Most companies are challenged with meeting objectives that might be diametrically opposed.
For example, how to scale up content marketing while not sacrificing quality, is a challenge that many companies are facing today.
One of the keys to scaling content while still ensuring that the messaging is clear, is to have an effective internal approval process. An internal approval process is necessary for content marketing, regardless of whether you’re creating content in-house, outsourcing your content production, or using a hybrid of the two.
There process needs to be streamlined, because if it isn’t, people will avoid the process, making it useless all together.
Smaller businesses face different challenges than larger businesses when it comes to quality assurance for content. Larger businesses have more complexity and more approvals that are generally required before content can go onto the Web site or be used for the purposes of this article. This article focuses on specifically on smaller businesses.
Approving content could be your bottleneck
So let’s talk about how the approval process goes.
- Generally, the first thing that happens is that someone comes up with a topic idea to write about.
- Then the topic idea is sent over to a content creator. And it’s that person’s job to create that content.
- Once that content has been created it needs to be edited initially for spelling and grammar. Nothing removes credibility from your brand than a typo!
- After the initial proofreading edit, the content should be checked for any inadvertent plagiarism.
- After a plagiarism screen, the article has to go to the appropriate business people within a company. These people will make sure that what is being covered within the content is aligned with the company’s business objectives.
All the parties involved are capable of editing for spelling and grammar. They are able to utilize a separate software to conduct any plagiarism screening. They may even have internal resources to create the content.
The problems often happen with getting approval. Oftentimes approvals have to be done at an executive level. As everyone knows, most executives never seem to have enough time to handle the myriad of tasks that are put in front of them… approving blog articles being one of them.
Learn more by reading our second series to this post: How to speed up content marketing approval when multiple people are involved.