Without a proper content approval process, the content you share with your audience can be a mess. If you don’t get the approval of your manager before sending out the content, you could be setting your company up for a disaster.
With the right content approval process, you can set up a strict set of rules and guidelines to be followed before the content is released. A vital content approval process ensures that your content has gone through all the required checks and balances before being put in front of your target audience.
In essence, a content approval process allows you to streamline the workflows for your content development team. It can make the production, approval process, and publication of your content hassle-free. Subsequently, as a brand, you can release content that improves and maintains your brand image.
So today, we’ll talk about the content approval process – what it entails and how you can improve it.
Let’s start!
Table of Contents
What Is A Content Approval Process?
Creating content is never the end of the story.
The competitive nature of today’s world requires you to publish the best content possible. To grab people’s attention, you need both quality and quantity to be incorporated into your work.
The content approval process allows you to get your content reviewed and reach the highest level.
Without content approval, you are bound to publish content that has mistakes that need to be fixed. Posting anything like that can harm the traffic your content was supposed to generate, and it won’t leave a good impression on your audience.
For your brand image to be the best and gain success, you need content approval to ensure that you put your best foot forward. There are many softwares available that help you manage your workflows better and increase your team’s productivity.
You’d Need A Powerful Online Proofing Tool To Kickstart Things!
Project management and online proofing tools like GoVisually can help you manage your content production better and allow you to produce brilliant results. GoVisually lets you receive reviews on the project and make edits in real-time. It takes away the hassle of long email chains and makes the approval process more efficient.
The Core Objectives Of A Content Approval Process
A content approval process will provide you solutions to multiple content creation problems. Let’s have a look at some of the core objectives of an effective content approval process.
Identify And Fix Mistakes
You can be the most experienced content creator in your team, and you are still bound to make mistakes. Making errors is part of being human; no one can be perfect. But publishing your content without correcting the mistakes is something that can easily be avoided. A content approval process will identify any errors in your work and allow you to fix them before you publish.
Ensure The Content Is According To The Platform
The content you publish on a blog is drastically different from those you post on more official sites like Forbes, etc. The tone you use in the content and the linking need to be according to the platform for which you are making the content. The content approval process will ensure that the work you publish is well-suited to the platform it will be on.
Publish Content Meant For The Target Audience
It might seem insignificant, but it needs to be kept in mind when the content approval process occurs. Many content creators get carried away while creating and forget that the content is meant for a target audience. They might write according to themselves, not the target audience’s needs. With an effective content approval process, the content can be vetted more thoroughly and satisfy the search intent of the public.
Reach Your Deadlines Fast And Stress-Free
Having a thorough content approval process allows you to meet all your deadlines more efficiently. When you know that you have to follow a particular set of guidelines before publishing, the whole process becomes more streamlined. A content approval process for your work can help relieve the stress you feel if you are unsure about the quality of the work you publish, as it ensures that only the best outcome is released to the audience.
The content approval process does come with its fair share of problems. If you have not developed an efficient content approval workflow, you might face multiple issues that hinder your team’s productivity.
Common Content Approval Process Problems
- Having too many people involved in the approval process can lead to more issues than solutions. They can slow down the publication process, as a back-and-forth between the reviewers and content creators takes up time.
- Having a few approvers can also slow down the process sometimes. If one person is in charge of multiple things, it is bound to take more time. Moderation is the key to a successful approval workflow.
- Poor planning and execution of the workflow can lead to failure.
- If workflows don’t accommodate feedback, the content creators will not learn and grow. The creators need to receive feedback and learn from any mistakes they make. Doing this helps the content creators to come up with better content for your brand in the future.
How To Build Your Content Approval Process?
Now that you know how a content approval process contributes to producing better content for your brand and company and the issues that incompetent approval workflows face let’s find out how you can build your content approval process.
Outline Your Content Goals And Inform Your Team
It would help if you first decided what the aim of your content is. There needs to be a clear image in your head that you want to be executed flawlessly. Your team should also be informed about the plan in your head so all of you can be on the same page.
You should clarify what goals you have set for your company and the exact type of content you need to publish. You and your team should have a clear idea about how you will generate traffic for your web page and the deadline by which you want to achieve all the goals you have set. By doing this, you will keep track of the progress you and your teams make.
Identify The People Involved In The Process
You must keep the number of people involved in your content approval process as low as possible. Having too many people can lead to different opinions that are not useful, and the team might stray from the original idea.
Having a content manager is pivotal to the process. They must be efficient enough to check the progress and assign the right content to the right creators. You also need a brilliant content creator who will interpret the given prompt and develop suitable content for your target audience.
The content designer and the editor should work on the created content post-production and eliminate any errors it might contain. They should thoroughly review the content and ensure that the published work shows the brand’s image the way originally planned.
Having a business expert and digital marketer on your team will help immensely with the growth and reach of the content you create. They can analyze the trends and help you produce content that will garner more traffic. You can also have an SEO manager to optimize your content to rank higher on Google, YouTube, and Bing.
If you are not a large-scale business, you do not need to have separate people for the jobs, and you can assign multiple jobs to one person. For example, the person in charge of digital marketing can also be the SEO manager.
Create The Workflow
After you have come up with a good content team, you will need to create a workflow. This content approval workflow consists of various moving parts, and your content team should ensure that all of them work smoothly together to create, review, edit and publish.
Everyone on your content team needs to understand the workflow and work efficiently to improve your time management and meet deadlines with ease. To do that, you’d need an outline and then pass it on to the team members.
After the outline process is complete, you can create the first draft and share it with the team to get feedback. You can then include this feedback to make your content even better!
Set A Timeline
After you have created the workflow, you must set a definitive timeline for the workflow.
It would help if you had a fixed timeline for each step and every member involved with the different phases. With a set timeline, it becomes easier to streamline the workflow. This timeline lets you know how much time each content team has to spend working on the content.
Having a fixed timeline will help you to publish content rapidly and eliminate the possibility of delays. This way, you can meet all your deadlines and publish the best content possible for your audience.
When you have a decided schedule for all the team members, you can assign them new work accordingly.
Set Up Brand Guidelines
To have a smooth content approval process, you must inform all team members of the guidelines you have set for the brand. Doing this ensures that your company publishes consistent content and maintains the brand image.
Although you may already have guidelines in place, you must document these guidelines and make them official. Doing this will allow your team members to clearly understand what the brand requires and the image you want to put out.
You should set guidelines for all the different departments. For the creative team, you should provide the outlines for the content you require. Writing or video creation, you must have the steps laid out for your content creators so that they can follow them and create precisely what you have in mind.
In the same way, you can set up guidelines for the design team. Let them know the type of images and designs you are looking for. Having a distinct color scheme for your brand is also essential and will help your brand image become more memorable and leave a lasting impression.
Compile Everything Into A System
For a content approval process to be successful, you must compile it into a repeatable system. This system will help you apply the same approval process to every content you work on for your brand.
A repeatable system will allow you to save time on all the different steps of a content approval process. SharePoint is one of the many services you can use for this purpose.
For the content approval process, SharePoint allows you to compile lists and libraries, and you can choose who has the permission to approve a particular step and who does not. This system also safeguards all the different elements of your content.
Use GoVisually To Review Content Assets
And finally, setting up an online proofing software to review your creative content assets can be a game changer. GoVisually can aid in your content approval process and help you have better control over it in just 3 steps:
- Upload content assets like graphic designs, video content, or brochures
- Invite reviewers and stakeholders to leave feedback
- Make changes and finalize the copy
By centralizing the review process and capturing feedback in one place, GoVisually helps you streamline the content approval process.
