Content marketing affects how well your business generates leads, nurtures them, and converts them into loyal customers. This explains why84% of people expect brands to produce content that attracts and entertains them. But how do you produce unique, engaging content?

The answer is as simple as it is obvious: You need a solid content creation process. Only if you have an established process in place will your team be able to produce high-quality content at scale. In this article, you will learn why this process is essential to your content marketing strategy and how you can set up and improve your own content creation process.

Why you should establish a content creation process

Whether it's writing blogs, producing podcasts, or making videos, content creation tends to be the ultimate marketing practice for any business. But creating high-quality content can take a lot of time and resources.

A content creation process helps your team work more efficiently and brings these benefits:

Save time and meet deadlines

With a process in place, your team has a clear structure and steps they can easily follow. Since everyone has well-defined responsibilities, tasks can be completed faster, ensuring that deadlines are met.

Increase transparency

A clear process helps managers keep an overview of all tasks and track the progress of content.

Ensure consistency and high-quality results

The approval step in the content creation process ensures that every content element has been reviewed for quality and brand consistency and that it has received final approval by all relevant stakeholders before being published.

How to structure a content creation process

Today, every marketer knows the importance of content marketing and strategizes accordingly.

Here are the five basic steps of creating quality content for your brand:

1. Ideation and SEO research

Reproducing already existing content is never helpful. For creating unique and in-demand content, research and ideation play a crucial role.

To develop unique ideas and trending topics for your content, you need to conduct solid SEO research with the right tools. This is key to generating ideas that align with your organizational objectives.

2. Briefing and outlining

A content brief is a summary that contains all of the information necessary for a content creator to produce a piece of content. The best marketing briefs integrate editorial guidance and business planning to ensure that every piece of material is well-written and optimized for SEO.

In addition, a good brief...

• Identifies the target audience – Who are you looking to educate and inform?
• Sets the foundation – states the keywords, content length, tone of voice, etc.
• Includes a clear and detailed description and outline.
• Has a deadline for each phase to be completed.
   

3. Creation

This phase, a stage that demands extra attention, entails the entire content creation process. It helps to utilize diverse strategies for a variety of content types as you consider your research, keywords, and the content plan.

Create unique content to maintain an edge for your business in the industry. Unique content will also strengthen your company’s marketing strategy. Using advanced content creation tools is recommended to ensure the quality and delivery of your work.

This step involves everyone who plays a role in the process of creating the final content offering. Team members may include:

• Content Managers (who manage and look over the entire content creation process and ensure that everything is working according to plan)
• Content writers (who work on textual content for any given purpose)
• Photographers (who take, edit, and enhance pictures for designated projects)
• Videographers (who capture videos for any campaign or project)
• Editors (who are keen to ensure the quality of all textual work done by the writers)
• Graphic designers (who design, edit, and finalize compelling materials for various purposes)
   

4. Review and editing

The content review step involves improving and finalizing content of the highest quality – because one small mistake can ruin all of your efforts. It consists of proofreading your work and making sure it aligns with your content objectives.

So, here are the necessary components of this stage:

• Share the content with all relevant stakeholders (i.e. the content manager, the product team, and other involved parties).
• Collect feedback from the reviewers to get input for improvements.
• Review and discuss any feedback that is not completely clear.
• Make changes according to the feedback and discussions.
   

Constant updates and reviews of each phase ensure the quality and brand consistency of work and, most importantly, keep it aligned with your defined objectives.

5. Approval

This is the final step, in which you require submission and approval of your content by the client or supervisor. Once editing is completed, it's time to get approval from stakeholders before publication.

Sharing large yet confidential files can be both a hassle and a risk; this is why using the right software and tools is always recommended. Automating the entire process can also simplify the task.

1. Ideation and SEO research → Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the most used SEO research tools and doesn't require you to be a pro in order to conduct comprehensive research. It is an all-in-one SEO tool for research on marketing trends and content.

Ahrefs can help you:

• Conduct a site audit for website optimization.
• Perform a competitor analysis with the site explorer.
• Find and choose the right keywords for your content with the keywords explorer.
• Discover top industry trends with the help of the content explorer.
• Track your search engine ranking position for specific keywords with the rank tracker.
   

This powerful toolset enables you to find relevant keywords and generate ideas to curate highly competitive content that will help your company stand out.

2. Briefing and outlining → SEO Surfer

SEO Surfer lets you explore related keywords, important FAQs, appropriate lengths for your content, and the suggested number of images to include, as well as keep an eye on your competitors. It also helps you find ways to optimize SEO and content development.

With this tool, you can also:

• Audit and optimize your web pages.
• Edit and improve your content.
• Find a correlation between the position in search results and on-page factors.
• Discover searches related to your keywords.
   

SEO Surfer helps you create a detailed brief for each type of content.

3. Creation → Google Worksheets and Canva

These tools help you produce different types of content.

Google Worksheets for texts

Google Worksheets is a highly versatile suite of multiple text-related tools. It is one of the most used text editors worldwide and is compatible with all operating systems and devices. With it, you can write blogs, design tables, make presentations, edit text, and even create spreadsheets.

All of this can be done both online and offline. You can save files in cloud storage, share them through links, and do so much more. Google Worksheets makes content creation and sharing very easy and accessible for all.

Canva for designs

Canva is a drag-and-drop tool that's great for creating all kinds of graphics, videos and images for various platforms and channels. It can help you make and edit customized content. Plus, Canva comes with hundreds of features and thousands of templates that you can use to design:

• Images
• Videos
• Social Media Posts
• Presentations
• YouTube thumbnails
• Flyers
• Logos
• Posters
• Facebook covers
• Business Cards
   

You can even use your existing branding and themes to create exciting new design elements on Canva.

4. Review and editing —> Filestage

Filestage simplifies the review process and makes it easy to collect feedback from multiple stakeholders. Its centralized platform helps you keep projects and files organized and makes it easy to share, comment and discuss your content.

With this software, the feedback process becomes extremely easy and fast. Filestage also offers various collaboration features to automate the review cycle, and it supports the revision step with an automatically created to-do list that the editor can work through.

5. Approval —> Filestage

Filestage also helps you speed up your review rounds and get your content approved faster. The software enables reviewers to approve files with just one click, while project managers can maintain an overview of the status of a file and who has submitted their approval.

Additionally, you can download a review report that includes all comments and timestamped approvals of the reviewers. This makes your content review and approval process fast, transparent and easy to manage.

6. Performance —> TWIPLA

Measure the success of your newly created content by using TWIPLA, the all-in-one privacy-compliant website analytics tool. See how your blog articles are performing and track the results in order to see what your target audience best responds to. 

This tool is easy to install and to use and offers you deep insights about your pages. You will get all the basic stats about your content readers, but also their behavior. Using the session recording and heatmaps tools, you will see how they interacted with your pages and what parts of your content attracted their attention the most.

Conclusion

With the right tools and techniques, any business can improve its content creation process and level up its content marketing. If you are a marketer looking for the right tools to develop your unique approach, we've given you quite the head start right here. Include the tools mentioned above in your processes, and create better content with less effort than ever before.