How to Fix Your Content Workflow (and Stop Getting Tangled Up)
- Veronica Jarski
- Mar 13
- 11 min read
Updated: Apr 15
Key takeaways
Assess the current situation. Meet with team members of your own team and cross-team members to better understand the existing workflow before you build a new one.
Map out a process. You'll need to know how to receive content requests, how to keep communication open during the creation process, and then how to finish out the project.
Establish roles and responsibilities. Know exactly what everyone on your content team is responsible for and how to communicate that information.
Automate when possible. You'll have tasks that you repeat so often, you'll want them to be automated.
Review regularly. Once a quarter, revisit the process with your team. Make sure everything is working well. If not, identify and plan to fix the friction as fast as possible.
Our content workflow needed a serious overhaul. What had worked when we were a content team of two now wasn't enough. The company was growing, and our content production was expanding.
So, we needed to streamline our process to keep up with the increasing content requests from external teams and ensure always meeting our deadlines.
Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy, right? If you've got a clear plan on how to do that, it can be fairly simple to create a successful content workflow. And by "simple," I mean "not complicated" ... but it's still a lot of work.
However, putting in the time and energy into an efficient content workflow is 100% worth it.
Let's dig into it (after we make sure we're aligned in our definition).
What Is a Content Workflow?
A content workflow is the process from content ideation through content production and content publication to content distribution. The process details every step in that process and the roles and responsibilities of different team members.
" ... The relationship between Workflow Efficiency and Organizational Success is
significant ... , indicating that improving workflow efficiency positively
contributes to overall organizational success. This suggests that while efficiency improvements may not immediately translate into productivity gains, they still have a broader impact on organizational performance, such as improving service quality and operational effectiveness." ("Revolutionizing Workflows: The Role of Efficiency in Organizational Success," August 2024)
The benefits of a good content workflow are ...
Increased efficiency (bye, bye, wasted time, money, and energy)
Defined roles and responsibilities (i.e., who does what and why)
Transparency among the team (if the workflow is documented and shared companywide)
Less friction among team
Greater collaboration among team members
Faster, easier content production
Fewer deadlines missed
Higher-quality work (Fewer rush jobs means more care in the crafting of content)
The Challenge: A Frankenstein's Monster of a Workflow Process
When I became head of Content at a SaaS, I knew that my first project was to create a successful content workflow. As the previous managing editor on the team, I knew that the team needed more structure and more standardizations. However, I didn't have the authority to fix it. Now, as the new head of Content, I could do so.
What are the problems in a content workflow?
An inefficient content workflow is usually very obvious to everyone who uses the process. Work frustrations can happen now and then. But hearing about regular bottlenecking, siloed information, redundant tasks, vague and blurry responsibilities, etc. indicate a chronic problem to address.
Our process had grown like ivy on Sleeping Beauty's castle, long and winding.
What was choking efficiency was the following:
Too many ways to make content requests. Slack, emails, in-person conversations, meeting notes, and even texts all made communication fast but not necessarily clear. I'd have colleagues on other teams slacking me their ideas, complete with links to whatever they'd seen or read to inspire them. Though appreciative when the ideas were good, the team felt frustrated in receiving countless vague ideas that, when pressed, the colleagues were only "sort of thinking about."
Insufficient information. A salesperson wanted a one-pager to explain a product feature, so he'd talk to one of the Content team members. But what did he want exactly? When did he need it? What was the purpose of the content? Or someone on the Demand Generation team needed an ebook about social listening. How was this going to be used? How would it be repurposed? Was there an email campaign around it? We had too much uncertainty at the beginning of any project. Getting the information from here and there added up to a ton of wasted time.
Lack of transparency. As the Content team members worked on the content, stakeholders wouldn't know where we were exactly in the production process. We'd get pinged a dozen times about this or that and deadlines, etc.
"Fire drill" mentality. When content was needed ASAP, when the team had to produce it ASAP, everyone worked with a high level of stress. Quality suffered. People got on edge. With requests coming in from all different areas, the Content team constantly received scorching-hot urgent projects. That led to everything else then being put on hold. Bottlenecks would happen. Stakeholders would go rogue and either hire freelancers (which led to different issues) or create. their own without letting anyone know (which wasted time and resources).
Disjointed team. The graphic designers, videographers, and content writers never talked to one another except for a sentence or two in Asana, the project management forum. As the newbie head of Content, I interviewed my team members and discovered that they felt in a silo, disconnected to one another, and had no visibility into each other's workloads and goals. That had to change.
Wasted time. Too many back-and-forth emails. Too little direction at the beginning, so we had false starts galore. Too much noise from all areas. All the above led to wasted time.
How I Fixed the Content Workflow Process ... and Saved Our Time, Resources, and Sanity
I had ideas and assumptions that I made about how the Content workflow could be better. After all, I was the managing editor and knew what I'd like to fix if I was given the necessary means to make those changes happen.
Assess the current workflow situation
However, when I got in my new role, I didn't want to assume that my perceptions were the same as the teams. So, I made individual meetings with the team members and asked them:
Describe your current workflow for me. Please be very detailed.
What do you see as the biggest problems or challenges in the workflow?
What do you see as the good things about the process that you want to keep?
How do you handle content requests from other teams?
How do you communicate with stakeholders?
If you had to fix anything right away, what would it be?
Take notes during the meetings with your team members. You'll need these notes for a full assessment of the process and to plan your next course of action.
Map out a detailed content workflow
After getting insights into the current process (which included mentioning needed steps, for example), I had a clear understanding of what we'd need for the improved content workflow.
Our Marketing department's project manager was well-versed in all things Asana. So, I brought her in to help with the process. In collaborating with her, I knew she'd find steps or have ideas that didn't occur to me. Her entire focus is workflow, so she was very helpful for this project.
We mapped out a process for every step of the content production process from the content request to post-publication/post-production.
Here's a look at our new and improved content workflow:
Planning stage
Content intake I wrote a document that served as a form on Asana. Whenever anyone had a content request, the person would click on the "content request" form. It'd pop up, and the person would fill out the form for editorial, design, or video content. The form a creative brief and would state: the: type of request (editorial, design, video), for the purpose of (brand awareness, new product feature information, sales-enablement content, etc.), by a certain date, the name of the requesting person, how success would be measured, etc. If the request form wasn't filled out properly, we'd leave a comment in Asana tagging the person making the request. We'd gently remind the person that no work would get started until the form was filled.
If the form was filled out well, the Asana task, with the attached creative brief, would go to the design team, editorial team, or video team to get additional information, if needed, and to give realistic deadlines for the requester.
If the content request was from a content team member (e.g., the videographer wanted to create a content asset for a new feature), he'd fill out the form as well, with much detail. It'd help in the tracking of the assets and keeping materials together.
No more requests coming in from a thousand different places.
Creative brief review
Once the request came in, a team member from editorial, design, or video would have a quick call or Slack with the requester to communicate realistic deadlines for the first iteration of the content asset, the review/approval time, and the final due date.
The creative brief (attached to the editorial request form mentioned above) included such fields to fill out as:
What content do you want or need? Why?
What is the goal for this content?
What is the tone for the asset?
What format do you want for the content?
How will we know if the goal is met?
What is the timeline for the assets? You'll need to define the dates for first drafts, review time, approvals, final draft, and publication date for the main asset. The same needs to happen for the supporting content (e.g., email sequences, YouTube video, etc.)
How will this content be used?
The creative brief remained housed in the Asana task, so anyone who wanted to know about the project can read the notes.
The task would then be moved via automation to the editorial, design, or video board.
Content creation stage
The editorial, design, and video teams all had their Asana boards to show:
Incoming tasks
In progress tasks
Blocked tasks
Under review tasks
Completed tasks
The boards were managed by their respective members, overseen by the head of Content. Any road blocks or issues were immediately shared with the head to make sure delays didn't last long.
Each Asana task card had:
Assigned stakeholder
Deadlines for each step of the process
Attached creative briefs and links to resources
Every task card had a comment section for all communication among the requesting team member and the content team member. All the conversations were in the Asana task. However, sometimes, if conversations sprang in DMs on Slack or in conversations in other channels, we would copy the conversation and paste it into the comments section of the referred-to project. That way, communication always remained open, transparent, and up to date.
The teams would then work on the content projects. All timelines for projects (i.e., how long something would take) was already established in our SOP document in Slite. (We had put that together after creating the workflow.)
Review and approval stage
Every content production schedule sets aside time for review. The stakeholder would know that the time was coming up because it was written in Asana and also the content team member would tag them in the Asana task to give them a heads up.
Sometimes, stakeholders would have urgent tasks (unrelated to content) that would pull them away from this task. In those instances, the content team would try to accommodate the schedule. Or we'd ask whether the stakeholder could have someone else on their team do the review.
If not possible, though, the task would be put on pause until the stakeholder could attend to it. A new completion date would then be given.
Publication date
The content team would publish work on the company YouTube channel, website pages, and blog. Designs would be housed in Figma.
All assets were kept in Asana and an organized Google drive folder. (Our budget did not allow for a digital asset management system.)
Promotion and distribution stage
In Asana, once we hit "completed" on a content task, the card task would be sent to the social media manager to be shared on our social channels.
Content team members would share their finished work on their social media channels (i.e., employee advocacy).
Completed content would also be shared on our Slack channels for all things marketing, product marketing, general, customer success, and customer support.
Analytics and metrics stage
How do you know whether the content was successful?
Organic traffic, free trial sign-ups, and engagement were the most common metrics for our content. We also measured other KPIs, but the exact focus was aligned to the company's overarching goal.
Tools to measure content performance:
The different teams would share their monthly reports on content performance on Slite, a knowledge base that our company used.
Assign roles and responsibilities for each member of your content team
Every member of the content team had a WSLL (what success looks like) document, so they'd know the expectations for their role, how to keep the engine running in the role, and how they could level up in their career.
Our content team was relatively small, but mighty. It included: the editorial team (a French content manager, a German content manager, and an English-speaking content manager), a video team (a video lead principal and a video producer), a graphic design team (two members), a project manager (unofficial to our team but we adopted her due to her helpfulness), and a head of content who also bore responsibilities for the editorial manager. (When I moved into the head of content role, I was promised a seat for a managing editor to take over my old tasks, but the budget didn't allow it. My role was two-in-one, which is not ideal.)
I also ran the freelancing side of our team, drafting creative briefs, assigning work to freelancers, and making sure deadlines were met.
Add automations to your process where possible
Asana allows for automation. Our project manager created automations that helped make content request intakes easier.
Another automation, of sorts, was using AI for assistance in drafting outlines for content assets. We were given the order to use ChatGPT and Gemini as much as possible. We'd use it for translations, subtitles, and outline drafts.
Articles and long-form content was 100% produced by real humans, under my leadership. AI served as a helper, not a replacer.
Create documentation for your process and share it
Everything mentioned above was written down (though shorter and with links to the teams) in a Slite document. I wanted to clarify any questions that other teams had. Due to an ever-revolving workforce, we'd have members from external teams constantly ask us about how long it'd take to create this or that, when they'd get a chance to review something, where this or that was, if anything was in progress, etc.
Once we got everything written in Slite and presented it to the company, we got much fewer questions. It also made life easier for the Content. Anyone had questions about timelines? Refer to this link in Slite. Not sure whether our project got underway? Look at this link in Slite.
Everything was so much easier. And as old team members left and new ones came in, our onboarding process was simple.
Outcome of a New and Improved Content Workflow
The entire workflow overhaul took about a month of dedicated, focused time. Everyone on the content team was 100% onboard with creating this new workflow, getting it down in writing via SOPs (standard operating procedures), Asana automations, templates, and Slite documentation.
So satisfying to say goodbye to previous issues!
Intake of content >>> One form for intake
Insufficient information >>> Documentation, resources, images, etc., housed in one place
Lack of transparency >>> All our processes and current workloads were visible. Everyone who wanted to could look at Asana and immediately know what we were working on, what was coming up in the queue, and what we'd finished.
"Fire drill" mentality >>> We had more time to dedicate to team-specific goals, such as boosting engagement on YouTube, ranking for keywords, and creating downloadables
Disjointed team >>> Constant communication and once-a-week meetings got everyone talking and bonding. My team was superclose, fun, and productive!
Wasted time >>> We had a high production output and made 95% of our deadlines. (The missed deadlines were due to stakeholder issues; we had data to prove it!)
The implementation of our new workflow ended up being very successful. (Hooray!) As the first team at our company to fully use Asana, we did a presentation at our general session regarding it. And we happily became a reference point for internal teams.