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6 Steps to a Content Production Process That Will Grow With You

The ability to produce valuable content can make or break your company. Start off on the right foot with a stellar content production process.

Published on Dec 19, 2022

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 include:

  • Onboard new team members with ease
  • Quickly identify gaps in content
  • Automate process or administration steps to save time
  • Withstand sudden or unexpected changes

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
  • 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. 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 content 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.

Five 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.

Blog Post Outline Example - Content Production

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.

SurferSEO Screenshot - Content Production

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 One account that provides 100 GB of storage on the cloud.

Google One Plans Screenshot - Content Production

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.

Asana Boards Screenshot - Content Production

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.

CoSchedule Screenshot - Content Production

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.

And if you're looking for even more efficiency (who isn't?), sign up for Jasper today. With our help, you'll be churning out stellar content in no time at all.

Meet The Author:

Dave Rogenmoser

Dave Rogenmoser

CEO of Jasper

Dave is the Co-Founder Jasper, a Y Combinator-backed tech company based in Austin, Texas. He is also a husband and father of 3 boys.

Marketing Strategy

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