What Marketers Need to Know – InstantFollowerz

The best content creators make it look easy, but behind every polished YouTube video and beautiful blog post is a digital content workflow that can involve a few people or a few dozen.

Technology has not yet advanced to the point where marketers can snap their fingers to launch a successful email campaign, YouTube series, or blog.

Until then, content requires extensive planning, a team effort, and a consistent content workflow to keep everything and everyone on track.

In this article, we’ll explore what a content workflow is, why your team needs one, and the steps to build the right one for your marketing goals.

Content

Defining roles, goals, and deliverables is critical to an effective content workflow. You’ll also want to make (and stick to) a realistic timeline.

Your content workflow may change depending on the type of content or resources available to you. It’s normal for the materials, people, and timelines defined in a workflow to change depending on the content you’re creating, such as a blog, video, live stream, or web copy.

Why marketers need a content workflow

Content workflows ensure a successful project launch without any issues. With Content Workflow, you can:

• Create content that is consistent, timely and accurate.
• Guarantee realistic deadlines and results.
• Proactively plan for common roadblocks content planning and launches
• Clearly identify how each team member fits into the bigger picture of content creation

Essentially, a content workflow keeps you and your team on track for a seamless launch. Without a content workflow, you and your team are more likely to miss deadlines, make mistakes, and struggle to work towards your shared goal.

Risks of not using workflows

It may be tempting to just relax, especially if you have a small editorial team and a low publishing cadence. I’m begging you: don’t give in.

I’ve worked in a few places where a formal workflow didn’t seem necessary because the team was so small. But as the company grew, new hires would become confused and frustrated by the lack of structure and documentation.

And in the end, people go to new jobs, and all that institutional knowledge goes with them.

According to a Marketing Charts 2024 Study50% of B2B technology marketers “create content based on website research and analytics” and 39% “closely monitor a content calendar based on campaigns developed to map to product delivery schedules.”

When your content strategies involve cross-functional collaboration like this, all teams need access to your workflows.

If the product roadmap changes, or if website analytics change dramatically, you’ll need processes in place to communicate and course correct. Even in a small team, the alternative is often chaos.

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Content Creation Workflow: Task-Based Vs. Status-based workflows

Before learning how to build a content creation workflow, you need to understand what would benefit your team the most, a task-based or status-based workflow.

Knowing the difference between the two will help you strategic the right workflow for your next project.

Task-based workflows

Each stage of a task-based workflow is a task that needs to be completed before moving on to the next step. In a task-based workflow, each step is described in detail and everyone working on the project knows what is expected of them.

Here’s a simplified example of a task-based workflow:

In this example, each piece of content would have four associated tasks that would guide it from research to publication. Task-based workflows are especially useful for new content teams because of step-by-step instructions at each stage.

Any writer, freelance or in-house, could keep content moving through the workflow.

Status-based workflows

More experienced teams often prefer a status-based workflow. In a status-based workflow, each stage is defined by a status, and stages do not include detailed descriptions or instructions as in task-based workflows.

Here’s a simplified example of what a status-based workflow might look like:

In this example, there are four stages or statuses: Unassigned, Recorded, Ready for Approval, and Published. If these stages were integrated into the content workflow, anyone viewing it would be able to see where each piece of content is in the overall workflow. This can make it easier to plan and schedule high-volume content.

Status-based workflows can be easier to follow and can be used for a wide variety of content types. However, it is crucial that your team understands the content creation process and their role in it.

Pro tip: Popular workflow tools like Asana, Trello, and AirTable have dozens of templates for different workflows. Even if you end up using a different tool, I find it helpful to make a quick mockup of the workflow and go through it with a few teammates. It’s often a faster way to identify pain points and figure out what will work best for your team.

Here’s an example of one of AirTable’s content marketing management templates.

You can see that each piece of content includes which user personas to target; if you have a lot of content and a lot of people, this might be something you want to recreate in your workflow.

The source

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Content Strategy Workflow: How to Build It

Follow these steps to create a workflow for you and your team.

1. Determine your content goals and audience.

Your goals will inform the content you want to create and the audience you’re trying to reach. As always, knowing your customer is the foundation of great content.

If you need to build or refine your customer profiles, check out ours template guide.

Is your goal to create brand awareness? If so, you’ll probably want to create product-driven blogs or engaging SOCIAL MEDIA posts. If you’re working to delight and retain your current customers, an effective email campaign might be a better option.

You’ll also want to set realistic parameters — your content workflow will fail if your goals outpace your resources.

2. Clearly define the roles and responsibilities of everyone on your team.

Once you know your content goals and target audience, you’re ready to decide who on your marketing team will be involved in the project.

For a content creation workflow, you’ll need content creators (bloggers, YouTubers, videographers, etc.), editors, and other stakeholders involved in content creation.

Whether your team uses a task-based workflow or a status-based workflow, everyone involved must have a clear definition of their role, duties, and where they fit in the process.

For example, if your workflow is for a series of content on YouTube, content creators will be in charge of producing the content. Editors will be tasked with ensuring that the content is of the highest quality and free of errors.

Senior editors or project managers will give final approval to launch each episode in the series.

This is also the time to figure out the tools and materials your team will need to create and launch content.

for example, content management systems like Content Hub are necessary for publishing blog posts. Canva and Adobe Photoshop are great design tools.

You’ll also need to consider your budget for tools like microphones and cameras for video or email automation software for email campaigns.

3. Decide on the type of content and frequency of output.

Determine the type of content you want to create and how often you want to publish this content. For example, you might want to post YouTube videos once a week or Instagram Reels every other day.

Now is also a great time to create a content calendar to plan your projects and ensure your content launches on time. In the LinkedIn newsletter Marketing strategies 4 GrowthJoe Kovacs suggests planning a quarter of the content at the same time.

If you are stuck at this point, Kovac has great advice that can help you decide on content types and frequency (he’s specifically talking about scalable content, but I think it’s broadly applicable): Center your customers or buyers.

“Your priority will be their problems, which you’ve defined in your buyer persona,” he writes. “Your solutions… [are] foundation of your content planning.”

4. Develop a content creation process.

Brainstorm with your team about the different steps that must be taken to successfully launch your brand content. These steps will vary depending on the type of content you’re creating.

For example, the process of creating and publishing a blog post it might look something like this:

1. Strategizing
2. Planning
3. Creation
4. Editing
5. Publishing
6. Analyzing

These tasks may seem broad, but this is where you want to expand. For example, creating a strategy usually means performing a content audit, creating buyer personas, and conducting keyword research.

Editing can include implementation SEO techniques or by adding images and links.

Each step in the process should be considered so that it can be assigned to the appropriate team member.

5. Document and automate your workflow.

According to a Content Marketing Institute’s 2024 Reportnearly half (45%) of B2B marketers using generative AI say they have more efficient workflows.

If you haven’t jumped on the AI ​​bandwagon yet, workflow automation is a great place to start.

Jamie Jewellereditor-in-chief HubSpot’s website blogused ChatGPT to help him create a tool called BlogBot, which automates a major pain point for HubSpot writers: getting our posts from Google Docs to the CMS.

Juviler has what he describes as a “poor background” in coding, but says “there’s no way I could have built this tool as efficiently as I did without the help of ChatGPT.”

And there’s no way HubSpot writers could publish as much as we do without BlogBot, which together have saved, no joke, thousands of hours.

Juviler also uses AI to sort, filter and extract data from a database or list. “For example, if I have a list of hundreds of blog posts and want to see which would be good candidates for a particular CTA, I’ll ask ChatGPT to pick the most relevant blog posts based on the post titles.”

Pro tip: If you use HubSpot (or are curious about it), automated workflow software which allows users to align all their teams’ processes so that there is no confusion or hiccups from task to task.

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The future of workflows

Content workflows are essential if you want to create content regularly and efficiently with your team informed every step of the way – think of it as a roadmap for a seamless content launch.

And now that AI has entered chat, it’s easier and faster than ever to create, test, and automate workflows, whether you’re using the free version of Asana or HubSpot’s enterprise platform.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in June 2022 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.