6 Steps to a Content Production Process That Scales With You

Content creation or content production is arguably one of the most important parts of your content marketing plan since you can’t promote content that doesn’t exist. Having a content creation process will move you away from the stressful rush of posting haphazardly and instead make content production a breeze.

What is Scalable Content Production?

Scalability in a business sense is defined as the ability to grow and adapt to changes over time. When you want to grow as a business, you need to think about how you’ll scale your operations. 

Scalable content production is essentially about making your process easy to replicate. With a scalable content production process, you’ll use the same steps regardless of whether you’re writing five pieces of content a month or 50.

Benefits of Having a Scalable Content Production Process

There are numerous benefits to having a content production process that works at both low and high scales (in terms of content velocity, or volume of output). Here’s a few reasons why you should consider developing processes built for scale:

• Consistent Quality: By following a scalable content production process, you can ensure a consistent level of quality across all your content pieces, regardless of the volume.
• Increased Efficiency: Having a standardized process in place streamlines content creation, leading to increased efficiency and productivity within your team.
• Faster Turnaround: Scalable processes help in reducing turnaround times, allowing you to produce and publish content more quickly to meet deadlines and audience demands. Increasing content velocity becomes easier when you have scalable processes from top to bottom.
• Cost-Effectiveness: With a scalable content production process, you can optimize resources, reduce wastage, and lower content production costs in the long run. 
• Improved Collaboration: A structured content production process promotes better collaboration among team members, as everyone understands their role and responsibilities clearly.
• Easier Scaling: As your business grows, a scalable content production process enables you to easily scale up your content output without compromising on quality.
• Data-Driven Decisions: By having a scalable process in place, you can collect data more effectively, analyze performance metrics, and make informed decisions to enhance your content strategy over time.

How to Develop a Content Production Process

Setting up a content production process will save you loads of time later on in your business growth when you’ll need to concentrate on more important things. You’ll also save yourself the stress when it comes to creating new content each week because your process is already one step ahead of you.

As you’re setting up your content production process, it helps to include all relevant members of your team that will be involved at some point. Involving your team or department leads from day one will help ensure that they bring up any important points that you may not have thought of on your own. They’ll also be able to describe the new processes to their teams easily. Plus, the inclusion of your key employees creates transparency.

The team members you’ll want to include in your content production process are:

• Content writers
• Content editors
• Graphic designers
• Social media managers
• Any other members of your creative team or production team

Once you’ve gotten everyone together, you can get ready with a whiteboard or fresh document and start the process of streamlining everything. The goal is for your eventual content production team to take over managing this entire process for you.

1. Decide where content production files will live 

Before digging into all the workflows and steps of the content production journey, you need to determine where all the puzzle pieces of your content are going to live before they are published to the world. To ensure your process is scalable, make sure your file storage option is also expandable.

Rather than emailing files for everyone to have on their own computers, find a secure cloud server that works for your whole team. Once you’ve picked your drive location, keep everything organized there to prevent confusion and lost items.

Part of organizing all of these files will be to create a standard for how they’re named. A common style is starting with yearly or monthly folders, and then using a file name that includes the title of the post and the purpose of the file.

When you’re creating these rules try to keep them intuitive so that you won’t have to refer back to the “rulebook” each time you’re saving a new file.

2. Set up the Idea Creation Process and Storage System

Now that your file system is set up, you need to have a list of content ideas for the rest of the production team to eventually create and publish.

If you have one person leading the keyword research portion of your content production, make sure they are in touch with the editorial strategy team. Decide how often you want to come up with new content ideas or content refreshes and where these fit into the content timeline or calendar.

3. Choose Deadlines for Content

Based on your marketing or business goals, consider how many pieces of content you want to publish each month. Work backwards from your long-term goals and split them up into smaller, short-term production goals. Spread the deadlines for publishing throughout the month. 

When you are preparing your content calendar, ensure you have prepared the following for each piece of content:

• Content brief
• Keyword research
• Content goal

Keep this information in your designated content folders or in a separate “Content Briefs” folder.

When you start planning individual months, remember to consider any key dates, holidays, or events.

4. Create Workflows for Each Content Format

There are multiple steps that need to happen before a draft content piece becomes a published piece. Write each of these steps out, making sure they are in order of what needs to be done so that no step is waiting on another.

Repeat this for each style of content you have that requires a different process or team. Here are some suggested workflows for common content types:

Blog content workflow:

1. Write a content outline
2. Fill in content
3. Add infographics or relevant images
4. Review SEO elements
5. Send to editor
6. Approve final draft
7. Publish or schedule publishing time
8. Promote blog content where applicable

Video content workflow:

1. Write your video script
2. Film content
3. Record voiceovers
4. Edit video and add visuals
5. Review SEO elements
6. Approve final draft
7. Publish or schedule publishing time

Social media posts workflow:

1. Create background or image
2. Write copy if applicable
3. Add social media captions
4. Review SEO elements
5. Create alternatives for other platforms
6. Approve final draft(s)
7. Publish or schedule publishing time

This is one of the biggest initial steps in creating your content production process, but what’s great is that once it’s done you won’t have to review it again for some time.

5. Dividing Responsibilities and Handoffs

If your team members have been involved up until this point, they’ll be able to let you know if you have enough team bandwidth to accomplish your current content goals or if you need to consider hiring extra hands. Alternatively, review your content goals to see if there are some content items with alternative goals that can be cut until you scale your business.

You’ll notice in the above example workflows that some steps are required in every workflow, such as reviewing for SEO and approving final drafts. When you divide up responsibilities for each of these steps, make sure that one person does not become a bottleneck for the content production. 

6. Plan to Review

The last step in any worthwhile process is ensuring it’s working with a planned review stage. This can take place anywhere from 90 days to six months after you’ve initialized your content production process.

Some things you’ll want to ask your content team during the review include:

• Is the content achieving its desired goal(s)?
• Are there any steps that could be adjusted for better efficiency?
• Is any step or person preventing another step from being completed?
• How do employees feel about the streamlined process?

Getting these answers directly from team leads or individual team members will give you insight into whether your content production process needs revisiting.

7 Tools for Making Content Production Process Easier

Throughout the content production process, there are opportunities to add ease to each of the steps outlined above with tools and software. Here are five great content production tools to simplify the process.

1. Jasper

An AI copywriting software will help reduce the time it takes to complete each step of your workflow processes. Let Jasper generate outlines for your content creation team in a flash with our Blog Post Outline Template or Video Script Outline Template. Then have Jasper write your content with the Paragraph Generator Template and finish the post with the Perfect Headline Template, all created through formulas from the world’s best copywriters.

2. SurferSEO

Throughout the production process, not only do you need to create amazing content, but you also need to make sure it's optimized for search engines. That's where Surfer SEO comes in. Surfer SEO is a tool that helps you write better content by taking care of the SEO side of things. With Surfer SEO, you can focus on writing great content without worrying about keyword research and other technical aspects of SEO.

Better yet, SurferSEO integrates seamlessly with Jasper so you can refer to SEO elements as you’re writing.

3. Google Drive

When you’re scaling your content production, you’ll need storage that can grow alongside your business. A free Google account comes with a free storage cloud that stores up to 15 GB. For larger server plans, you can upgrade to a Google Workspace account that provides 2 TB of storage on the cloud.

4. Asana

Collaborating on projects is key to ensuring your workflow, well, flows. By including each team member in the same workspace, you’ll be able to instantly see what tasks have or haven’t been completed on time. The best part about Asana is that you can visualize the same items in numerous ways, such as boards, lists, or timelines, so you can personalize your project to fit your team’s needs.

5. CoSchedule Content Calendar

If you don’t already have a content calendar, you can check out CoSchedule’s free digital marketing calendar software program. The Calendar Organizer, a feature within the Marketing Suite, offers you the organization needed to manage multiple campaigns, events, targets, and processes all within the same software. Using a collective calendar like this ensures your team members aren’t messaging you with questions about key dates while stakeholders can watch the progress as it happens.

6. ClickUp

If you're looking to streamline your content production and scale your efforts efficiently, ClickUp is the ultimate all-in-one solution for your workplace needs. Say goodbye to managing multiple platforms like Google Docs and Trello, and embrace the robust functionality of ClickUp that brings everything under one roof.

From task management to collaboration tools, ClickUp empowers your team to work seamlessly, ensuring that no detail is overlooked and productivity soars. Give ClickUp a try today and experience a new level of organization and productivity in your content creation process!

7. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an SEO software platform that you can use in your content planning efforts. It’s best used in conjunction with other tools like Asana or ClickUp, as it provides in-depth analysis of your website’s performance and backlink profiles.

With Ahrefs, you can track keyword rankings, explore content ideas and topics, and even conduct competitor analysis to stay ahead of the game.

Streamline Your Content Production Today with Jasper

Streamlining your content production process—perhaps using tools like these or other platforms for content marketing—is key to maintaining efficiency and growing your business. By following the steps in this post, you should be able to produce quality content without spending hours upon hours hunched over a computer screen.

Are you tired of wasting time and resources trying to organize your team's content production?

Look no further than Jasper, the ultimate solution for streamlining your content creation process. With our collective calendar feature, you can easily keep track of key dates and deadlines while collaborating with team members within the same software.

Save yourself the headache of endless back-and-forth emails and messages by trying out Jasper's 7 day free trial today.