What’s the best way for overcoming marketing disagreements, avoiding approval bottlenecks, and stopping delays in your content creation?

Establish a framework for content review and approval so the process is easy, efficient, and effective. If you do, your team will not only produce high-quality content consistently, but they won’t skip a beat when it’s time to scale up your content output.

A content review and approval process is a way to develop ideas into pieces of marketing content that are approved and ready for publication. Smart marketers take several steps to produce content pieces such as blog articles, eBooks, whitepapers, and guides that often look like this:

1. Conceptualizing content topics and ideas
2. Researching keywords
3. Writing a content brief and/or outlining the piece
4. Creating a first draft
5. Editing and finessing the content
6. Publishing the content
7. Thinking of ways to repurpose the original content into other pieces of content

4 Objectives of an Effective Content Review and Approval Process

During the steps of marketing content creation, stakeholders have a chance to review the content, offer feedback, and approve the final products for publication. In addition to typos, the review process can address other things that may be missing, such as optimized keywords for SEO, up-to-date research in written arguments, new product upgrades, answers to consumer questions, relevant current events, and more. With content review and approval you can overcome all these marketing disagreements and accomplish these four objectives.

Find and fix mistakes. No marketer wants to publish incorrect information or content full of misspellings, grammatical errors, or the use of irrelevant keywords.

Ensure the content fits the platform. Checking that the voice and tone of the writing matches your brand as well as the platform you’re publishing it on is essential for attracting the right audience with the right message.

Analyze search intent and value. Valuable marketing content provides solutions that audience members need to answer their questions, fulfill their needs, or add something to their lives. 

Make deadlines and make an impact faster. You want to get eyes on your content as soon as possible, because after it’s published, it can take from three to six months to rank on the first page of search results (SERPS) – if you produce quality content that is optimized. If not, add at least six more months before you see results.

Best Practices To Streamline Your Content Review and Approval Process

Start With Clearly Established Content Goals

Make sure everyone on your team knows your content strategy and understands their value to your brand’s bottom line. Setting SMART goals is always a good start (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely).

Establish Editorial Guidelines 

Editorial guidelines help your marketing team to support brand consistency across all of your content. The guidelines pertain to elements such as:

• Voice and tone of writing or scripting
• Style and format of headlines and subheadings
• Internal and external linking strategy
• Video production value
• Brand colors for graphics
• Style of photos, illustrations, charts, and other visuals
• The type of graphics or illustrations to use

Identify a Team for Content Review and Approval

Everyone’s opinion matters most of the time, but for the sake of ease and efficiency, name just a few stakeholders, such as:

• Content Manager
• Content Creator
• Content Editor 
• Subject Matter Expert – a person who has expertise in the topic a piece of content covers, who can add value or insight to the content, and who can speak to the differentiators or unique selling proposition of the brand’s products or solutions.
• Content Designer
• SEO Manager
• Digital Marketer – a person who uses content as an asset to market your brand online.

Create a Content Workflow and Timeline

A workflow will define the actionable duties of each member of your review and approval team. The timeline will inform the process, so content is reviewed quickly, edited and updated, then moved forward for publication. A typical workflow looks like this:

1. The content creator produces the first draft and passes it to the editor for review.
2. The editor makes suggestions and passes it to the subject matter expert for review.
3. The expert gives feedback and passes it back to the content creator.
4. The creator updates the content and passes it to the designer, who adds relevant visuals like photos and graphics, as well as to the SEO manager, who optimizes title tags, sub-headings, meta descriptions, and the like.
5. The optimized content design elements are passed to the content manager for publishing.
6. The published content is passed to the digital marketer for social media distribution and/or link-building.

Typically, the content approval timeline defines when you need each step of the process to be completed and the number of content pieces that need approval.

Consider Using Project Management Tools

Tools such as Asana, Basecamp, and Monday can help your team quickly create assignments, calendars, checklists for each role of your review and approval team, and more to organize the established workflow and keep everyone accountable.

11outof11 Knows Content Marketing

If you need help honing your content review and approval process into a well-oiled creation machine, connect with 11outof11. Request a complimentary call with an 11outof11 expert. Contact us to learn more.