Online collaboration tools, like Trello, can help teams track their workflows, possibly using a built-in calendar to give a graphical view of the editorial calendar. Expand your content marketing knowledge – attend Content Marketing University. For example, in GatherContent (my employer), each phase of the workflow may be assigned a color for a visual overview. To define a content workflow is to identify who does what when. Spelling and grammar? We can look at an overview of this in one of our calendar views. 4. With a workflow for content production on a website project, of course you start with a brief and move through production and review and then to publish. Marcia Riefer Johnston tells the story of how this workflow came to be: I was part of a team that was having a devil of a time getting clear about the Q-and-A part of our workflow. Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked. A happy post-production workflow. The template above is useful for anyone, but I recommend adding it to your Process Street account and editing it to add extra steps which are specifically relevant to your business. Accuracy? The first section of the checklist is dedicated to pre-writing tasks: keyword analysis, recording long tail keywords, determining 5 title ideas, settling on a provisional final title, and understanding what kind of header image the post would need. This zap below is the one which updates the Airtable record with the final post information once the editor completes the checklist inside Process Street to confirm that the article has been successfully published. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! But it isn’t always that straightforward. Designed for all content, customized for you. This step allows us to automatically search the Airtable database for the correct record in order to update it. This allowed us to store all our ideas and then assign due dates to the ideas we liked to show they were coming soon. We used the calendar view on Trello to get an overview of when each article would be published, ordered according to due date. Podcast Publishing Checklist 8. As this person will understand the workflow in terms of who is doing what and when, they can easily identify the bottlenecks, unblock the projects, and keep them moving. But that’s not to say that Trello isn’t good; it is. It’s not a blame game buy rather a way to identify issues that need to be addressed to keep the content (and project) moving. When we plan our sprints we will go through the post-ideas view in Airtable and assign dates to ideas we want to use that month. Scale that up to a website with dozens or hundreds of pages, and it becomes evident how time-consuming content is. With an automated workflow, teams can ensure that everything gets created and signed off on in time. As such, those two tasks comprise the first tasks in this new checklist. This means that all records which contain my name in the Who field of the record will show up in this view. Love it! But what about all the steps before that point? If you’d like to read that, then you should check out this article when you’ve finished: Airtable vs Trello: The Best of Task and Project Management. This means, for example, I could search on Airtable for all the articles I published last year in the category Processes. That’s why you need a sole person who is responsible for overseeing the project, including keeping each piece of content moving through each stage of the workflow. Experiment to see which tools best support your team. This means that the scope is the final checks and edits you need to do on your blog before you hit the Publish button. To achieve these goals we have to transform the way that content is produced, and a new Content Production Workflow group has been established in the pan-BBC Design and Engineering division. For any tasks that need more details than will fit in the workflow itself, point people to those details. Content Creation Workflows: Why You Need One and How to Build It, Airtable vs Trello: The Best of Task and Project Management, The Ultimate Guide to Business Process Automation, Ultimate Guide to Small Business Automation with Zapier, 50 Ways To Save Time & Money with Workflow Automation, Form Automation: Turning Your Checklists Into Databases, 222 Zaps to Crush Your Current Process Automation, SEO Checklist: The Keyword Research Process, Social Media Influencer Outreach Checklist, Accepting, Formatting, Editing and Publishing a Guest Post, What our content creation workflow looked like when we had a small team, What our scaled up content creation workflow looks like now, How you can build a content creation workflow like ours, The Process Street templates you can use to structure your new workflows, The email text which was sent to subscribers. Each different type of content has its own version of this view. We were able to do that by getting the author to put all the important post details into form fields within the pre-publish checklist; when the last task of the checklist was clicked a zap copied all of that information into an Airtable record. Rob is a journalism graduate, ex-BBC audience researcher, and former head of content and project manager at a branding and design agency. Examples: After you have identified the roles for a given workflow, identify the tasks (“create a draft” or “approve a draft” for example), assign each task to a role, and put the tasks in order of completion. Identify what each role does (the tasks). It will also add some automatic tags because it was created via the Slack channel. Tools for defining and communicating about your workflows can be basic or sophisticated. Social Media Influencer Outreach Checklist 4. How do you do yours? Let us know what has worked for you and what hasn’t in the comments below! That record becomes a … well … record of everything that was ever done in association with that article. Identify when the tasks get done (the flow). Let’s say you’ve defined your content workflow. You see, Airtable is a big database that looks like a spreadsheet – it is easy to use and navigate. Each record has about 50 different fields. This means that everyone can see the progress of their team members while recording their progress too. Find out how to master your content production workflow in 2018 with this definitive guidebook. Please, try again later. A written content marketing workflow provides structure to your processes and increases your execution efficiency. That’s pretty much our internal mantra. Creating content – blogs, infographics, videos, podcasts – creates an opportunity for you to connect with your audience and to engage with a new audience. Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute. Products. Then define each task in as much detail as needed to minimize time spent on avoidable edits, queries, and general confusion. As with any content documents, such as content inventories and style guides, the workflow should be a living document. You may show this visually, talk through the workflow, or use a tool to manage this. The blog pre-publish acts as the content creation section of the workflow. The way it does this is by searching for the Record ID of the original Airtable record. This ties that particular checklist to the original record and allows our zap to pull the record ID from the checklist to search for it in Airtable. In the second, the URL of the checklist was taken and posted back into the Trello card as a comment. Follow him on Twitter @RobertMills. This makes each card an exhaustive history of the progress on a particular task. Do You Have a Playbook for Long-Term Success? It has managed content and workflows for mobile app creation, magazine production, marketing materials, print production, corporate collateral and sales enablement. One of the problems with the above flow is that you don’t have an accurate searchable database of all your previous material. But your content will not be highly effective if that’s your outlook – even if the substance of your content is brilliant! This time, it’s an additional Search step between the Trigger and the Action. In fact, it’s great for small teams. The editor can review work in regular meetings but only needs to act when notified, and the rigorous pre-publish section of the checklist reduces the workload on the editor. This kind of small automation proved useful and the team liked how it improved the flow. I will recommend this to the team of our platform, to know what they think, because we are beginning to scale up. Whoever said workflows can’t be fun? Considering you build a process like this to work for multiple years and it’s designed to improve quality too, it’s a no brainer. If it saves 10 minutes, it’s paid off in 12 weeks. There have been a number of different approaches to supporting workflow processes in content management systems. It can also record the performance of that article over time. We don’t any more. Everyone on the team has this view. This is like choosing the parent database. [The Weekly Wrap], Break down the content process into manageable tasks, Identify each piece of content’s stage of development, Identify each step for the content to receive approval, Know who is responsible for each step and when, Reviewers (legal, HR, department heads, etc.). We have a significant number of data points for each of these individual records, meaning we can perform complex filtering and performance assessments. Check you’ve included the keyword in the different headers, make sure there are no typos, look at the formatting for each image, etc etc. We know just how hard it can be to get good quality content produced and published on time. Earlier this month, we spoke at Content Marketing World on how to restructure your internal team and processes in order to improve your organization’s ability to create quality content in a sustainable way. Kingston’s Workflow Station and Readers give users the freedom to create and customize a file offload setup that fits their needs allowing them to transfer video, photos, and audio from multiple sources at once 1 . VIDEO EDITING WORKFLOW 3. The Kingston Workflow Station is tailored to content creators who are finishing up production and need to offload files. Here’s what defining a content workflow enables your team to do: A defined content workflow tells people in all roles where the content is in the process when their turn comes, and it clarifies what they must do to deliver what’s needed when it’s needed. The best way to do it is just to make a test base in Airtable and a test template in Process Street and just play for a bit. Immediately following our presentation, an attendee approached us and asked for some guidance on how to best integrate a legal/compliance review step into the content production workflow. Those stages need clear milestones and dependencies so that the whole team can see the interrelated deadlines. Each tool represented a different part of the content creation workflow. To keep content projects on track, define the #workflow before #content is created, says @RobertMills via @cmicontent. Once you have the hang of this kind of zap you can start building out more complex ones. You then choose data pulled in from Slack and select to enter it into the relevant fields by using the little insert buttons on the right hand side of each field. Creating content across all the channels and touchpoints your customers interact with your brand is becoming ever more complex. Process Street was used to shape the content itself and Trello was used to organize the team and provide clarity over what was being worked on, by whom, and what the progress was. There is no room for excuses such as “I didn’t know it was my responsibility” or “That’s not my job” – things I’ve heard many times when working with clients. #contentstrategy, Try These 5 Agile Marketing Values to Sharpen Your Content Process, Want More Productivity? We also have a view for all blog posts. This made it easy to move things around understand which tasks were priority items. This brings us to the content team organization aspect of any good content creation workflow. The aim of a content workflow is to not only get content produced faster, but ensure everyone in the process is on the same page and knows exactly what their responsibilities are. Subscribe to my email newsletter here on Substack: Trust The Process. When the article has been published and the email received, the editor can check off the final task to complete the checklist. This is like choosing the specific sheet or section of the database you want this data to be entered into. It was a smooth and simple process for a small team. Introduce several feedback loops (marketing, HR, legal) and you’ve added several layers of complexity to the workflow. They use Relayter to create their omnichannel marketing content and materials. This way it’s easier for team to see where they are and what action is needed to achieve the goals and targets. Some teams use spreadsheets. This effort alone doesn’t protect you from pitfalls. If it saves each writer 30 minutes per post and you publish 3 posts a week, then a 6 hour time investment is paid back to the team after 4 weeks. For example, when defining the task “approve a draft,” you might spell out exactly which aspects of the content need approval. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Browse: Home. 1 Various components of a workflow The CMS … Continue reading "Workflow in a Content Management System … This new process begins when the writer does. What experiences have you had with defining content workflows? There is significant value which can be unearthed through an effective content strategy. Together, DigiCore and MPSTrak deliver the power you need for … Pushing content through the workflow requires a shared understanding to keep things on track. Moving into one column would generate a pre-publish checklist, moving into another column would notify the editor that a piece was ready for review. Streamline creation and collaboration that delivers efficiency and better creativity. The next step is to find a good keyword for the article and then to hash out a structure or basic plan. For example, a workflow for an online content creation project might look something like this: I finally drew these stick figures and sent this drawing out to everyone. The number of roles and titles vary greatly. A workflow may be simple or complex. Use the terms your team uses. Animation Design Process 7. Our content creation board was roughly set up with the following columns: When we came up with ideas for new articles we entered them into the Inbox column. Without a step-by-step action plan for content production, … In each task card you can add comments or upload files, even add subtasks. Our old system utilized Process Street and Trello. The narrative is linear and makes sense. #contentstrategy, Get Your Content Workflow on the Right Track [Tools], Want Better Content Marketing Management? For the first, moving a card to a particular column was the trigger and running the checklist was the action. We have a specific channel in our company Slack which is dedicated to new ideas for posts. In the space of 1 year. Others use project-management software, which enables them to plug in start dates, task duration, and dependencies so that date changes ripple through automatically. And it will record when it was posted. Find what works for you but make sure this information is disseminated effectively. Fully customizable automated workflows. Since implementing our new content creation workflow we jumped from 20k weekly visits from Google to 75k. Airtable automatically creates a record ID for each record you make – it’s part of the default metadata, much like how each Process Street checklist always has certain metadata attached to it. Then the editor works through the steps to send the article out via email to the subscribers list. A bottleneck is a choke point in the production workflow that obstructs the throughput of job volume. Until he does it, the content can’t be passed on to the next stage of the workflow, which is proofreading by the editor. I’ve worked in both agencies and corporate setting… “Yesterday” isn’t a helpful response. Once you’ve selected your Base and Table, you will see all the available fields for a record in that Table show up as options for you in Zapier. You can edit it to add new tasks or you could add extra detail inside tasks to more rigorously enforce a style-guide. How to Document Your Content Marketing Workflow, 5 Brands Share Their Content Marketing Process, When defining #workflow, use terms your team uses, says @RobertMills via @cmicontent. But several considerations are relevant to all projects. This brings us to the two simple stages of a content creation workflow: Creation vs Organization. This old process of ours wasn’t laden with automation, but it did contain some automated bits. This triggers a zap which takes that idea and creates a new record in Airtable. The editor then works through the rest of the checklist. Let me take you through our process step by step. It may seem like a simple task to produce a creative brief, but things get a little tricky in getting people to actually fill out their creative briefs. A productive workflow should be able to be presented visually so that you and your team can see the stages and responsibilities with ease. Failed to subscribe. Setting up a strong production workflow can save endless headaches down the road, so make sure you set up a solid foundation right from the start and use it consistently going forward. It does seem pretty efficient based on how you explained it. The designer then creates the first iterations of the header image while the writer is working on their draft. The last task the writer is faced with in the checklist is called Submit for Review. What We Do. People key source of bottlenecks. As you can see, there’s a third step in the overview. Alternatively known as a Content Governance Model, content workflows are the definition of roles, responsibilities and ownership, workflow, documentation, and training of employees to make sure they’re fully equipped to do the best job they can. There will still be bottlenecks and there will still be some buck passing. The default workflow will depend upon the project type that was selected when the project was created. NLP-based content production workflow solution for scholarly articles publishing Challenge Owing to increase in research and development (R&D) spending across the world has resulted in an increase in the volume of research findings sent for publication. ... 5 Tips for Helping to Design and Build Content Production Workflows. To begin to discover ways to streamline your workflow, start by looking at the processes like the one defined above and identify ways to remove any redundancies and reduce the time taken for each step. Registered in England and Wales. That small time investment to create a solid content creation workflow will reap dividends later down the line. If you have a digital storyboard and clear shot list, managing the edit is a whole heap easier. In GatherContent, workflow makes the status of your content crystal clear. You see, when we first changed the status of the Airtable record to Confirmed to Start in order to automatically generate a checklist for the writer to follow, we also moved some data into hidden fields in the checklist. Someone else added the wigs. There are many ways to create a production workflow. When creating content, it’s easy to think you should just make it and publish it. The first step in defining a content workflow is to understand who will be involved. Most systems use a very straight-forward user role based system. What we ended up doing was recording all the details of each post in Airtable. It will record who posted it into Slack. Thanks! As in any process, the stages of content production follow a logical, repeatable order. A team may have separate workflows for certain clients or types of projects. This is the use of organizational tools to improve the substance, optimization, and presentation of your content. I hope that makes sense! Living in Sevilla in the south of Spain, my current hobby is learning Spanish! A content workflow is a set of tasks that a team needs to complete for a given client or content type — a web page, a blog post, a white paper, an email, or any other kind of content that the group needs to deliver. To put it in simple terms, our team worked out of Trello and the different stages of the flow were defined by what column a task was moved into. With a defined workflow, everyone who helps plan, create, and publish the content knows the process and how their individual tasks fit into it. If the task definitions are left vague, prepare to hear things like “I didn’t know I had to do that” or “That’s not my job” or “I thought Peter was taking care of that.”. When you’re a small team you want to be able to act quickly. Readability? Basically, if your trigger is changing the status of a record in Airtable and your action is to run a new checklist, then in the Edit Template section of the Action part of the zap, you’ll be able to decide what data or metadata you want to move from Airtable into that checklist. @adam_h_h on Twitter. Checking off that final task in the checklist triggers yet another zap. What has worked well for you, and what hasn’t? Our cloud-based content workflow and production platforms are designed to streamline digital publishing, from content creation to delivery, with workflow management and tracking automation. Content workflows help to remove the common pitfalls when it comes to producing content. The writer only needs to work from a single checklist at any point, making their lives easier and providing them with more guidance and steps to increase quality consistently. Content Production Workflow. Workflow is the operational aspect of a work procedure through which we can define the following aspects How tasks are structured Who performs the tasks What their relative order is How they are synchronized How information flows to support the tasks How tasks are being tracked. The publishing calendar can be planned a month or more in advance, not just because of calendar software but because the editors now have more time to carefully manage future output. SEO Checklist: The Keyword Research Process 3. You also select to ignore any messages posted by bots, only humans. Accepting, Formatting, Editing and Publishing a Guest Post You know how we do our content creation workflow! There is an approvals section which allows for iterations on the header image. Once you’re building it you’ll find it becomes clear very quickly. You don’t have to use software tools to define content workflows – you could use a crayon on the back of a manila folder – but a drawing application, such as Visio or other graphics programs, can come in handy. This is further enhanced by a set of tools that helps maintain consistency of the manuscript, automates mundane tasks, … This example, which shows each role in a “swimlane,” conveys the progression of tasks across roles (vertically) and over time (horizontally). Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used). Number 3099067. Even if you haven’t defined your workflows, your team has them. What I’ll briefly do in this section is cover some of the mechanics of how you can link these systems up with Zapier. The record ID of the Airtable record was inserted into the Process Street checklist at the very beginning of the process. Editor’s note: Want to get your content production on a formal track? Try these 5 Agile marketing Values to Sharpen your content projects probably involve a lot people. Replicate our kind of zap you can build robust systems which are simple. The run Prepublish column these articles was going to be done personalization analytics... A ruthlessly efficient content creation workflow address the reasons why ( no time, it ’ s not to that! Make sure this information is disseminated effectively people who have distinct responsibilities at project... Edit Options section of the process Street and dabble in other projects inc Idyoma on the side easier team... From here, the checklist was taken and posted back into the Trello card contained accurate... 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