Everything You Need to Know About Content Review
Growing your blog, e-commerce site, or the overall content marketing strategy isn’t easy. Content management is a challenging job that’ll have you face-to-face with new problems and a bigger content footprint daily.
And you need a dependable, expert-tested process to deal with and resolve these challenges.
Besides, your website is also often the first point of contact a customer has with your brand during their journey. It has to be amazing to ensure that they buy the first time and keep coming back for more. Your content should therefore be attention-grabbing and updated so that customers know what your services stand for.
For these reasons, you need to set up a content review process that enhances the effectiveness of your content creation, content distribution, marketing, and management efforts.
What Is a Content Review?
Content Review is the process of identifying and monitoring all the content that is there on a company’s website. It ensures that all the information on the website is updated for visitors to read and understand the company’s values and mission by which they stand by.
As a content reviewer, you will be required to analyze the content that is displayed on the website/blog, from text-based content to any digital or visual graphic content. You will also be responsible for resolving any issues that might be reported by users.
Benefits Of Having A Content Review And Approval Process
Delivering work on time requires efficiency and coordination between marketing, legal, and product departments. Without a draft review process, each department may develop a new idea that might clash with the overall resulting product. Let’s look at some of the benefits of having a content review team.
Ensure Brand Consistency & High-Quality
One of the most important reasons for carrying out a content review process is to ensure brand consistency. With the number of digital applications available online, it has become relatively easy to create multiple content types that highlight your brand mission.
A review process will ensure that your marketing team knows what tone to adapt to each of their content. It may also help align all content produced with the company’s mission statement.
Help Your Team Save Time
Establishing guidelines will make it easier for your marketing team to know precisely what kind of content to create. Adhering to a set standard will also minimize any misunderstanding within the content team and ensure that job is done quickly and efficiently.
Organize All Feedback
For consistent improvement, it is crucial to maintain a feedback and approval system within your team.
However, the management may change, and the task of approving content may move to someone else. In such cases, having a standard approval procedure helps new managers take charge without making significant changes.
Approving content also begets constant improvements, ensuring high-quality content to be produced at each stage.
How To Set Up A Content Review And Approval Process
Here is a quick and practical guide to setting up a content review and approval practice for your business:
Set Your Objectives For Content Creation
Producing content without a clear objective in mind can lead to disjointed content that can give an impression of disorganization. Before creating any content, ask yourself the following:
- What are you trying to achieve with your content?
- Do you want to rank top on search engines?
- Do you want to create engagement?
- Or do you want to educate an audience?
Create Content Standards And Editorial Guidelines
Developing strong guidelines can ensure high quality and consistent content to be produced across your entire team and any guest writers. For example, establish a color scheme that aligns with your brand, so the content you create distinguishes your brand. You can take help from various online guides and templates to create a unique design language for your business.
Source: Venngage
Establishing standard rules to create content is vital in project management. It can be especially helpful when working on multiple projects where time is of the essence.
Build A Clear And Transparent Process
The first step in implementing an effective and efficient content review process is defining who will be responsible at each stage.
Suppose you are part of a large team. In that case, the chances are that collaborating on the different content and files may get complicated.
This is where markup, annotation, and highlighting tools come in handy. Having software or a platform where all team members can view, edit, and make files collectively can enhance teamwork and ensure better content quality.
Ideally, you should choose tools that align with your values of flexibility, ease of use, and transparency between team members.
Define The Content Team (Creators, Reviewers, Managers)
For a successful content marketing strategy, all your team members should have clearly defined job descriptions. From content strategists to writers and content reviewers to managers, each team member should be aware of the responsibilities that come with their role.
Content Creator – Marketing your brand may involve content creators who create both written and visual content. To further specify your team roles so that everyone has a specific goal to achieve, it is preferred to distinguish your graphic content team from your writing team.
Content Reviewer – Their responsibility entails identifying any minor edits or changes needed to ensure brand consistency.
Content Manager – They supervise all the content creating and marketing strategies needed to create a formidable online presence. A content manager can edit or review the content at any time and is also responsible for engaging with clients and customers.
By defining role responsibilities and descriptions at every level, you can easily identify and rectify delays when they occur.
Best Content Review Tools
There are many content analysis tools to help you adjust your content reviewing strategy to determine your team’s efficiency. These include:
Filestage
Filestage has all the tools reviewers need to analyze content with little or no professional training. Filestage makes it easy for team members to view and annotate documents in real-time, making the approval process easy and stress-free.
Aproove
Aproove is an excellent software to streamline all your business workflows and manage multiple projects at a time with Aproove Work Management. It also provides workflow automation and task management, making the reviewing and compliance process easy between team members.
PageProof
Pageproof is an online proofing platform for content creators and reviewers to review and approve their work more efficiently. It lets you make proofs for various HTML files, Microsoft Word, web banners, email templates, and many more.
3 Best Practices to Improve your Content Review Process
Whether you’re a small company or a large corporation, it can be useful to have a review team examine the drafts for any brand inconsistencies or minor errors.
However, this process can be quite labor-intensive and can lead to mismanagement if not done properly.
Make sure that you:
Clarify The Due Dates
Having deadlines for every task ensures that work is done on time and makes it easy and efficient for team members to manage the rest of the work accordingly.
Guide Reviewers
Whether you have in-house content reviewers or outsource it, make sure the content matches the reviewer’s expertise. Having a technical writer evaluate a copywriting advertisement would be of little to no help since technical writers are more experienced informal writing modes.
Additionally, before reviewing, make sure you have enough time at hand. Editing and evaluating can be a lot of work. Before you commit to such a role, make sure you can meet the deadline and efficiently carry out your job.
Create A Repeatable System
Once you have set criteria for your review process, your next step should be to ensure that all the steps are followed for every content reviewed. Having a repeatable review and approval system eliminates any confusion regarding the process and can also help speed up the review process.
Also, don’t forget to incorporate A/B testing for what works and what doesn’t. Use it for both – creating the content as well as evaluating the processes behind it. This will help you design a robust system that maximizes your teams’ efficiency.
Repeating specific actions can also help you analyze the techniques working well for your content team and the techniques that might limit their efficiency.
To Conclude
If your brand and website have been growing, the chances are that reviewing your content takes a long time and is a tedious process that you’d rather avoid.
However, an effective content review strategy can help you and your team know exactly which pages need to rank in search results. Additionally, it can also help ascertain what type of content to display on your website’s main page, and how to maintain consistent performance for all your content strategies.
It might feel a bit overwhelming at first, but rest assured that it won’t be as tiresome or time consuming the second and even after that. So hand in there through the review, and we promise that your website will emerge much stronger and better after it.
Author bio
Max Benz is a content marketing manager at Filestage and thinks that you can’t put enough emphasis on the content review process. On the side, he’s running a German SaaS director, suitApp.de.