Content Production Management Explained

A well thought out content production process can make creating any piece of content, big or small, easier, faster, and better. In this post, we’ll go over all you need to know to manage your content production effectively and efficiently.

Content production is the creation of digital content such as blog posts, videos, whitepapers, presentations, graphics, podcasts, newsletters, and online interactive content.

How to create a content production strategy

Having the right strategy makes it easier to develop good content. It helps you focus on the goal at hand and plan out exactly what steps you need to take to make content that achieves your goals.

The right content production strategy needs to take several factors into account:

The goal of your content

Ex: generate leads, SEO, thought leadership.

The intended audience

What’s the profile of your audience, customer vs. new visitor or lead? What’s the job role, seniority, company type, industry, demographics, intent, etc.

The intended distribution of the content

Ex: through search engines, social media, newsletters, a speech, etc.

What other assets are needed

Ex: custom designed images, video, stock photos.

Who is involved in the content creation process

Ex: designers, copywriters, managers, etc.

The steps needed to create the content

Ex: research, budgeting, reviews, approvals

The timeline and due dates

When you expect to have the content published.

Expected results

Your key performance indicators - what metrics equal success?

You can then choose a strategy to create your content based on the constraints.

For instance, when creating a blog post, your strategy could be:

Goal: SEO / traffic
Audience: product managers at startups
Distribution: search engines
Other assets needed: infographics
Who’s involved: copywriter, graphic designer, SEO specialist
Steps: research, draft, review, design, final review, publish, submit to search engines
Due date: 1 week from now
Expected results: #1 ranking in Google search for [your keyword] and approximately 10,000 pageviews within a year of publication.

Steps for a great content production process

You’ll need to map out the steps to making the content once you have your strategy. These steps should be easy to follow and repeatable since you’ll use them every time you produce content.

Your process, depending on the type of content, will be made of many of these steps:

Brief (description of the content and your content strategy)
Project setup (set up a workspace in your project management tool, communicate tasks to those involved in the content creation)
Research
Draft
Review
Test or QA
Revise
Final review/approvals
Stage
Publish
Distribute
Monitor

Content production processes for different types of content

Here are a few examples of the steps you can take for producing different types of content.

Written content like blog posts, emails, and white papers

Brief
Project setup
Research
Draft
Review
Revise
Final review
Stage (if it’s to be posted online)
QA
Publish
Distribute
Monitor

Video content

Brief
Project setup
Research
Draft
Review
Revise
Optimize (if posted online - optimize for file size, thumbnails, seo)
Final review
Stage
QA
Distribute
Monitor

Interactive content such as interactive guides and surveys

Brief
Project setup
Draft
Review
Revise
Stage
QA
Final review
Publish
Monitor

Live content like presentations and speeches

Brief
Project setup
Draft
Review
Dry run (practice delivering the content)
Revise
Dry run
Final review
Live run

You can add the following steps If you also plan to use a recorded version of the live content:

Optimize (if posted online - optimize for file size, thumbnails, SEO)
Final review
Stage
QA
Distribute
Monitor

How to manage content production with Neatly

Neatly is a content and digital asset management platform that works with any online content such as files saved in Google Drive or Dropbox or anything else with a shareable link. Neatly makes it easy to organize and find your team’s content and files.

Content production with Neatly

Step1. Create a project

Neatly is organized into categories and projects. Categories are meant for day-to-day files, like the company logo, brand guide or links to reports. Projects are meant for temporary files for things like work in progress blog posts, videos, files for client projects, etc.

Neatly projects are great for content production since collaborators will only see the project and not any of your other files – which is great when inviting external collaborators like freelancers.

To create a project:

Log into your Neatly account
Click on the project tab
Click to create a new project in the left sidebar

Step 2. Add collaborators

The second step is to invite your collaborators (freelancers, designers, managers, etc.) to your project.

What’s nice about this is that each Neatly project has its own unique link so collaborators can just go to the link instead of searching for the relevant files in their email or Google Drive.

You can also subscribe to a project using the bell icon at the top right of the project page to get email notifications every time a new file or link is added to the project.

Step 3. Upload files

Adding files to Neatly is very easy. You can either upload a file (will be saved to your Google Drive), create a Google Doc, Sheet, or Slide directly from Neatly, import from Google Drive, or paste in a link from any website or platform (ex: Dropbox or Figma).

You can also add descriptions to each file or link to make it easier to collaborate.

Final thoughts

Making content becomes infinitely easier when you have a good content production management system.

Neatly makes content production easier through enhanced file and link sharing and giving you one spot for all your files and links regardless of where they’re saved.

Want to try Neatly for free? Sign up here.