If you and your team find yourself grappling with clarifications, working on easily avoidable errors, even rehashing entire content pieces, you need a defined content workflow.
In this post, we’ll quickly recap what a content marketing workflow template is and give you a step-by-step breakdown of how to create one.
A content workflow template is a fleshed-out plan covering all the steps involved in executing your content strategy across multiple marketing channels
To this end, it’s based on three foundational pillars that implement your content strategy:
Using a content marketing workflow template to run your content operations delivers a plateful of benefits such as:
Convinced you need a content workflow template? Let’s walk you through how to make one.
Since a simple content marketing workflow covers everything involved in creating and distributing content, a basic template should address:
Now to show all this theory in practice, here’s an example of blog content workflow in GatherContent.
A typical blog content workflow covers:
Once you’ve selected blog topics to cover, start creating briefs within the platform.
As you build out the templates needed for your team, you can make sure to include the most relevant information needed by your content team to make sure it follows your content strategy.
This example blog post template, for example, shows the assets needed from a writer – complete with specific guidelines on what screenshots shouldn’t include.
By clicking on the brief’s status bar at the top center of the dashboard, you can also quickly set due dates.
And, track progress using the coloured rounds beside each project.
Once the writer finishes their job, they can change the draft’s status to review and tag the editor or project manager. This person, in turn, can easily share feedback using inline comments.
Next step: getting the post ready for publication. By integrating GatherContent with your CMS like WordPress, this process should be a breeze. The workflow tool automatically uploads blog posts to your CMS with their formatting intact – ready for publication.
Finally, for promoting each piece of content, create a checklist-based blog promotion template within GatherContent. With each published post, follow through the steps in the checklist so you’re giving your content the love it deserves by promoting it well enough.
Creating a well-oiled content workflow takes more than broadly breaking down your content processes into a template.
It also involves correctly estimating the amount of time each step in the process takes – something we aren’t very good at doing as we tend to underestimate the time it takes to do something (technically, known as planning fallacy).
The solution? Follow these steps as you start creating your workflow:
Good tools facilitate the workflow by providing content marketing teams a platform to collaborate in one place.
So the basic tools that you’ll need are:
This will give you and your entire team a refresher of:
If you already haven’t, you’ll want to document your strategy, goals, and buyer persona. These will help guide the creation process.
Based on your goals, don’t forget to decide on the key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics you want to track for a defined time.
Example steps for a case study:
Use Toggl to understand exactly how long each workflow task takes in real-time. Then add buffer time to the estimates so you have built-in fail-safes to keep production on schedule.
Ask yourself questions like who brainstorms content topics for the quarter? Who assigns briefs? Who designs branded graphics? Who formats content for publishing?
Depending on your team size, you might have people responsible for different roles. This means you might not have a social media manager or specialized proofreaders on the team. But you need to specify exactly who’ll be executing the work that these roles come with.
💡 See also: Organise your content team: Bring clarity using this roles and responsibilities chart
This includes outlining your workflow around assigning content pieces, editing them, publishing them, and so on.
You’ll also want to create checklists to guide decision-making. For example, create checklists for content submission, SEO optimization, and promotion.
Create one for approving content ideas as well so your team works on the best ones only.
💡 See also: Checklist Template: Validate Content Ideas
Finally, create a schedule with dedicated timeslots for promoting content and analyzing its performance.
With your editorial calendar set, your content marketing workflow template is ready to guide your processes and deliver its benefits.
Before we wrap this up, here are four more tips to help you build an effective content workflow template:
In addition to steps-based checklists, create checklists for monitoring quality. For example, make checklists for writing high-quality blog posts, editing and proofreading them.
This is harder said than done. But if you’re focusing on quality over quantity in content production, make sure you choose a publishing frequency that’s achievable.
For each piece of content, create two dates: complete date and publishing date. This way, you can have publishable content ready well in advance, which helps to stick with your publishing schedule.
Tweak and improve your content workflow based on what you learn by putting the workflow to practice. This will help you add and remove channels to your workflow too.
If you and your team find yourself grappling with clarifications, working on easily avoidable errors, even rehashing entire content pieces, you need a defined content workflow.
In this post, we’ll quickly recap what a content marketing workflow template is and give you a step-by-step breakdown of how to create one.
A content workflow template is a fleshed-out plan covering all the steps involved in executing your content strategy across multiple marketing channels
To this end, it’s based on three foundational pillars that implement your content strategy:
Using a content marketing workflow template to run your content operations delivers a plateful of benefits such as:
Convinced you need a content workflow template? Let’s walk you through how to make one.
Since a simple content marketing workflow covers everything involved in creating and distributing content, a basic template should address:
Now to show all this theory in practice, here’s an example of blog content workflow in GatherContent.
A typical blog content workflow covers:
Once you’ve selected blog topics to cover, start creating briefs within the platform.
As you build out the templates needed for your team, you can make sure to include the most relevant information needed by your content team to make sure it follows your content strategy.
This example blog post template, for example, shows the assets needed from a writer – complete with specific guidelines on what screenshots shouldn’t include.
By clicking on the brief’s status bar at the top center of the dashboard, you can also quickly set due dates.
And, track progress using the coloured rounds beside each project.
Once the writer finishes their job, they can change the draft’s status to review and tag the editor or project manager. This person, in turn, can easily share feedback using inline comments.
Next step: getting the post ready for publication. By integrating GatherContent with your CMS like WordPress, this process should be a breeze. The workflow tool automatically uploads blog posts to your CMS with their formatting intact – ready for publication.
Finally, for promoting each piece of content, create a checklist-based blog promotion template within GatherContent. With each published post, follow through the steps in the checklist so you’re giving your content the love it deserves by promoting it well enough.
Creating a well-oiled content workflow takes more than broadly breaking down your content processes into a template.
It also involves correctly estimating the amount of time each step in the process takes – something we aren’t very good at doing as we tend to underestimate the time it takes to do something (technically, known as planning fallacy).
The solution? Follow these steps as you start creating your workflow:
Good tools facilitate the workflow by providing content marketing teams a platform to collaborate in one place.
So the basic tools that you’ll need are:
This will give you and your entire team a refresher of:
If you already haven’t, you’ll want to document your strategy, goals, and buyer persona. These will help guide the creation process.
Based on your goals, don’t forget to decide on the key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics you want to track for a defined time.
Example steps for a case study:
Use Toggl to understand exactly how long each workflow task takes in real-time. Then add buffer time to the estimates so you have built-in fail-safes to keep production on schedule.
Ask yourself questions like who brainstorms content topics for the quarter? Who assigns briefs? Who designs branded graphics? Who formats content for publishing?
Depending on your team size, you might have people responsible for different roles. This means you might not have a social media manager or specialized proofreaders on the team. But you need to specify exactly who’ll be executing the work that these roles come with.
💡 See also: Organise your content team: Bring clarity using this roles and responsibilities chart
This includes outlining your workflow around assigning content pieces, editing them, publishing them, and so on.
You’ll also want to create checklists to guide decision-making. For example, create checklists for content submission, SEO optimization, and promotion.
Create one for approving content ideas as well so your team works on the best ones only.
💡 See also: Checklist Template: Validate Content Ideas
Finally, create a schedule with dedicated timeslots for promoting content and analyzing its performance.
With your editorial calendar set, your content marketing workflow template is ready to guide your processes and deliver its benefits.
Before we wrap this up, here are four more tips to help you build an effective content workflow template:
In addition to steps-based checklists, create checklists for monitoring quality. For example, make checklists for writing high-quality blog posts, editing and proofreading them.
This is harder said than done. But if you’re focusing on quality over quantity in content production, make sure you choose a publishing frequency that’s achievable.
For each piece of content, create two dates: complete date and publishing date. This way, you can have publishable content ready well in advance, which helps to stick with your publishing schedule.
Tweak and improve your content workflow based on what you learn by putting the workflow to practice. This will help you add and remove channels to your workflow too.
Masooma Memon is a pizza-loving freelance writer for SaaS. When she’s not writing actionable blog posts or checking off tasks from her to-do list, she has her head buried in a fantasy novel or business book. Connect with her on Twitter.