To produce excellent content, your team doesn’t have to be big—it just has to be organized. Successfully producing content at a consistent pace and quality requires an efficient and streamlined workflow. When every content team member understands the production process from start to finish and owns their role in it, you’ll have the tools to make excellent content that continuously improves.

There are many reasons why you might be revamping your content team. Perhaps you’ve hired additional roles, developed a new content strategy or offloaded other responsibilities to another department. Whatever your reason for reading this post, it will guide through the important considerations when developing your content department. 

We’ll review how to narrow down your scope and how to ensure each team member knows their role and has the tools to fulfill their duties. We’ll also discuss the importance of iteration and how to systematize your processes.

1. Determine Scope of Content Team

Get clear on the scope of your content department. Your department’s scope is key because it helps you stay focused on the exact outcomes you’re responsible for as opposed to what types of tasks can be left to other departments or people. 

As part of your content team’s scope, you’ll want to look at aspects like:

  • Blog production and management, including how frequently you will publish
  • Website content management, including how often you’ll review existing pages and how to determine the types of refreshes your site needs
  • Social media and distribution of website and blog content
  • Guests-posting and cross-collaboration with industry influencers and strategic partners

The scope identifies what is and is not your team’s responsibility. For example, does the content department also do social media, or is that left to digital marketing? Will the content team select blog topics or will topic directives come from marketing for promotion support? In many cases, a content team’s scope will include cross-department collaboration, which should be defined clearly.

2. Identify Key People and Roles

Once you understand what outcomes fall within your content team’s responsibilities, you can now determine which team members are responsible for what. This is a good opportunity to decide on in-house vs. outsourcing content writing and production. You can determine any supplemental needs you might have throughout the year based on your content plan and calendar.

If you have a small team, it’s still important to define key roles—even if the same person has multiple roles. The reason for this is because the roles help define the workflow and prevent your team from getting distracted. 

Here are some of the key content team roles to define:

  • Content strategist—the overview role, responsible for the planning of tailored, targeted content.
  • Content coordinator—the support role that ensures the content process stays on track with deadlines and key milestones.
  • Writer—the person responsible for drafting content that follows the content strategy, style and tone.
  • Editor—Edits and revises the content drafts and ensures consistency across all content.

There may be other marketing roles that could overlap or work in conjunction with the content team. Social media specialists, PPC (pay-per-click) specialists and designers are other roles that can support the content team (and vice versa) in the creation of digital campaigns. 

3. Define Job Duties

After you’ve decided on the key roles you need to fulfill to develop and execute a content strategy, you’ll need to define clear duties for each of these people. Not only will each of the roles need to know the scope of their responsibilities, but they’ll also need to know how they work in relation to each other.

Once you’ve defined what each person will be responsible for, you can now decide which of these roles you can outsource, either partially or fully.  For example, if your budget allows for two or three employees, then you may need to search for a freelance editor who also has project management skills to help coordinate content and deadlines.

You may need to keep an open mind initially about these roles and be flexible with how they look. As you set up your content team and you get into a routine, it gives you an opportunity to assess what’s working and what you can change. 

4. Map out the Process

With everyone now having a good understanding of their roles, the next step is to define the content process. Where does it start and where does it end? It’s helpful to map it out in a flow chart to get a visual of exactly how you’ll create and publish content. 

Here is an example of a simple process you can implement no matter how many team members you have:

  1. Content planning — Includes topic and keyword research and coming up with the vision and direction of each piece of content.
  2. Content scheduling — Setting deadlines and milestones, such as the date the first draft is due and the final publish date.
  3. Content production — Assigning the content to the writer, having them draft the page, followed by the editing and revision process.
  4. Content publishing — Getting the assignment ready to be published, including formatting, adding images and visuals and uploading it to the CMS.

5. Create Tools

To significantly improve your current content production systems, you need to have the right tools that help make everyone’s job easier. Developing content tools requires a time investment up front, but it’s essential to ensuring everything runs more smoothly. 

If you give your team tools that will help them produce higher quality content more consistently, it will be well worth the time spent building them. Content tools not only help streamline the current process, but they can also provide you with valuable feedback that will help you with continuous improvement.

Some examples of tools you content team can use include:

  • Content calendar: Scheduling your content in advance is one of the biggest investments you can make in your team’s productivity. When setting up a content or editorial calendar, fill in key dates that provide good opportunities for seasonal or promotional content. Schedule in regular blog posts based on the scope you determined in step one. You likely won’t have topics for all scheduled posts yet, which is where a topic planning tool comes in.
  • Topic planner: Plan your future blog topics or future website content pages using a topic planning spreadsheet. Plan your topics around keyword opportunities and results from past high-performing content.
  • Editorial and style guidelines: All content should follow a specific style and tone so that it remains consistent across the site. Consistent styling and writing is important for brand integrity. If you have recently implemented a new style guide and have past content that doesn’t match it, make a content maintenance plan, so you can go back and refresh old content to bring it up to speed with the new tone and style.
  • Blog post templates: Blog post templates make it easier and faster to write blog posts. If you already have a template in place, your writers don’t have to spend time on each topic outlining the post. With a template, writers already know the structure to follow making it easier to dive into the topic. You can create different templates for different styles of content, such as lists, longforms and how-tos. Templates also support branding because all content follows the same style.  
  • Website audit manager: Similar to a topic planner, a website audit spreadsheet helps you keep track of every currently published page—including blogs and website pages. In a website audit manager, you can add notes about the improvements needed for each page, how each page has performed in terms of views and conversions and what upcoming content should be added to it, such as mentions of new products or services.

6. Test and Refine

You’ve got your people in place and their job roles well-defined. You have a complete process and the tools to go along with it. Now it’s time to focus on continuous improvement. After your team has been in place for a while, you’ll be able to collect data on what’s working and what’s not, and you get this data by asking your team for their input. 

Find out what your people like about the process and what they find cumbersome. Ask them if they have all the tools they need to make their job easier if there are gaps that need to be filled in. 

Finding out where the bottlenecks are is crucial so you can implement the right solution to overcome them as quickly as possible.

As you begin to get a clear picture of where there’s room for improvement, you can tweak and refine your system. Make sure to maintain documentation of your processes and tools and revisit them regularly. Adjust and update them as necessary. This ensures that as your team grows, you’ve got a well-defined system, and its evolution has been documented along the way.

Hiring an outside content creation agency is a smart way to leverage existing tried-and-true content creation practices. By working with an agency, you get access to proven systems of content creation without having to put in the work (and risk) yourself. 

For more information on content development and how Healthy Content can help your team, contact us today and get your content project started.