Someone once said ‘Content is king’ and this holds true to date. Digital marketing is nothing without content.
The better quality and more value-adding your content is, the more people and audience you’ll attract to your brand. Thus, the content review process is a process that every organization should take seriously.
As a content marketer, you have innumerable tasks on your hands from ideation to planning, from strategizing to execution. You might use a project manager software to set up all the tasks that are needed to be done, all the content that is required to be delivered.
Then all that’s left to do is knock down the tasks one-by-one. Once you achieve that, there is a blissful feeling of accomplishment as you reach the finishing line.
But then, comes the review and approvals. Everything slows down. You lose your focus and your momentum.
This process can often be the reason for many content marketers to face the mess. The reason they often feel overwhelmed.
If this happens to you too, it’s probably the time for you to give a makeover to your process and streamline it. Here are a few best practices that you can consider.
Do not get a lot of reviewers on board
Have you ever heard the phrase ‘too many cooks spoil the broth?’ This just means that when you involve many people to do a job, it won’t be done well because of the different opinions and perceptions.
Keeping this in mind, you should always make sure that you do not have an increasing number of reviewers. It will not help you generate good quality content. Instead, it will only confuse you further and maybe delay the entire review process for you.
Limit the number of reviewers and approvers on your projects.
Create yourself a template
A template is just a more organized way of carrying out the work that you are anyway supposed to do. Also, since you will be getting your content reviewed and approved more than once, it only makes sense to create yourself a template that will just need you to make the changes.
A typical template for your content review will look something like this:
- Inform the reviewers and approvers about the date you want them to be available.
- Give three days to reviewers, also remind them about the purpose as well as the deadline.
- Make the changes that are suggested.
- Repeat the process the second time.
- Submit the final copy.
Enable more clear feedback
Feedback is all that you look for when you undertake the content review process. If you don’t get constructive, clear, and informed feedback, it will lose its purpose.
More often than not, reviewers tend to give poor feedback because they are unaware of the context of the piece that you have shared with them. They don’t have any references to recall the basis of your content or feedback from other reviewers.
How can you resolve this issue? Simply by making sure your communication is up-to-the-mark and enabling clear feedback. Remove all the barriers that could come between you and proper feedback.
Reduce the number of rounds
Many times content creators tend to make all the changes that reviewers ask them to make and then send for approvals again and again. This mostly happens when reviewers always find something to be edited.
When you start with a project without researching about it properly beforehand, it is then that you come across so many review rounds.
The best way to resolve this issue of an increasing number of rounds is by doing your homework the way before. Think through the brief that you have been given, identify the purpose of your content pillars, do market research, and take every step that is needed to help you learn about the project.
Only after that should you actually begin writing.
Conclusion
The content review process is a crucial process but it is also a very prolonged one. With the right tools and strategies, you can make this process a lot easier for yourself.
