Content Review: A 5-Point Plan to Make Your Work Smarter, Not More Harder

How does your content review process look?

It becomes more difficult to ensure that our blogs and ecommerce websites have the best content possible.

It is easy to get caught up in creating new content. The noise can obscure the scope of the content. Drafts become stuck in endless feedback loops, and final approvals can be delayed. We end up with content that’s not on-brand, full of errors, and doesn’t align with our content marketing goals.

Implementing a strategic content review process can solve all these problems. It might be time for you to invest in your content reviewing process if you want to improve your content quality and the productivity of your marketing department.

What is Content Review?

Content review refers to the process that each piece of content must go through before it is published on your website. This includes everything from careful proofreading to ensuring that content is consistent with brand guidelines, the target audience, and meets SEO requirements.

Monitoring content can be part of content reviewing. This is done to make sure your content stays relevant, and that your web pages and customer touchpoints function properly.

Content review is important

Why is content review so important for your content marketing strategy

1. Keep your brand consistent

Lucidpress reports that 77% of businesses view off-brand content in their companies. This is despite 68% businesses stating that brand consistency leads to revenue growths between 10-20%.

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It can be difficult to create, maintain, and improve a consistent brand identity, especially when there are many people involved in the creation. Content review is a key task because it ensures brand consistency. This helps align your content with the brand’s mission, visual aesthetic and tone of voice.

2. It saves everyone time

Clear guidelines and standards can be established through content reviews. These rules will apply to everything from your SEO strategies to the voice of your brand. Marketing teams can collaborate to achieve common goals, which eliminates confusion and improves productivity.

3. Encourage team members to grow

Feedback is an important part of the content review process. This fosters a culture that encourages growth and opportunities.

Instead of having one writer be the sole creator and reviewer of specialist content, consider inviting other writers to join you in the process. The reviewing process can be facilitated by your specialized team member, who can use their expertise to refine content and give valuable feedback to budding authors.

4. You should inspect even the smallest errors.

No matter how many times you double-check, triple-check anddouble-check your writing, there will always be an error somewhere.

Generalization is the reason it is so easy to overlook your own typos. It can lead to poor copy quality that will reduce your marketing materials’ impact. This problem is solved by content reviewing. This makes it more likely that errors are caught before the content goes live.

5. Feedbacks are centralized and organized

A well-organized content review process makes it easier to give feedback. You should be able identify the author of the draft, the person who reviewed it, the person who edited it, and the reasons for these changes at a glance. You can provide the correct feedback by knowing where your content is at any particular time.

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6. Set goals and targets are met

It’s easy for team members to get lost in the shuffle of content creation and changes. Content review aims to manage a piece or content from its draft stage through to the approval stage, with an eye on meeting specific goals. Your content review strategy will help you achieve your goals, no matter if your goal is to build loyal customers or increase your SEO value.

Who does Content Review?

The content review process involves three key personnel.

1. Content writer

The content writer is responsible for creating the content. The content writer is responsible for creating the first draft and submitting it to review. Because they make most of the recommended changes, the content writer is a key role in the content review process.

2. Editor of Content

Your primary content reviewer is your content editor. Although they don’t have to be a professional editor to perform this role, they will need to have a keen eye for detail and expertise in the subject. Your content editor provides feedback and suggestions to your content writers, as well as guiding them through revision.

3. Content Manager

The content manager is responsible for overseeing the review process from beginning to end. They coordinate the assignment of content for each stage and ensure it moves through all stages quickly. They are responsible for ensuring that content editors thoroughly review work. After the content has been edited, refined and published, the content manager will give its final approval.

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How to perform a seamless Content Review

A solid plan is key to implementing a content review strategy. These are the key steps.

1. Prioritize clear goals and objectives.

Without clear goals and objectives, it is easy to get lost in the content creation process. This results in unfocused, fragmented content that has no impact on the larger picture.

Each piece of content that you create should have a purpose. Do you want to:

• How can you improve your SERP ranking?
• Attract new customers on your website
• Drive social engagement?
• Your readers should be entertained or educated.
• How do you sell a product/service?

Be specific. What is your primary focus if you want to increase social engagement? Do you want to increase comments on your blog or get more? Acquire more Instagram followers? Get more Facebook comments Your team will have an easier time creating content that meets these goals if you are more precise.

2. Establish editorial guidelines and content standards

Your writers can be empowered to produce consistently high-quality content. These guidelines should be incorporated into a tangible resource (such a brand style manual) that contains all information necessary to create content that is consistent with your brand’s expectations and style.

The following should be included in your brand style guide:

• Personality of your brand
• Statements of mission and values
• Target audience
• Palette and color schemes
• Typography
• Tone of voice
• Communication style
• Images
• Tools and resources for content curation

Here is a page from Ivy Lane Events’ brand style guide, where they discuss their brand personality.

Screenshot taken by issuu.com, Ivy Lane Events – Brand Guide

SecureDocSharing is a document-sharing tool that allows you to securely manage internal knowledge documents.

3. Discuss the review process in a meeting with your team members.

Your marketing team should all have an input on how the content review process should work. Start the meeting by describing your content ideas and your creation process. Next, discuss the steps involved in reviewing the content. These steps should be aligned with your larger content marketing goals.

Invite your team members to offer suggestions and feedback. You can implement a review process that meets your goals more efficiently if you have a solid content strategy in the early stages.

4. Give tasks to the right people

If you don’t take care, the content review process can become messy. You can avoid the content review process from spiraling into chaos and unproductive chaos by clearly stating who is responsible for what and why.

Each member of the team should have a clear role that is aligned with their expertise and your overall content marketing goals. For example, if your goal is to create a blog post that ranks high, then your content editor should have SEO expertise. Your goal is to create engagement-oriented articles.

You can place talent where it makes the most impact by delegating tasks strategically.

5. Keep your eyes on the final approval process.

Many times, new content goes through multiple revisions before being approved. Every person involved in content review must keep their eyes on the goal and align the content with the business goals at each stage. This helps to ensure that the objectives are not lost in translation, or forgotten when new projects emerge.

Every member of the team can benefit from a simple, but effective Content Review Process

The purpose of the content review process is to promote a culture of collaboration and growth across the business.

Content writers have the chance to improve their writing skills. They can improve their writing skills by following a set of guidelines and obtaining constructive feedback.

An organized content review process can be a benefit to editors who take their expertise and interests into consideration. This increases their productivity as well as the value they can add to a piece. They have the same guidelines, rules and goals as the writer. This improves communication and unifies collaboration.

Content managers have a clear understanding of the content and can guide it to the approval stage efficiently.

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Conclusion

A content review is more than just checking for spelling errors in your copy. This process enriches each piece of content by bringing in the expertise of other members of your team while still keeping it on track to achieve its goals.

You can create a culture of growth and feedback by implementing a strategy content review process. This will allow you to produce consistent, error-free, on-brand content that meets your objectives every time.

The first Scoop.it Blog article was Content Review: A 5-Point Guide to Help you Work Smarter, not Harder.