content workflow?
A content workflow defines each stage a piece of content needs to pass through from ideation to publication, distribution, governance, optimisation, and finally decommissioning (if there is a need.)
Each piece of content is unique and the best way of moving your content through a workflow will depend on the type of content you’re producing and the tasks your team needs to complete.
Even if you’ve never defined your content workflow, your team has one. There will be tasks and processes that your content team repeatedly completes while producing a piece of content. How many stages your workflow has depends on the type of content and how your team works.
When documented, you may want to create a visual form of your workflow to show the progression of tasks over different roles and time.
Here’s a visual representation of what a workflow might look like for a website redesign:
How does having a content workflow impact your marketing efforts?
Defining your content workflow is important for tracking large projects and preventing bottlenecks in the process. Workflows hold people accountable and keep the creative process flowing. A well-documented content workflow will help your content budget stretch further and use your team members’ time more efficiently.
Building an effective content workflow enables you to:
Use time more efficiently with reusable templates and processes.
A well-defined workflow shows people where exactly in the process each piece of content is. It also explains what they must do to deliver what’s needed on time.
Armed with a workflow, you’ll be able to produce more high-quality content in fewer hours––key for meeting your content deliverables on time.
In The Content Marketing Institutes' 2021 Content Report they found that some of the biggest strategic challenges of respondents include “communication among teams so everyone is on the same page” (e.g., content, marketing, IT, creative, sales) and content production workflow.
Notably, those who cited content production workflow as a challenge increased to 45% from 27%.
When asked what capability they felt their organisation was most lacking that technology could help with, respondents said a project management tool to manage workflows and omnichannel products and strategy.
Based on this report, there’s a need for content teams to have a workflow that facilitates organisation, communication, and improved project management.
As Angus Edwardson, the co-founder and VP of Product at GatherContent says:
“There is clearly a need for dedicated roles and technologies that can facilitate content production and approval across an organisation. Now we are at a time where content is truly being realized as a business asset, and with that move, we can see huge shifts in the amount of investment in the people, processes, and technology required to make sure it, too, is delivering value.”
At its core developing an effective workflow ensures your content has the best chance of delivering its intended impact and providing a return on your investment.
But a poorly planned workflow may hinder your efforts. If you notice these issues, it may be time to reconsider your workflow:
Slow process to publish ready-to-go content (weeks or months).
Content distribution is inconsistent and promotion opportunities are missed.
The team is unclear on who is doing what.
Time is wasted figuring out the next stages.
The key is to avoid only focusing on the execution and delivery of content. When teams prioritise execution they may not properly plan their workflow which may lead to poorer results. Better quality content releases ultimately help your business achieve its goals more quickly.
What should you include in your content marketing workflow?
There’s no one size fits all content workflow––it’s vital to build one around your resources and content needs. It goes without saying, each organisation will have different content needs.
For instance, your content may need to:
Be legally compliant.
Appear on multilingual web pages.
Be approved by a subject matter expert.
Go through a PR review.
You need to set up your workflow to include all these different moving parts so nothing is forgotten during the process.
Here’s a step-by-step guide for creating the main moving parts of a content workflow.
1. Ideation
First, you need to plan what your content is about. Build topic clusters and themes that can be broken down into smaller content pieces. For example, if you’re managing a university faculty’s site, you may want to divide large subject clusters down into smaller topics like undergraduate degrees and modules.
Next, create a results-driven content brief that’s easy for anyone working on or supervising the content to follow. Within your content brief, include:
Content goals: Is your content aimed at helping prospective students decide their future course, or is it for guiding students through future career path options?
Format: Will your content take the form of a user guide, blog post, or online brochure? Always define your content format before getting started.
Design: Will your content feature any new logos and branding or follow already defined branding guidelines?
Expected results: Outline what you realistically hope to achieve with your content and which metrics you will use. How many pageviews or brochure downloads are you hoping for?
As you scale up your content production, content templates can help you scale up consistent high-quality content production.
Before you start executing anything, make sure you get stakeholder alignment so everyone is on the same page. This will reduce bottlenecks around content edits and approval later down the line so you’re not trapped in endless feedback loops and rounds of revisions.
2. Prioritisation
According to the marketing agency, Radix Communications, the top barriers to creating top B2B content are workload and changing priorities. Continuously shifting priorities can confuse team members on what they should be working on and slow down content production.
Not all content requests are created equal, so just because someone says they need something urgently doesn’t mean that you have to process it first. Adopt a prioritisation system so that each request or piece of content is processed according to your system.
As a piece of content nears publication or distribution date, it should be prioritised over other content production tasks. For example, editing and publication should take priority over outlining or researching other new content pieces.
You should also prioritise different content types that could have the most potential impact. For example, content that ties in with an upcoming product launch should be prioritised over an ebook due to be published in 6 months.
As you’re making your way through the workflow, remember that most content creation tasks take longer than initially expected. Orbit Media found that the average blog post takes 3 hours and 55 minutes to write and that content writers are spending 63% more time on each post than 6 years ago.
3. Content creation
The content creation phase needs to be mapped out with systems and processes in place to avoid unnecessary delays and potential bottlenecks down the road. Using project management software and automation can help streamline the process and ensure everyone is on board with project timelines.
Create
In the creation phase, the author should write content according to previously agreed deadlines. Designers should produce any graphics or other supporting visuals for the content.
Edit
Once the content has been created, it’s time to begin the editorial review phase. A copy editor should review grammatical issues, structure, and tone. Depending on the type of content and subject matter, you may need to include additional review steps like a subject matter expert review and legal compliance.
A ContentOps platform can enhance real-time collaboration and commenting––streamlining the editorial phase and reducing back and forth between editors and creators. Using shareable links can also help provide a frictionless way of gathering feedback from multiple parties.
Approve
Content creation calls for constant dialogue between stakeholders, creators, and managers. But at some point, someone has to make that final call and decide that the content is done.
Avoid endless feedback loops and rounds of revisions by establishing set criteria to decide when a piece of content is done. For example, you could decide on 3 reviews led by different people and 1 final approval by a senior gatekeeper. Creating a pre-agreed structure like this will ensure your content production flows and doesn’t grind to a halt as a result of bottlenecks around the final approval phase.
When revisions have been made, the project manager should circulate content so relevant approvers see the content. To save time, project managers could use time-saving tools to automate the process and immediately notify stakeholders when the previous step in the workflow is complete. That way you won’t need to manually update individual stakeholders on different project stages.
Once content is created, think about how you’ll store it and make it available to others. You’ve probably had people come to you requesting things like your company’s manifesto, logos, or branding documentation. All of this kind of content needs to be easily accessible to everyone in the organisation.
Keep your content in one central place
Make sure you have a simple, standardised organisation and storage system in place. This might include the version number and date in a consistent form (i.e, v1. 06/2021) either at the start or end of the file name. Create a system that everyone understands and uses consistently.
Store all your content in one location, so it’s easy for people to find the content they’re looking for efficiently. Implementing a content hub enables you to say goodbye to having to track down content scattered across different sources and platforms.
Build in a hand-off process for completed content
A process for handing off content to relevant team members ensures that completed content goes to the right places and doesn’t get lost. Whether you’re sending a blog post off to be published, or content to the sales department, build in a clear hand-off process so that teams can easily know when content is ready to be published or distributed.
5. Publication and distribution
Writers often choose platforms like Google Docs for its collaboration features and easy sharing. But using these platforms adds in multiple additional steps to your workflow, as you’ll then need to manually transfer content to your CMS for publication.
The way around this is to use a ContentOps platform. Ask writers to submit their content to a ContentOps platform like GatherContent, that way you can review, and edit all content from within the platform before publishing it directly on your blog or website when it’s approved.
Once you’ve published your content it can be tempting to immediately move onto producing the next piece of content. Don’t hit publish though and forget about your content. It’s important to be strategic about how and when you promote and distribute your content.
Depending on your content type, you may choose to distribute and promote in several different ways. It’s a good idea to mix and match between paid and organic techniques to maximize your content’s reach:
Organic social media posts when the content goes live.
Including recent content in email newsletter campaigns.
Paid social media posts to increase views.
Employees sharing content on their own accounts.
Influencer marketing shares.
Backlink outreach to help your content’s ranking in search.
Posting content on forums like Reddit and Quora.
Distributing in industry membership groups on Slack.
Make sure to review your promotion strategies and see which results in the most user engagement and views. That way you can include more of the promotion strategies that yield the best results and eliminate those that don’t.
6. Analysis
Analysis is another step that’s easy to forget about and skip. But you need to know how content is impacting wider marketing efforts. The key is to get into a regular habit of checking your content performance against its initial goals and seeing how you can improve.
To do this identify key KPIs and metrics to measure the success of your content. These could be:
Pageviews
Signups
Time spent on page
Number of social media shares
Schedule quarterly reviews for a more in-depth analysis of your content performance. At this point, you should also look for trends across your content. See if certain content types seem to perform better with your audience than others.
7. Governance
As your content output grows, you may find it more challenging to maintain high standards for your content. Sometimes larger organisations don’t know exactly what’s on their site or whether it’s good enough to be there.
Effective governance ensures that everything on your site is of high quality, accurate, and up to date. Bake in an agreed cadence of content review to ensure your content doesn’t go out of date or become inaccurate.
Your governance process could include the following steps:
Monthly reviews to evaluate whether content is out of date or inaccurate––this is especially important for industries like healthcare that are constantly changing.
Quarterly reviews to check that reports and links are still up to date and aren’t broken.
Monthly reviews of content to ensure it’s legally compliant. Some organisations like publicly funded higher education institutions are required to publish content like budgets and salaries.
Archiving content when it’s time to take it offline and store it in a centralised content archive. This archived content shouldn’t be discarded––it could serve as a helpful template or resource for developing future content strategies.
Effective content governance helps ensure the end-user is receiving the most up to date and accurate information from your content. Follow our simple governance checklist to help you keep stock of the content you already have.
8. Optimisation
Once you’ve invested time and resources into your content production, it’s key to ensure you’re getting the most out of your investment to maximise its impact.
To optimise your content’s reach, repurpose it into other formats. Content repurposing not only helps your original pieces of content stretch further but also puts them into formats that may be more accessible to different types of end-users.
To help you repurpose your content here are a few ideas:
Repurpose a podcast or webinar into a blog post.
Create a downloadable ebook from a series of blog posts.
Produce an actionable video series from an ebook.
Publish a series of social media posts from a blog post.
Create an infographic from some original research.
Use insights from the analysis phase to identify which content formats are most popular with your target audience. You may find that your audience is far more likely to download a single ebook than spend the time reading multiple blog posts on the same subject. These insights can help shape where to put your content resources.
9. Decommissioning
Not all content is evergreen, some content expires and will need to be decommissioned to avoid providing users with inaccurate or conflicting information.
For example, if you manage content for a university and you provide daily updates on COVID-19 and teaching changes, you’d need to decommission yesterday’s content as you publish today’s update. That way you’d ensure that students have access to the most recent and accurate information surrounding COVID-19 and the university’s response.
In the same light, if you update yearly policy documents, it’s best to decommission and remove last year’s version to avoid confusion.
When you publish content that will need decommissioning, set yourself an automated reminder for its removal date.
Build a detailed content workflow for efficient content production
While you can build out an ultra-detailed content workflow, a degree of trial and error is required to figure out what works for your team. Processes are essential for creating consistent high-quality content––but only if your team actively follows them, otherwise they could hinder rather than help.
The trick is to find a balance between clearly defined workflows and enough leeway for your team to foster creativity and collaboration. Remember if a workflow feels too rigid or doesn’t fit your team’s needs, make some changes and see how it affects your content output. Your content workflow should be a fluid document that evolves with your organisation and team.
B2B buyers consume an average of 13 pieces of content before making a purchase decision. That’s a lot of content. Equally, many other organisations like educational institutions, fintech companies, and healthcare groups need to publish accurate, and up to date content regularly.
But how do you go about producing more high-quality content without piling in more resources and time? The key lies in creating a well-defined and detailed content workflow that everyone working on the content follows.
That way when it’s time to scale up your content production, there’s a clear set of processes and guidelines that everyone knows inside-out. Today, we’ll dive into how a content workflow impacts your marketing efforts and a step-by-step guide to creating a workflow that your team members and stakeholders will actually follow.
What is a content workflow?
A content workflow defines each stage a piece of content needs to pass through from ideation to publication, distribution, governance, optimisation, and finally decommissioning (if there is a need.)
Each piece of content is unique and the best way of moving your content through a workflow will depend on the type of content you’re producing and the tasks your team needs to complete.
Even if you’ve never defined your content workflow, your team has one. There will be tasks and processes that your content team repeatedly completes while producing a piece of content. How many stages your workflow has depends on the type of content and how your team works.
When documented, you may want to create a visual form of your workflow to show the progression of tasks over different roles and time.
Here’s a visual representation of what a workflow might look like for a website redesign:
How does having a content workflow impact your marketing efforts?
Defining your content workflow is important for tracking large projects and preventing bottlenecks in the process. Workflows hold people accountable and keep the creative process flowing. A well-documented content workflow will help your content budget stretch further and use your team members’ time more efficiently.
Building an effective content workflow enables you to:
Use time more efficiently with reusable templates and processes.
A well-defined workflow shows people where exactly in the process each piece of content is. It also explains what they must do to deliver what’s needed on time.
Armed with a workflow, you’ll be able to produce more high-quality content in fewer hours––key for meeting your content deliverables on time.
In The Content Marketing Institutes' 2021 Content Report they found that some of the biggest strategic challenges of respondents include “communication among teams so everyone is on the same page” (e.g., content, marketing, IT, creative, sales) and content production workflow.
Notably, those who cited content production workflow as a challenge increased to 45% from 27%.
When asked what capability they felt their organisation was most lacking that technology could help with, respondents said a project management tool to manage workflows and omnichannel products and strategy.
Based on this report, there’s a need for content teams to have a workflow that facilitates organisation, communication, and improved project management.
As Angus Edwardson, the co-founder and VP of Product at GatherContent says:
“There is clearly a need for dedicated roles and technologies that can facilitate content production and approval across an organisation. Now we are at a time where content is truly being realized as a business asset, and with that move, we can see huge shifts in the amount of investment in the people, processes, and technology required to make sure it, too, is delivering value.”
At its core developing an effective workflow ensures your content has the best chance of delivering its intended impact and providing a return on your investment.
But a poorly planned workflow may hinder your efforts. If you notice these issues, it may be time to reconsider your workflow:
Slow process to publish ready-to-go content (weeks or months).
Content distribution is inconsistent and promotion opportunities are missed.
The team is unclear on who is doing what.
Time is wasted figuring out the next stages.
The key is to avoid only focusing on the execution and delivery of content. When teams prioritise execution they may not properly plan their workflow which may lead to poorer results. Better quality content releases ultimately help your business achieve its goals more quickly.
What should you include in your content marketing workflow?
There’s no one size fits all content workflow––it’s vital to build one around your resources and content needs. It goes without saying, each organisation will have different content needs.
For instance, your content may need to:
Be legally compliant.
Appear on multilingual web pages.
Be approved by a subject matter expert.
Go through a PR review.
You need to set up your workflow to include all these different moving parts so nothing is forgotten during the process.
Here’s a step-by-step guide for creating the main moving parts of a content workflow.
1. Ideation
First, you need to plan what your content is about. Build topic clusters and themes that can be broken down into smaller content pieces. For example, if you’re managing a university faculty’s site, you may want to divide large subject clusters down into smaller topics like undergraduate degrees and modules.
Next, create a results-driven content brief that’s easy for anyone working on or supervising the content to follow. Within your content brief, include:
Content goals: Is your content aimed at helping prospective students decide their future course, or is it for guiding students through future career path options?
Format: Will your content take the form of a user guide, blog post, or online brochure? Always define your content format before getting started.
Design: Will your content feature any new logos and branding or follow already defined branding guidelines?
Expected results: Outline what you realistically hope to achieve with your content and which metrics you will use. How many pageviews or brochure downloads are you hoping for?
As you scale up your content production, content templates can help you scale up consistent high-quality content production.
Before you start executing anything, make sure you get stakeholder alignment so everyone is on the same page. This will reduce bottlenecks around content edits and approval later down the line so you’re not trapped in endless feedback loops and rounds of revisions.
2. Prioritisation
According to the marketing agency, Radix Communications, the top barriers to creating top B2B content are workload and changing priorities. Continuously shifting priorities can confuse team members on what they should be working on and slow down content production.
Not all content requests are created equal, so just because someone says they need something urgently doesn’t mean that you have to process it first. Adopt a prioritisation system so that each request or piece of content is processed according to your system.
As a piece of content nears publication or distribution date, it should be prioritised over other content production tasks. For example, editing and publication should take priority over outlining or researching other new content pieces.
You should also prioritise different content types that could have the most potential impact. For example, content that ties in with an upcoming product launch should be prioritised over an ebook due to be published in 6 months.
As you’re making your way through the workflow, remember that most content creation tasks take longer than initially expected. Orbit Media found that the average blog post takes 3 hours and 55 minutes to write and that content writers are spending 63% more time on each post than 6 years ago.
3. Content creation
The content creation phase needs to be mapped out with systems and processes in place to avoid unnecessary delays and potential bottlenecks down the road. Using project management software and automation can help streamline the process and ensure everyone is on board with project timelines.
Create
In the creation phase, the author should write content according to previously agreed deadlines. Designers should produce any graphics or other supporting visuals for the content.
Edit
Once the content has been created, it’s time to begin the editorial review phase. A copy editor should review grammatical issues, structure, and tone. Depending on the type of content and subject matter, you may need to include additional review steps like a subject matter expert review and legal compliance.
A ContentOps platform can enhance real-time collaboration and commenting––streamlining the editorial phase and reducing back and forth between editors and creators. Using shareable links can also help provide a frictionless way of gathering feedback from multiple parties.
Approve
Content creation calls for constant dialogue between stakeholders, creators, and managers. But at some point, someone has to make that final call and decide that the content is done.
Avoid endless feedback loops and rounds of revisions by establishing set criteria to decide when a piece of content is done. For example, you could decide on 3 reviews led by different people and 1 final approval by a senior gatekeeper. Creating a pre-agreed structure like this will ensure your content production flows and doesn’t grind to a halt as a result of bottlenecks around the final approval phase.
When revisions have been made, the project manager should circulate content so relevant approvers see the content. To save time, project managers could use time-saving tools to automate the process and immediately notify stakeholders when the previous step in the workflow is complete. That way you won’t need to manually update individual stakeholders on different project stages.
Once content is created, think about how you’ll store it and make it available to others. You’ve probably had people come to you requesting things like your company’s manifesto, logos, or branding documentation. All of this kind of content needs to be easily accessible to everyone in the organisation.
Keep your content in one central place
Make sure you have a simple, standardised organisation and storage system in place. This might include the version number and date in a consistent form (i.e, v1. 06/2021) either at the start or end of the file name. Create a system that everyone understands and uses consistently.
Store all your content in one location, so it’s easy for people to find the content they’re looking for efficiently. Implementing a content hub enables you to say goodbye to having to track down content scattered across different sources and platforms.
Build in a hand-off process for completed content
A process for handing off content to relevant team members ensures that completed content goes to the right places and doesn’t get lost. Whether you’re sending a blog post off to be published, or content to the sales department, build in a clear hand-off process so that teams can easily know when content is ready to be published or distributed.
5. Publication and distribution
Writers often choose platforms like Google Docs for its collaboration features and easy sharing. But using these platforms adds in multiple additional steps to your workflow, as you’ll then need to manually transfer content to your CMS for publication.
The way around this is to use a ContentOps platform. Ask writers to submit their content to a ContentOps platform like GatherContent, that way you can review, and edit all content from within the platform before publishing it directly on your blog or website when it’s approved.
Once you’ve published your content it can be tempting to immediately move onto producing the next piece of content. Don’t hit publish though and forget about your content. It’s important to be strategic about how and when you promote and distribute your content.
Depending on your content type, you may choose to distribute and promote in several different ways. It’s a good idea to mix and match between paid and organic techniques to maximize your content’s reach:
Organic social media posts when the content goes live.
Including recent content in email newsletter campaigns.
Paid social media posts to increase views.
Employees sharing content on their own accounts.
Influencer marketing shares.
Backlink outreach to help your content’s ranking in search.
Posting content on forums like Reddit and Quora.
Distributing in industry membership groups on Slack.
Make sure to review your promotion strategies and see which results in the most user engagement and views. That way you can include more of the promotion strategies that yield the best results and eliminate those that don’t.
6. Analysis
Analysis is another step that’s easy to forget about and skip. But you need to know how content is impacting wider marketing efforts. The key is to get into a regular habit of checking your content performance against its initial goals and seeing how you can improve.
To do this identify key KPIs and metrics to measure the success of your content. These could be:
Pageviews
Signups
Time spent on page
Number of social media shares
Schedule quarterly reviews for a more in-depth analysis of your content performance. At this point, you should also look for trends across your content. See if certain content types seem to perform better with your audience than others.
7. Governance
As your content output grows, you may find it more challenging to maintain high standards for your content. Sometimes larger organisations don’t know exactly what’s on their site or whether it’s good enough to be there.
Effective governance ensures that everything on your site is of high quality, accurate, and up to date. Bake in an agreed cadence of content review to ensure your content doesn’t go out of date or become inaccurate.
Your governance process could include the following steps:
Monthly reviews to evaluate whether content is out of date or inaccurate––this is especially important for industries like healthcare that are constantly changing.
Quarterly reviews to check that reports and links are still up to date and aren’t broken.
Monthly reviews of content to ensure it’s legally compliant. Some organisations like publicly funded higher education institutions are required to publish content like budgets and salaries.
Archiving content when it’s time to take it offline and store it in a centralised content archive. This archived content shouldn’t be discarded––it could serve as a helpful template or resource for developing future content strategies.
Effective content governance helps ensure the end-user is receiving the most up to date and accurate information from your content. Follow our simple governance checklist to help you keep stock of the content you already have.
8. Optimisation
Once you’ve invested time and resources into your content production, it’s key to ensure you’re getting the most out of your investment to maximise its impact.
To optimise your content’s reach, repurpose it into other formats. Content repurposing not only helps your original pieces of content stretch further but also puts them into formats that may be more accessible to different types of end-users.
To help you repurpose your content here are a few ideas:
Repurpose a podcast or webinar into a blog post.
Create a downloadable ebook from a series of blog posts.
Produce an actionable video series from an ebook.
Publish a series of social media posts from a blog post.
Create an infographic from some original research.
Use insights from the analysis phase to identify which content formats are most popular with your target audience. You may find that your audience is far more likely to download a single ebook than spend the time reading multiple blog posts on the same subject. These insights can help shape where to put your content resources.
9. Decommissioning
Not all content is evergreen, some content expires and will need to be decommissioned to avoid providing users with inaccurate or conflicting information.
For example, if you manage content for a university and you provide daily updates on COVID-19 and teaching changes, you’d need to decommission yesterday’s content as you publish today’s update. That way you’d ensure that students have access to the most recent and accurate information surrounding COVID-19 and the university’s response.
In the same light, if you update yearly policy documents, it’s best to decommission and remove last year’s version to avoid confusion.
When you publish content that will need decommissioning, set yourself an automated reminder for its removal date.
Build a detailed content workflow for efficient content production
While you can build out an ultra-detailed content workflow, a degree of trial and error is required to figure out what works for your team. Processes are essential for creating consistent high-quality content––but only if your team actively follows them, otherwise they could hinder rather than help.
The trick is to find a balance between clearly defined workflows and enough leeway for your team to foster creativity and collaboration. Remember if a workflow feels too rigid or doesn’t fit your team’s needs, make some changes and see how it affects your content output. Your content workflow should be a fluid document that evolves with your organisation and team.
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