By Harry Mackin

The “Wild West” of content marketing stuck around longer than we may have imagined, but COVID-19 well and truly brought it to a close. These days, 82% of marketers use content marketing, over 40% of marketers say content is a very important part of their strategy, and 70% plan to actively continue investing in it in the long term.

If content marketing is such big business now, however, why does so much of it still feel distinctly lawless? Nowhere is that more true than when it comes to actually getting either client or internal approval for your content. You go to all the work of producing your stuff, send it to the people in charge, and then… you’re at their mercy. And often, your content disappears then and there.

There’s a better way to work content approval, and it’s all about process building. Securing content approval is a part of your workflow like everything else, and like everything else, it’s more effective when you have a plan.

Follow these five steps to create your own plan for content approval, and you’ll find yourself spending a lot less time bitterly running down approval and a lot more time actually planning for your team’s next big splash.

1 — Standardize the Lead-Up

The last few times your content got trapped in pending purgatory, was it really because your approver got picky about back-and-forth edits? Sometimes, sure, but usually the issue is simpler… and, unfortunately, closer to home.

Chances are, in fact, you don’t know exactly where the bottlenecks are that hold up your content approval process. THAT is the biggest problem.

You’re not alone, either. According to a survey by the Content Marketing Institute, 42% of content marketers said that content production flow was one of their biggest challenges for the upcoming year. Meanwhile, a DIFFERENT survey by the CMI found that only 42% of content marketing teams have a formal content workflow in place.

When you don’t know what you need to see a piece of content from conception to publication, a lot of your content never reaches the approval phase at all. Instead, it gets wrapped up in “where were we at with that piece, again?” territory… until everyone forgets about it. Then, if it DOES see the light of day, everyone’s forgotten what it was for… and you’re back to square one.

There’s a straightforward solution: a content workflow. Create a tight, simple game plan for publishing and follow it for every single piece of content you create. At every turn, you should know:

A: Where a piece is in the process

B: Who’s in charge of the next step

C: When they plan on completing the next step

D: Who they will send their finished work to

E: Repeat

The more you can standardize and streamline your content creation process, the more consistently a clear, relevant piece of content …read more

Source:: Top Rank Blog

Author: Aaron