Content Marketing Workflows: A Guide to Create and Implement it Effectively

A content marketing workflow allows teams to ideate, draft, publish, and promote quality content effectively. It is a documented process that helps:

• Ensure that the content creation process is consistent and effective
• Improve collaboration and communication between team members and external stakeholders
• Align the content with the brand’s objectives and the needs of the target audience
• Avoid confusion and delays by clarifying tasks and responsibilities for everyone
• Track the performance of various content pieces and find areas of improvement

Keep reading to learn how you can create and implement a customized content marketing workflow for your WordPress team.

How to create a content marketing workflow

1. Determine your goals

This is where you answer the question — why do we need a content marketing workflow?

Depending on your current business goals, it can be things like gaining more organic visibility, educating your target audience, or getting more signups. Defining your goal(s) clearly will help you visualize the outcome and hence achieve it efficiently.

There are three major tasks you need to complete to finish this step:

• Find out your current business goals based on the industry you are in and the impact you aim to have in the lives of your customers
• Determine how (and if) content marketing can achieve those goals
• Identify the key metrics or performance indicators that you need to monitor to measure your progress and set benchmarks for them

It is crucial for WordPress content teams to assess their resources before setting goals as this is the foundational step in building a content marketing workflow. For instance, trying to keep up with large enterprises might be an unrealistic expectation from the content marketing workflow of a small team.

2. Find what your audience wants

As we mentioned briefly earlier, your content marketing strategy should be centered around your target audience because they are the ones who you will be creating content for. The aim of this step is to determine what kind of content your audience wants in terms of topic and format.

Use these three tips to get started:

• Conduct surveys, polls, and interviews to learn what your audience would like to see/learn
• Monitor social media, online communities, and forums to gain a deeper understanding of their pain points
• Analyze your existing content’s performance (both on the website and on social media) to find out which ones are popular among your audience

It is recommended that you start with low/no-cost steps such as monitoring your website’s analytics to learn about your target audience and move from there. You can also offer freebies and coupons to your audience to increase survey response rates.

3. Develop a content calendar

After you know your goals and the needs of your audience, it is time to build an action plan for your content marketing workflow — a content calendar. A content calendar contains the schedule for your content creation, publication, and promotion.

You can create a content calendar in three easy steps:

• Determine the frequency of your content publication (daily, weekly, etc.)
• Assign tasks and responsibilities to your team members
• Modify the calendar as per your team’s feedback, business goals, and audience’s needs whenever necessary

While determining your content publication frequency, it is important to collaborate with your team members to avoid setting unrealistic deadlines for content delivery. It is even better to let your team set deadlines themselves as they will be running the content marketing workflow.

Now that you have created a  content marketing workflow, let’s look at how you can implement it to achieve your goals.

How to implement your content marketing workflow

1. Define your content creation strategy

In this step, you answer questions like “who will be creating your content?”, “what are the steps from ideation to drafting?”, and “how will the content pieces be created?”. The aim of this step is to define tangible and operational steps for your content marketing workflow.

Here’s how to go about it:

• Create guidelines for each type of content you want to publish to ensure uniformity
• Decide how you will create your content — in-house or outsourced to an agency
• Adopt the right task and project management tools to establish clarity among team members

One of the most crucial things you need to take care of at this stage is to encourage your team members to communicate overtly and participate in decision-making. This will lead to an efficient implementation of your content marketing workflow as the decisions are made by your team members themselves.

2. Track the performance of your content

You need to measure the success of your content marketing processes to find out what is working and what needs to change. This will allow you to scale up your efforts wisely and will give you a higher ROI for your efforts.

It is essential to develop an action plan before you start to track your content performance. For instance, if your audience is preferring one topic over the other, you need to have a plan in place to produce more content in that domain.

A common mistake that your WordPress marketing team might make is to focus on vanity metrics rather than North Star metrics that actually reflect your business’ performance and customer satisfaction.

For example, if your North Star metric is the number of demo requests, focusing on metrics like traffic from social media can be unproductive. To avoid this, make a practice of choosing key performance metrics based on your business goals and customer satisfaction.

3. Regularly update your marketing workflow

New technologies emerge, the needs of your audiences evolve, your team grows, and your business goals change. Sticking to a rigid content marketing workflow, regardless of how successful it was at a  time will prevent you from making consistent progress.

This is where retrospective meetings come in handy. Retrospective meetings compare your content marketing workflow’s periodic performance to discover new opportunities and identify areas for improvement.

Focus on quantitative elements such as the key performance indicators and qualitative elements such as the alignment of the efforts of your team with the business goals. Then, collaborate with your team and stakeholders to make changes to your WordPress content marketing workflow.

Run your WordPress content marketing workflow effectively with Multicollab

As we have mentioned a few times earlier, one of the most essential ingredients to create and implement a content marketing workflow is team collaboration. How well your team can communicate ideas, exchange feedback, and work together is pivotal to the success of your workflow.

It is vital, therefore, for content teams to equip their WordPress content teams with the right tools to facilitate qualitative collaboration. And this is where Multicollab comes in.

Multicollab is a WordPress collaboration plugin that enables Google Docs-style editorial commenting in the Gutenberg Editor. You can comment, suggest changes, and tag other team members just as you do with Google Docs:

Apart from moving your content approval and editorial process to WordPress, Multicollab also helps with:

• Sharing feedback on videos and dynamic content (image carousels, CTA blocks, etc.) as the Gutenberg Editor is a blog editor
• Protecting your organizational data as you won’t have to give unrestricted access to your company’s drives to external parties
• Managing permissions of internal and external collaborators through various phases of the content marketing workflow

… and many more.

Interested in learning how Multicollab can help your content marketing workflow?

Register for this free webinar now.

FAQs

• What is a content marketing workflow?
  A content marketing workflow is a systematic process that outlines the steps necessary for the creation, publication, and promotion of content that aligns with a business’s marketing objectives and target audience’s needs.

• What are the 7 steps of content marketing?
  The 7 steps of content marketing are: defining goals, identifying the target audience, conducting research, developing a content strategy, creating the content, promoting the content, and measuring and optimizing results.

• What are the 5 rules of content marketing?
  The 5 rules of content marketing are: understanding the target audience, providing valuable and relevant content, consistent publication, utilizing a variety of formats and channels, and measuring the success of the content.