That’s pretty much our internal mantra. 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. 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. Content Production Workflow. As you scale your systems will scale and this can present difficulties, which we’ll address later. 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. 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. One of the problems with the above flow is that you don’t have an accurate searchable database of all your previous material. Please, try again later. It’s much quicker than using a regular Google Sheet or Excel spreadsheet when you’re operating with thousands of complex records, and it’s much easier to do complex things with thanks to its intuitive filtering and grouping functionalities. If not, does the user have to create one based on a letter and/or number combination? Those associations that leave their workflows undefined often find it difficult to keep track of a large number of projects. Content Production Workflow. 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. 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. Aptly named, the dock enhances content creators’ post-production workflow. That small time investment to create a solid content creation workflow will reap dividends later down the line. Together, DigiCore and MPSTrak deliver the power you need for … 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. Do You Have a Playbook for Long-Term Success? Whether you’re producing a podcast, a marketing campaign, a TV show, or a piece of content, establishing a production workflow is crucial. Fully customizable automated workflows. Accepting, Formatting, Editing and Publishing a Guest Post You know how we do our content creation workflow! Production workflows are important for training new team members, scaling your business, and doing good work without having to reinvent the wheel. This time, it’s an additional Search step between the Trigger and the Action. Readability? Example workflows for ongoing content production Social Media Influencer Outreach Checklist 4. Every team does: Certain people do certain things at certain times over and over. This means that all records which contain my name in the Who field of the record will show up in this view. Social Media Image Design 6. Simple. You’ve covered who, what, and when. So I would build a blog writing process template and then every time I write a blog post I run the checklist and follow it. With a defined workflow, everyone who helps plan, create, and publish the content knows the process and how their individual tasks fit into it. All the important information entered into the checklist, including: … etc, is imported back into the relevant fields in the original Airtable record. In each task card you can add comments or upload files, even add subtasks. There is significant value which can be unearthed through an effective content strategy. What We Do. We now have a fully searchable database of every piece of content we’ve ever done, or has ever been done about us. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! The app works on the basis of Kanban boards, which means tasks are represented as cards and these cards can get dragged from one column to another. This brings us to the content team organization aspect of any good content creation workflow. Use the discount code FRIEND200 for a $200 discount on access to the courses for an entire year when you register by April 30. If it saves 10 minutes, it’s paid off in 12 weeks. To define a content workflow is to identify who does what when. Number 3099067. Want to put content workflows to work for you? Define each task thoroughly enough so that the person in each role knows what they need to do to complete their tasks satisfactorily and keep the project moving. When you’re a small team you want to be able to act quickly. Identify what each role does (the tasks). Identify and stick to a content workflow. Content Production Workflows. Some tools enable teams to see at a glance what phase of the workflow a piece of content is in. This allowed us to store all our ideas and then assign due dates to the ideas we liked to show they were coming soon. Until he does it, the content can’t be passed on to the next stage of the workflow, which is proofreading by the editor. Copyright © 2021 Informa PLC By using Content Marketing Institute, you. Then define each task in as much detail as needed to minimize time spent on avoidable edits, queries, and general confusion. This effort alone doesn’t protect you from pitfalls. People key source of bottlenecks. This makes each card an exhaustive history of the progress on a particular task. If you leave your workflows undefined, it’s difficult to keep track of a large number of projects, and projects can get stuck. @adam_h_h on Twitter. Workflow is the set of statuses that can be applied to items in your project to communicate their progress. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used). The record ID of the Airtable record was inserted into the Process Street checklist at the very beginning of the process. There will still be bottlenecks and there will still be some buck passing. This was comprised of two “zaps” – individual automations via Zapier. And it will record when it was posted. You see, Airtable is a big database that looks like a spreadsheet – it is easy to use and navigate. 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. Informa UK Limited is a company registered in England and Wales with company number 1072954 whose registered office is 5 Howick Place, London, SW1P 1WG. VIDEO EDITING WORKFLOW 3. For example, if you know a certain subject-matter expert is away every Thursday, don’t set the sign-off date for a Thursday as that will thwart success and set things up to be late from the beginning. Your list of columns for your content creation board hit me like a ton of bricks! To replicate our kind of setup you’ll need a paid account with Zapier, Airtable, and Process Street. Whatever you like. We used to use Trello. Knowing that John is a bottleneck means you can address the reasons why (no time, other priorities) and help unblock him. DAVID SCHWEER January 9, 2020. Find out how to master your content production workflow in 2018 with this definitive guidebook. Creating content – blogs, infographics, videos, podcasts – creates an opportunity for you to connect with your audience and to engage with a new audience. The editor then works through the rest of the checklist. 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. Moving around data like IDs allows you to use extra search steps later on in your flow. First, let people know when in the workflow they are featured. Tools for defining and communicating about your workflows can be basic or sophisticated. Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute. 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. 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. With Process Street, you build a process template and then run checklists off that template each time you do the task. Content Marketing World is part of the Informa Connect Division of Informa PLC. This triggers a zap which takes that idea and creates a new record in Airtable. This made it easy to move things around understand which tasks were priority items. That record becomes a … well … record of everything that was ever done in association with that article. Everyone on the team has this view. 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. Even if you haven’t defined your workflows, your team has them. Start free trial No credit card required. 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. As such, you can build robust systems which are still simple and intuitive. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. He also collects typewriters! We can look at an overview of this in one of our calendar views. Try One of These Tools, Marketers: Reclaim Your Time With These Productivity Tips, Tools, and Templates, 175+ Favorite Tech Tools of Content Marketers, Your 2020 Mission: A Unified Strategy for Content in Your Marketing, Do You Really Care How Your Audiences Are Doing? Robert Mills is head of content for GatherContent – the pre-CMS content collaboration platform. Designed for all content, customized for you. Once you have the hang of this kind of zap you can start building out more complex ones. The most important one to note here was how we launched our pre-publish checklists. Others use project-management software, which enables them to plug in start dates, task duration, and dependencies so that date changes ripple through automatically. Does Airtable automatically create the record ID for use in Process Street? Let’s say you’ve defined your content workflow. But several considerations are relevant to all projects. Experiment to see which tools best support your team. To provide you with the best possible user experience, we and our trusted partners use cookies on this website for personalization and analytics. Once the writer has done this, the next section of the checklist is assigned, via Process Street’s task assignments feature, to the designer. Using a simple 750-word page as the example, let’s say the average time it takes to get from brief to publication is 12 hours. Thanks! Build efficient and scalable content production system with Content Workflow. 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. Introduce several feedback loops (marketing, HR, legal) and you’ve added several layers of complexity to the workflow. It was a smooth and simple process for a small team. I hope that makes sense! After everyone included in the workflow has been allocated their responsibilities, you have reached the place where you can define the phases the content will pass through. 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. Rob is a journalism graduate, ex-BBC audience researcher, and former head of content and project manager at a branding and design agency. 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. What I’ll briefly do in this section is cover some of the mechanics of how you can link these systems up with Zapier. We have some simple zaps like this one, for taking new ideas from Slack and using them to create new records in Airtable, which are pretty self explanatory: Within the Edit Options section of the Trigger, you define the Slack channel which these post ideas will go into. Once you’re building it you’ll find it becomes clear very quickly. We don’t any more. Trello prides itself on its simplicity. Here’s what defining a content workflow enables your team to do: 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 Some teams use spreadsheets. 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. 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. Everyday we work with agencies and their clients, or in house teams, who are trying to produce content for their new websites. Schedule demo. Thanks! This is like choosing the parent database. We used the calendar view on Trello to get an overview of when each article would be published, ordered according to due date. SEO Checklist: The Keyword Research Process 3. TruEdit offers the flexibility and customization necessary to support your creative workflow. We have a significant number of data points for each of these individual records, meaning we can perform complex filtering and performance assessments. If we decided that one of these articles was going to be done in the next two weeks we would move it into Upcoming. It will also add some automatic tags because it was created via the Slack channel. How do you do yours? In this Process Street post, I’m going to explain to you: I’m going to jump straight into the nitty gritty. 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. Assuming you’ve been efficiently managing your production with production workflow software and working with a capable assistant editor, half the battle for your film post production will already be won.. The zap will automatically fill the name of the record with the content of the Slack message. Each tool represented a different part of the content creation workflow. Ultimately, video production workflows can help video productions and marketing teams control who sees video content, and when. Does it typically get stuck in limbo? Use PR to spread the word at different outlets. Lots of data is being transferred throughout the process and the work is being done automatically. "Content Strategy for the Web" author Kristina Halvorson says a content workflow determines "how content is requested, sourced, created, reviewed, approved, and delivered." Every content team that wants to keep its projects on track needs to define its workflow before any content creators’ pens touch paper or fingers hit keyboards. 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. Whoever said workflows can’t be fun? Use the terms your team uses. 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. 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. It will tag the Team as content-creation and it will tag the Type as blog-post. All the work done by the content promotion team will now be stored on that very same original Airtable record. Our last panel will look at the changes in content production in response to new tools and distributed teams. “Yesterday” isn’t a helpful response. Organization is a less intensive challenge for you as there are far fewer variables to keep track of at any one time. 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. CONTENT WORKFLOW Build efficient and scalable content production system Ensure everything gets created and signed off on time with our automated content approval workflow. It launches the content promotion team’s checklist. Editor’s note: Want to get your content production on a formal track? All tools included in this post are suggested by the author. 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. #contentstrategy, Get Your Content Workflow on the Right Track [Tools], Want Better Content Marketing Management? You can create different “views” in Airtable which are basically just predefined filters, allowing you to see all the data which matches a particular set of parameters. The Workflow Station connects to your computer with the included USB-C … #contentstrategy, Try These 5 Agile Marketing Values to Sharpen Your Content Process, Want More Productivity? A creative briefis usually a one-page document that outlines the content goals, messages, format, design, and expected ROI. Accuracy? The designer is built into the process; they know their tasks at the beginning of the month and are notified about specific content in advance of the writer needing it. One of the simplest ways to improve your approach is to implement a documented content creation workflow. The way it does this is by searching for the Record ID of the original Airtable record. If you’re nodding your head, your content team probably hasn’t defined its workflow. People on the content team may be unsure of their responsibilities or unaware of the amount of effort required to complete the content. 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. This means that collaboration can be more precise, timely, and relevant to each specific stage of production---the gold standard for busy video teams that need to get videos shot/created, edited, and delivered quickly. In her book, Content Strategy for the Web, Kristina Halvorson says a content workflow determines “how content is requested, sourced, created, reviewed, approved, and delivered.”. It may increase the time you spend on a single piece of content or decrease it depending on your current process, but it could also prove to boost the effectiveness of your content by huge margins. But, to be fair, you can use these tools for any and all departments across your business. 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. This means that all records which contain blog-post in the Type field will show up in this view. We took this experience and applied it again when we built out our newer larger content creation workflow. You have the idea assigned to you. But what about all the steps before that point? Finally, explore ways to use software tools to communicate about the workflows and possibly even integrate the workflows into your systems. There have been a number of different approaches to supporting workflow processes in content management systems. Blog Image Design Process 5. You may show this visually, talk through the workflow, or use a tool to manage this. If you’re thinking about using workflow technology to mature your content marketing, this blog has 5 tips to help you design your content creation workflows. Then, in the Edit Options section of the Action, you choose which Airtable Base you want to use. This embed is a pre-publish checklist. But this isn’t the normal pre-publish checklist. Everyone was confused. Scale that up to a website with dozens or hundreds of pages, and it becomes evident how time-consuming content is. What experiences have you had with defining content workflows? With a … This way it’s easier for team to see where they are and what action is needed to achieve the goals and targets. As with any content documents, such as content inventories and style guides, the workflow should be a living document. PageMajik’s workflow management system can design and handle such multiple workflows, thereby increasing the productivity of the content production process. Perhaps a lot of content is waiting for John from the legal department to approve it. The first step in defining a content workflow is to understand who will be involved. Those stages need clear milestones and dependencies so that the whole team can see the interrelated deadlines. The process doesn’t run itself. 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. 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. With an automated workflow, teams can ensure that everything gets created and signed off on in time. 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. Podcast Publishing Checklist 8. Later I’ll be talking about our migration to Airtable instead of Trello, but I won’t be going into an in depth analysis of the two. This new process begins when the writer does. TruEdit is for all content creators. Our old system utilized Process Street and Trello. Content Workflow and Production. Whenever you have a new idea, you put it into that channel. Let me take you through our process step by step. Creating content across all the channels and touchpoints your customers interact with your brand is becoming ever more complex. This is further enhanced by a set of tools that helps maintain consistency of the manuscript, automates mundane tasks, … It can also record the performance of that article over time. 1 Various components of a workflow The CMS … Continue reading "Workflow in a Content Management System … Content Production Workflow. 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. This is where the understanding of people’s day jobs and related schedules can inform the assignment of work and tasks across the workflow. But now you know who is doing what; when they need to do it is the next requirement. 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. This is the hidden piece of a ruthlessly efficient content creation process. Required fields are marked. 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. This example, which shows each role in a “swimlane,” conveys the progression of tasks across roles (vertically) and over time (horizontally). Pushing content through the workflow requires a shared understanding to keep things on track. Covid-19 and Mixed Reality have only added to the demands and expectations. On the technology front, the ongoing roll-out of 5G technology will further enhance remote production, while AI will continue to expand into more facets of production workflows. 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. Then the editor works through the steps to send the article out via email to the subscribers list. 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. Compliance with certain policies or legal requirements? The designer then creates the first iterations of the header image while the writer is working on their draft. Advanced Content Promotion Checklist 2. So you have a card for Write Article and it’s currently in the Upcoming column, then you start it and move it into the Doing column. 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. We know just how hard it can be to get good quality content produced and published on time. We change the Status of the record from Idea to Confirmed to Start. Informa UK Limited is part of Informa PLC. Someone else added the wigs. But your content will not be highly effective if that’s your outlook – even if the substance of your content is brilliant! When creating content, it’s easy to think you should just make it and publish it. So, every piece of content we would write would be examined against this checklist before it was handed to the editor to click Publish. Informa PLC’s registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. You can do this in any way your team finds helpful. But it isn’t always that straightforward. Our blog writing process used to look very similar to the template embed you can see below. Using the third party automation app Zapier, this would then run a pre-publish checklist and post a link to it into the Trello card. Allocate a realistic amount of time to each stage. 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. I manage the content for Process Street and dabble in other projects inc Idyoma on the side. 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. The default workflow will depend upon the project type that was selected when the project was created. For example, in GatherContent (my employer), each phase of the workflow may be assigned a color for a visual overview. It does seem pretty efficient based on how you explained it. It may look complex to build these automations with Zapier, but you just need an afternoon and suddenly you’re in control and running all kinds of tasks while you sleep. September 25, 2020. It will record who posted it into Slack. Each different type of content has its own version of this view. If you’ve put a hidden field into your Process Street template then you should be able to move over the Record ID from the Airtable record into that specific checklist which the automation runs. Each record has about 50 different fields. To finish off, I’ll leave you with these extra templates in case you want to turn any of these into part of your own content creation workflow: 1. Content production can be a communication challenge in any environment. For example, tell writers where to find the content’s purpose, audience, word-count goals, style guidelines (for voice, tone, and format, etc. “ASAP” isn’t a deadline. To keep content projects on track, define the #workflow before #content is created, says @RobertMills via @cmicontent. 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. This brings us to the two simple stages of a content creation workflow: Creation vs Organization. There is an approvals section which allows for iterations on the header image.