Customizing Your Content Workflow for Maximum Efficiency

Robert Mills, Head of Content at Gather Content, and MarketMuse Co-founder and Chief Product Officer Jeff Coyle spent some time discussing the best ways to improve your content workflow. Here are the webinar notes.

What is a Content Workflow?

Providing visibility into the content workflow allows everyone to understand where the content is coming from and where it’s going next.

Risks of Not Following a Workflow

Not using a workflow leaves too much open to chance, including the risks of:

• Bottlenecks
• Process issues
• Skills required
• Roles and responsibilities

Stages of an Effective Workflow

You may need several workflows within an organization, depending on the project. There’s no golden rule for the number of stages required in a workflow, but each one should have a well-defined purpose.

Process, Tasks, and People Involved to Make it Work

The six primary tasks in an effective workflow are:

• Content creation
• Optimization
• Review
• Publish
• Measure
• Learn

Although the size of a team will vary, the main functions within the team that need to be covered are: Chief Content Officer, Content Creators, Content Editors, Social Team, and Content Managers.

The Cost of Creating Content

The three pillars of costing quality content are:

• Scope (amount of content to produce)
• Resources (amount of writers and budget for them)
• Time (content creation window)

Repurpose and Optimize Existing Content

One piece of content can serve multiple purposes, taking a different form. For example, a webinar can be repurposed into a blog post. An ebook can be turned into a workshop or a checklist. Like optimization, repurposing is very effective because you’re not always starting from scratch.

Leverage Technology for Greater Efficiency and ROI

There are three areas in which technology can help:

• Content operations and management system
• Content intelligence
• Project management system

Gather Content uses a number of tools including their own software (obviously), ContentCal for social media scheduling, HubSpot for marketing automation.

Customize Your Workflow

There are five parts to workflow customization:

• Map your workflow
• Add people
• Identify risks and pain points
• Estimate time
• Pitch and critique.