You might be wondering: What is a content workflow?

In simple words, it’s a document designed to let every member on your team know the tasks assigned to them for creating content. This way, you can come up with a content strategy and create a content workflow to make sure everything goes according to plan.

Creating a content workflow for your business is beneficial for multiple reasons. For starters, you can better analyze and identify uncompleted tasks and the team members responsible for the job. It also helps you manage and keep up with deadlines for your content strategy. As a result, it improves content management for your business.

The best part about creating a content workflow is that it can enhance your content strategy by identifying bottlenecks or areas where there’s room for improvement. In this article, we’ll walk you through the necessary steps needed to create a content workflow for your business.

Step #1: Create and assign team roles

It’s important to appoint team members to do specific tasks or assemble a team that will be involved in the process of creating content for your business. For instance, you want to assign team members for roles like writers, editors, content strategists, SEO experts, and graphics designers. Writers can research and write the blog posts, while your editors can go through the article and ensure it’s inline with your brand’s requirements and messaging.

This lets you gather a team of professionals that all fit their position and are well qualified to tackle the task at hand. You don’t want to hire staff only to find out their expertise is not in creating the type of content you need for your business. Building the right team for the type of content you want to create helps enhance the content workflow and ensures smooth operations.

You can create and assign team roles based on the type of content you’re creating. For example, if you want to create WordPress-related blog posts, you will need to look for specialized WordPress writers. Similarly, if you’re creating podcasts, you will need to find audio and video experts to help you create high-quality content.

Step #2: Decide on major goals

After creating team roles and assigning them to team members, you can start thinking about major goals. This is where you provide a clear direction to your team and let them know what you want them to do for your business.

Here are some examples:

  • Let copywriters know they need to produce two 1,500 word blog posts each week.
  • Let the SEO expert know more about the audience you’re targeting, your brand, and what your content’s strong points are. Using this essential information, SEO experts can help enhance your content and help improve the visibility of your web page in SERPs.
  • Tell the graphic designer to coordinate with the copywriters for featured images for blog posts as well as the social media graphic that’ll go with it.

Ideally, you want to set clear major goals for your content workflow so everyone’s on the same page.

Deciding on major goals and setting tasks is also important for working with new team members or for when you decide to outsource work. Since everything that needs to be done is already documented, there’s less chance of someone not knowing what they are supposed to do, even if they just joined your team. It offers a more user-friendly environment for new staff members and helps enhance your content workflow.

Step #3: Set timelines

Timelines also play an important role in shaping a successful content workflow for your business. You need to set proper timelines for executing decided tasks on time. This way, you let your team members know exactly when they’re supposed to be submitting work or completing the project. For instance, you can set a timeline for creating blog posts to 4 days. This way, your copywriters will know exactly when you and your editors are expecting an article from them.

This is a great way to keep track of things and tells you exactly how far you are in your content marketing strategy. Keeping track of this helps marketers analyze if everything is going according to plan.

Setting important timelines can also prevent any potential delays in the future as everything is decided beforehand. All team members, including you, will know when they have to complete certain tasks. This reduces any delays and enhances your next content strategy plan.

Step #4: Set up a content publishing plan

Although a content publishing workflow might be different from your content workflow, it’s still recommended to properly set up and decide on a solid content publishing plan. A content publishing plan is a document that lists important timelines for when specific pieces of content should be published on your website.

This lets your team members know exactly when each piece of content they’re creating needs to be published. As a result, you’re able to prevent any delays and make sure content is in its final, publishing form well beforehand.

It’s also one of the best ways to improve your content strategy. You can analyze important dates during the year and publish high-quality content accordingly. For example, you can create blog posts specifically about plugins or tools Black Friday sales, or create WordPress tutorials on how to personalize your website for Christmas. Since you produced content specifically for a certain date, you can take advantage of the event and attract more readers to your blog posts.

Setting up a publishing plan works great for determining the time it will take for an idea to be converted into a blog post so that you can set publishing dates accordingly. The time it will take for your team members to fully reach the final content stage may take more or less time than you may have initially estimated. However, with a solid publishing plan, you can rest assured it’ll be ready in time for your readers to consume.

Step #5: Create and publish content

The last and perhaps the most important step is executing your content strategy using the workflow you created. This is where all your hard work comes into play.

During the content creation phase, you need to ensure that all team members are following the workflow. This means that while creating content, team members should be following all brand guidelines, important timelines, and their assigned tasks. It’s also your responsibility to ensure the final quality of content as it needs your stamp of approval before it gets published on your website.

It’s also important for you to think about organizing your finished content once it’s past the brainstorming phase. You need to decide where published content should be stored and how unfinished content or ideas will be stored. This gives you a better “go-to” place when you need to go back and look for something. As a result, it can help you quickly jump back to a specific piece of content or let team members access previously-published content easily.

While it may not seem like much, publishing and promoting your content as soon as it’s finished is also important for the overall success of your content strategy plan. However, it’s also essential to not rush and choose the wrong time for publishing fresh content on your website. For instance, you don’t want most of your audience to be asleep when they receive a new blog post alert notification from you.

Conclusion

Creating a smooth content workflow for your business can be challenging, especially if this is your first time organizing everything. Creating a content workflow is a great way to enhance your content strategy for your business and boost conversions.

It lets you better analyze and manage everything from the content creation process to the time it gets published on your website. Content workflows for your business can also benefit your team members as it provides them a clear sense of direction for creating high-quality content for your business.

Are there any steps you’d add to create a smooth content workflow? Let us know in the comments box below.