Key takeaways:
- What are the key stages in building a content creation workflow? The four stages are defining outputs, specifying subtasks, allocating roles, and monitoring/refining the workflow.
- How can standardizing workflows benefit content teams? A standardized workflow increases efficiency, ensures high-quality output, and maintains clear communication across team members.
- What tools can enhance workflow management? Platforms like Wrike provide features such as dynamic request forms, automation, and integrations to streamline the content creation process.
- Why is continuous monitoring important? Ongoing monitoring allows teams to identify bottlenecks, improve processes, and optimize performance based on data-driven insights.
- What types of workflows are effective for content creation? Kanban, Agile, and Gantt chart workflows can each be tailored to fit specific team needs and project requirements.
If you're finding it challenging to produce new content efficiently, keep track of your ideas, or align your content with your wider strategy, it's time to think about standardizing workflows for your content creation team.
Whether you're publishing articles, videos, podcasts, or social media posts, meeting your deadlines and keeping your content calendar full is key to your success. A shared workflow — which puts all your content through a transparent, rigorous production and approval process — makes sure this happens consistently and efficiently, even at high volume.
Here, we'll break down the process of building a content creation workflow to suit your team and the type of content you produce. We'll divide workflow building into four stages:
- Defining your workflow outputs, so you can build a content creation workflow to fulfill your brief
- Specifying subtasks, so you can plan your workflow stages and resource allocation
- Allocating roles and delegating tasks, so you kick off your workflow smoothly
- Monitoring and refining your workflow, so you can keep your content to a high standard even as you scale up
Later, we'll showcase some of the features of our work management platform, Wrike, which can streamline your planning and production process even further, no matter what style of content creation workflow you build.
4 steps to build your content creation workflow
Even if they produce similar content, no two marketing teams will have the same workflow. Your company structure influences roles and accountability at each stage, and the way you handle briefs and approvals is tailored to your clients.
Whatever the final result, though, you can build and implement a powerful workflow with this four-step approach.
1. Define your workflow outputs
To build your workflow, you first need to know what you want it to produce.
For example, if you want to provide regular articles to generate leads for your company, you'll define the length of the articles, your approach to supporting images or graphics, and your strategy for calls to action and internal links.
You'll come to these definitions partly by knowing what your target audience will respond to. To create more effective content, it can be helpful to consider a narrow section of your potential customer base that you want to reach with your content. Then, consider the channels where you have a potential touchpoint with them, and what your content needs to look like to catch their attention.
If you plan to produce different types of content, you'll have to go through this process more than once to draw distinctions between different outputs. This will be important in the next stage, because you can't use an identical workflow to produce, for example, longer videos for your website vs. short clips for social media.
But either way, these detailed definitions of your workflow outputs will give you a strong foundation for your workflow design. Specifically, you set up:
- Clear expectations of what to work toward, which makes communication easier once you begin work
- A focus on connecting effective content that connects with its intended audience, rather than simply filling up the slots in your content calendar
- Workflow stages that match the content you want to produce, rather than fitting your work into a generic process
- A more accurate timeline for your new projects — because when you know what you're setting out to produce, it's easier to schedule your content team's work
Put simply, when you have a clear picture of what your outputs should be and what you need to do to produce them, you can create a thorough, transparent workflow that your whole team is happy to use.
2. Break down the tasks that produce your content
Once you have a deeper understanding of what your workflow should produce and why, you should define your process for creating each type of content.
Think of your workflow subtasks as the steps that need to happen to transform the workflow input (like the creative brief and images supplied by a client) into the output (like a new landing page for their website).
For example, suppose you've been asked to create articles based on interviews with industry experts at a company. In this case, the subtasks could be:
- Interview planning: Where a team lead researches the interviewee and plans the questions that will generate great content for their article
- Interview: Where the team lead meets with the interviewee and records their conversation
- Transcription: Where the interview is transcribed using software and shared with the writer, who will produce the content
- Writing: Where the writer creates an article based on the materials they received from the team lead
- Review: Where the team lead (or another designated approver) checks the work against the creative brief and the brand's tone of voice guidelines
- Publication: Where the interview goes live and the original document is stored for later reference
Depending on the complexity of the content and how many people are involved, you might have more workflow stages than this. For example, you might take more steps to finalize the brief and the scope of the article at the beginning, or more steps to review the work internally and send it to the client at the end of the process.
As you're breaking down your tasks, you should also consider the order of the workflow stages.
The example above is linear, because the writing can't take place until after the interview has been recorded. But if you have a piece of content where multiple teams are collaborating (for example, if your graphic design team is supplying images to illustrate an article), you'll have to consider how these workflows overlap and how you'll time them so you can meet your deadlines.
Finally, consider the level of experience or authority you'll need at each stage of the workflow, and the tools you'll require to complete each subtask. This will help you to plan your resource allocation and put the necessary tools in place before you share the workflow with your team.
3. Delegate tasks and kick off the workflow
Once you've finished building your workflow, you have a few important jobs to do:
- Visualize the process by choosing the best workflow diagram to track your tasks as they progress
- Give your team access to the resources they need, like your first briefs, their profiles in the tools they'll need to create the content, and permission to edit files in shared folders
- Kick your team off with the new workflow during an initial meeting
This stage can be quick and simple. However, if your content team has different divisions, or if you're migrating to new workflow management tools, you'll need to plan more time for onboarding. Without this training, you can run into problems later — for example, as subteams silo information or create duplicate versions of essential files.
Once your team is ready to begin, delegate the first content creation tasks and set the workflow in motion.
4. Monitor and refine your content workflow over time
As your team starts to deliver content, you'll discover areas where the process could be improved. Finding these opportunities and designing the solutions is an ongoing task for creative project managers.
If you use software to build and manage your workflow, you should have at least some of the tools you need to track your team's performance. For example, a Kanban visualization can show you where tasks are bunching together in your workflow, which can reveal the bottlenecks you need to tackle.
Common areas to streamline in a content creation workflow include:
- Creative brief creation, which can be managed with templates or simplified once you have a good understanding of a client's preferences
- Communications, where you can replace internal emails with notifications when a task in the workflow changes status
- Approval and amendments, where you can adjust the number of team members with approval authority to manage a backlog of tasks
- Workflow management, where you can choose a workflow tool that updates automatically to give you a real-time overview, rather than asking your team to manually update a shared spreadsheet
To identify the areas where a change could make the biggest difference, create reports from the data generated as tasks move through your workflow. This information on your progress and performance helps you make informed decisions, rather than simply experimenting with a process your content team relies on.
This process of monitoring and reporting has some added benefits, too. Reports can:
- Show your team's effectiveness and prove your value
- Inform your wider content strategy with a deeper understanding of how your resources are being used
- Record the way your tasks were handled, so you can use successful tasks as a blueprint for new projects
- Store information on your decision making, so you can audit your work in more detail in the future
The four steps we've discussed here will help you create a successful workflow, and they can be easily customized to different team sizes or types of content.
But suppose your ultimate goal is to scale up your content production and expand your audience. Then, you'll need to do more than just organize a workflow you were already broadly happy with. In this case, content creation workflow software gives you the tools you need to deliver content to the same high standard at an even greater scale.
Scale up your content production with Wrike
Wrike is a work management platform with the cutting-edge tools you need to design, implement, and refine a shared content workflow, regardless of the number of people or job roles in your content team.
Marketing teams at companies like Electrolux, Sony Pictures Television, and the Texas Rangers use Wrike to power their content workflows and drive results from their creative process.
Now, let's look at the features that make it happen.
Streamline intake with content request forms
One of the best Wrike features for creative teams is a dynamic, customizable request form. At the beginning of your workflow, these forms gather the information you need from your clients in one convenient place.
Whether you set up different request forms for social media, long-form content, and product listings, or create new forms for each client, standardizing your intake process saves time and helps you make a great first impression.
Aerotek's marketing team streamlined its intake process with Wrike, replacing strings of emails, phone calls, and meetings with tailor-made request forms.
Matt Andrews, Marketing Campaign Manager, told us about how Wrike has simplified his team's workflow:
When a request comes through, it triggers the creation of a job that your team is going to work on from start to finish, and once it's done, we can archive it and it'll be there forever.
Matt Andrews, Marketing Campaign Manager
In total, Aerotek reduced emails by up to 90% and shaved a week and a half off its planning cycle.
Automate your workflow
You'll also make your workflow more efficient by automating some of your essential tasks. This speeds up your process and takes some repetitive, frustrating, and even error-prone tasks off your creative team's plates.
Wrike's automations can come into play throughout your workflow:
- Automatically delegate tasks based on real-time capacity information, so you can get to work faster without overloading a member of your team.
- Instantly notify your team when a task they're tagged in changes status, so everyone who's producing or reviewing content knows what they have coming up.
- Automate approvals to route your task instantly when it's signed off or sent for revisions.
Plus, Wrike's Work Intelligence® solution monitors trends in your performance, spotting common actions, bottlenecks, or patterns in the way your team is working to identify new areas where automation could improve your workflow.
For example, Marketing Architects used Wrike's workflow automation tools to become 40% more efficient. The team reduced its response time from one day to 20 minutes, and is able to complete projects 25% faster.
Eric Pilhofer, Senior Vice President of Creative, told us this:
I can come up with automated workflows and solutions that, in the past, I would have had to hire a software programmer to develop … The slick part is the automation. To be able to put an asset up for approval, and if there are no problems, you never see that asset again? It just got approved and got out the door? That's the beauty of it.
Eric Pilhofer, Senior Vice President of Creative
Seamlessly integrate your content creation tools
Gaps in your content creation workflow can hamper your progress. Every time you have to switch tools (for example, recording feedback in a document while viewing an asset in a graphic design platform), you create an opportunity for essential feedback to slip through the cracks.
Wrike includes hundreds of integrations, including Adobe Creative Cloud, so you can add the tools your creative team is using directly to your workflow.
Take a look at what this looks like for proofing the design assets you want to add to your content. The approver opens the file within Wrike and uses pixel-accurate tools to pinpoint the area that still needs work. Then, with a simple @mention, they can bring the designer into the process and request the changes. 
OSF Healthcare's marketing team uses Wrike's Adobe integration as they fulfill over 400 creative requests every month. Heide Wessler, Graphic Design Coordinator, told us:
When we were looking for a work management solution, finding something that could really make that seamless transition from the project management system to the creative process was really important. So when I saw the Wrike and Adobe integration, I was really excited that we found something that could bridge that gap so well.
Heide Wessler, Graphic Design Coordinator
Since adopting Wrike, OSF's 11 marketing subteams have completed projects 50% faster and brought an “amazing” transparency to their process.
Eliminate versioning issues as work progresses
When your workflow produces content at scale (and especially if you're making revisions), you'll need a method to make sure you're always working on the latest version of your files.
Wrike's folder structure makes this simple. With a folder for each project, each client, or each marketing subteam at your organization, you can easily access the files you need.
And, with our innovative cross-tagging system, shared documents can exist in more than one folder simultaneously, so there's no need to email new versions every time a change is made.
For example, if you're working on a post that needs input from both your writers and your social media team, the brief can exist in both workspaces, and both teams can be notified when the task moves forward in the workflow.
It's been really powerful to be able to expand it beyond our team and collaborate with other departments that are now using Wrike … The tool is interactive and we see everything in real time. We're all working collaboratively together instead of waiting alone for emails. I have visibility on all projects.
Alex Bacon, Project Manager
All in all, they've accelerated their workflow process by 75% and tripled their marketing output with ease.
Generate informative reports on your workflow and your content
The final stage of any workflow is monitoring and refining, and Wrike makes this incredibly simple.
Instead of looking at spreadsheets and outcomes and guessing at the areas where you need to improve your approach, you can get detailed, personalized reports sent to you automatically throughout your content project.
These reports are an easy way to keep yourself updated on your team's progress through their backlog, but they're also a starting point to drill down into granular data on your team's performance and the current risks to your deadlines.
By filtering the data on your tasks in your content workflow, you can identify employees who are overloaded, scan for bottlenecks in your process, spot tasks stuck in the review stage, and ultimately make better decisions about how to support your team and keep them on track.
Types of content creation workflows to try
Other posts on content creation workflows talk about the importance of choosing a task-based workflow (where your workflow stages are labeled by what someone is doing at that point, like “writing” or “editing) or a status-based workflow (where you sort tasks into more general stages so the labels fit different types of content, like “new task” or “in-progress”).
In practice, though, this distinction is fairly academic. You're more likely to find a workflow system that helps your content team achieve their goals if you look at the shape of the workflow, rather than just changing the way you refer to each stage.
The benefit of Wrike is that it's completely customizable, so you can build a workflow of any type and tailor it to your team and the outputs they produce.
With that in mind, let's look at three different approaches to content creation workflow design.
Kanban content workflow
A Kanban workflow — where your workflow stages are represented by columns — is a popular choice for content teams who have to deliver a large number of pieces during a project cycle.
Imagine you've been asked to create a series of 50 articles for a website. In this case, your Kanban board can include columns labeled “backlog,” “writing,” “editing,” “in review,” “approved,” “published,” and “promoting.”
Each piece of content is represented by a card, which moves forward in the workflow as the tasks are completed, and back if changes are requested. In Wrike, a task's position in the Kanban board updates automatically whenever it changes status.
This framework makes Kanban a good choice if all the content you produce follows the same workflow and takes a similar amount of time. Product descriptions, articles, and social media posts (especially in a series) are all good fits for this methodology.
Agile content workflow
There's a misconception that Agile is only for software developers. If your content team produces assets at scale — for example, ahead of a marketing campaign launch — the Agile approach can be a great fit.
Here, you add your incoming tasks to a backlog and prioritize them to be tackled during intense sprint cycles punctuated by daily meetings. In these meetings, team members share their progress and describe the obstacles they're facing so the team lead can focus on clearing the path. This helps ensure you deliver content on a regular schedule.
Gantt chart content workflow
A Gantt chart is a more linear way of viewing a workflow that includes dependent tasks.
For example, if your goal is to produce a piece of hero content — like a new recruitment or marketing video where multiple departments are involved — this type of workflow design can be a good fit. It can show you what needs to be completed before each new task can begin. And, as you measure your real-world progress against the moving deadline, you can easily evaluate whether your content production is on track.
All of these workflows can be built, visualized, shared, and tracked in Wrike. Check out these templates to get started:
- Kanban project
- Agile teamwork template
- Project schedule template (which includes Gantt visualization as standard)
For smoother production and consistent content, try Wrike
With a tried-and-tested content creation workflow, your team can work more efficiently and transparently, and you can scale up your content production without letting your standards slip. When you build, streamline, and automate these processes in Wrike, you get a level of insight and visibility that can't be matched with spreadsheets and emails.
Wrike's workflow tools include dynamic request forms, intuitive automations, powerful integrations, customizable storage and permissions, and the exhaustive, timely reports you need to inform your decision making and deliver great content on time and to brief.
