Content Workflows: Today vs Letterdrop

TL;DR:

• Content marketers often spend excessive time on manual tasks, leading to missed deadlines and inefficiencies.
• A content workflow includes stages such as strategy, creation, approval, publishing, distribution, and optimization.
• With Letterdrop, marketers can automate idea intake, prioritize projects, manage content calendars, and simplify the publishing and distribution processes.

As a Content Marketer, you have aggressive traffic goals and a million other things to do — but your content pipeline is jammed with overdue tasks. You're falling behind on deadlines.

You're not alone. On average, content marketers can spend around 60 hours a month on upkeep for their content workflow... if it's not streamlined.

Using spreadsheets to keep track of projects, formatting errors while publishing, or using a flimsy content calendar like Airtable adds hours to your day-to-day. You're wasting time on things that can be streamlined or automated, and your deadlines are slipping you by. Cue a disgruntled VP of Marketing asking about content output.

Don't risk your job for tasks that software tools can take care of for you.

And you don't need multiple tools to cover every stage of the process. You could speed up the content production process by 32% by just adding one tool to your tech stack. Let's dive in.

What is a Content Workflow?

A content workflow refers to a sequence of tasks a content team must take to move from the initial idea to the final delivery of content. This includes the people and resources needed to put content out there.

This is all the cat-herding and fiddly bits that keep you up late at night when you should be catching some Zs.

A content workflow typically includes the following stages:

1. Strategy and research. This involves deep diving into relevant topics and developing a content strategy.
2. Ideas and planning. This includes brainstorming content ideas, creating briefs, and planning your content calendar.
3. Content creation. This is when your blog posts, social media updates, videos, and podcasts are made.
4. Editorial stage. This involves removing errors, adjusting tone to stay on-brand, and making sure the content is concise and serves its desired purpose.
5. Approval and publishing. Once you get the final go-ahead from stakeholders, it's time to publish and think about distribution.
6. Distribution. This is about getting content out to the right places and getting your team to amplify posts on social media.
7. Monitoring success and optimizing results. This stage involves measuring the performance of the content, analyzing the results, and optimizing the content strategy for future campaigns.

Performing an audit of your content workflow can show you where there are gaps in the process and where you can improve.

Most content marketers don't audit their workflows — and they're missing out. A better workflow means a faster turnaround time, more efficient communication with your team, and higher visibility for your content.

At Letterdrop, we've studied content setups at hundreds of companies. Here's a breakdown of what they look like on average and common areas for improvement.

Sourcing Ideas for Content

The Job that Needs To be Done

You need to compile ideas that are actually useful to your customers and achieve some sort of business goal, like pushing them down the sales funnel.

(It's easy to find yourself stumped for inspiration. We know. Our CEO wrote an article on how to get your first 20 blog posts out, no sweat.)

How It's Done Today:

1. Recording and taking notes during sales calls. Customers tend to talk about their problems and ask questions during calls. You can then tailor content to solve those problems and help with product positioning. You can record calls and get transcripts with tools like Fathom or Fireflies.
2. Creating a spreadsheet for team ideas. Get your execs, product managers, sales and customer support teams to put in their ideas on a weekly basis.
3. Doing competitive research. You can see what your competitors are doing right and create strategies to outperform them.
4. Recycling old content for social media. Turn a blog post into a carousel or a hand-drawn diagram that you can share on LinkedIn and Twitter. Make a habit of refreshing a piece of content like this every month.
5. Revisiting previous ideas. Update published pages to keep them relevant and topical.

Let's face it. A lot of these processes are manual and slow you down.

• Your sales team has hundreds, maybe thousands, of calls every month. You can't possibly listen to all of them to gather insights.
• Loose spreadsheets and transcripts can get lost or might be hard to access for your larger team. That means good ideas that could drive revenue are being lost.
• It can take hours to research competitors.
• You have to revisit old social posts manually, look for what was best performing, and see if enough time has elapsed to warrant posting them again.
• You'll have to use GA4 and Google Search Console to manually comb through your pages to see what pages need a refresh — one by one.

The Cost

• Lost time: We talked to 24 content teams, and manual steps like tracking spreadsheets and scrolling through GA4 can add up to six hours a week to a content workflow. Oof.
• Focusing on the wrong content: If you're not looking at first-party customer data or doing refreshes, you're ignoring a lot of low-hanging fruit and instead investing in the wrong types of content.

Letterdrop Automates Your Idea Intake and Prioritization Process

Here's how Letterdrop can help you drop your ideation process down to 30 minutes.

1. Letterdrop has a Gong.io integration to extract marketing insights from sales calls. You can get detailed and automated marketing insights from calls to understand what customer questions to answer.

2. Letterdrop drops friction for adding ideas with Slack and email integrations. No need to beg your team to fill in a hard-to-find idea form. Just type /idea in Slack or send an email, and you can add ideas directly to your backlog in Letterdrop for prioritization.‎

3. Competitor research. Forget the pain of manual searching. Letterdrop lets you see what your competitors are pp about and how they're ranking.

4. Recycle and revisit content. You can identify pages that need to be refreshed or social posts that performed well in the past so you can repost the good stuff.

Here's a quick breakdown of the Idea Generator in Letterdrop.

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Planning A Content Calendar

Jobs to be Done

You have a million channels to think about. Your company newsletter, the blog, individual social media pages... not to mention managing company and personal accounts across platforms.

You have a bunch of people to manage in-house, and sometimes you work with freelancers. You need to:

• Track individual projects.
• Remind people of deadlines.
• Give approvals at every stage of production.

That's a lot to supervise. You'll be left with stale spreadsheets and a Slack channel flooded with messages.

Keeping track of what is going out where will drive anyone crazy. That's where content calendars and project boards come in.

How It's Done Today

Some marketers choose to set up content calendars and project boards with Notion and Airtable. They allow you to set deadlines, see everything in one place, and leave comments for your team.

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‎‎‎Neither of these tools is synced with your content or with publishing. You'll still need to use third-party tools like Google Docs to write and edit content. That means constant cross-checking between your calendar, project board, and content.

Isn't the whole point of a content calendar to reduce your workload? These platforms only slow you down.

The Cost

Lost time: We surveyed content marketers asking how much time they lost before getting a robust content calendar. Going without one, or choosing a content calendar with limited features, can add 6.8 hours to your week in manual operations.

You can also waste up to 9.3 hours per week searching for information spread across loose docs, spreadsheets, and work messages.

Lack of visibility: When your VP asks what the content plan looks like for the next quarter, you want to have an up-to-date view that you can share with them immediately instead of pulling together a report last minute.

You can forget to publish: Without publishing tools, you can simply forget about posts that were supposed to go out, which will not go down well with your boss. Loose spreadsheets that track outgoing content can get stale, leaving you with no way to really know what's going on.

Letterdrop's Content Calendar and Project Board Sync with Your Content

With Letterdrop you won't be left wondering whether the calendar and project board are accurate or up to date. The Letterdrop calendar gives a high-level overview of everything that's scheduled to go out.

As your content moves, your calendar updates — and vice versa. You can save all those hours on cross-checks.

You can say goodbye to those endless messages and missed deadlines with the Letterdrop project board. Letterdrop's integrated CMS brings project management, approvals, and analytics under one roof.

• Project cards are color-coded according to customizable deadlines.
• Every card is tied to artifacts like drafts and content briefs.
• Each card shows status history, the person responsible for the project, and data around search volume and SEO difficulty.

Everyone can work on their projects in one place. No more loose docs to worry about.

Tracing responsibility and keeping on top of deadlines is easy. Collaborators get notified via email and Slack when it's their turn to contribute. And this applies to freelancers, approvers, writers, and editors.

It also has gated permissions, so you don't have to worry about things moving forward without approval.

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‎Comments are in real-time, much like in Google Docs. You can tag people and assign them to tasks, too.

Letterdrop banishes those pesky shadow databases and makes project management easy.

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Publishing

Jobs To be Done

Before you publish, you need to:

• Finalize design.
• Format and add custom code embeds.
• Do SEO checks, plagiarism checks, and grammar checks on content.
• Preview your post.

How It's Done Today

Many marketers publish with platforms like WordPress and Webflow. And as awesome of a site-builder as Webflow is, the CMS looks like a code editor, which doesn't make life easy for non-technical contributors.

Trying to format code and preview content on such sites can take ages and even break pages. You'll also have to outsource SEO, plagiarism, and Grammar checks for content.

Publishing is supposed to be the quick and easy part of content creation.

The Cost

Time lost: Adding embeds and formatting can slow down your entire process by half a week every month. Publishing on Webflow is particularly technical (and can seriously slow you down.) If you break a page trying to preview or paste over code from other docs, you add another hour or so to your publishing process for technical fixes.

Your content is poorly optimized without SEO tools: Content that isn't SEO optimized doesn't drive new leads.

Money spent: Outsourcing an SEO agency can cost thousands of dollars a month to do checks that you can automate.

Letterdrop Makes Publishing Quick and Painless

With Letterdrop, you can get published in less than 10 minutes.

1. Add Code Embeds in a Few Clicks

Embeds are no problem — you can save and load them with templates in Letterdrop. Enter the HTML once with variables that you can replace. It becomes a form that writers can add without code. We cover how Letterdrop makes custom code embeds easy in this article.

2. Site Previews are Temporary

Letterdrop creates a temporary preview of your post on a staging site that gets deleted after a few minutes. No accidental publishing or broken pages here.

3. Built-In SEO, Plagiarism, and Grammar Checks

With Letterdrop, you can do all your final content checks in one place.

Letterdrop's SEO tooling was developed by ex-Googlers and helps you rank better on search engines by helping you:

• answer search intent
• understand what topics, not just keywords, are already covered today (you can also auto-add these in natural sections to your content)
• identify new ideas that haven't been talked about to optimize for information gain
• follow technical SEO best practices with auto-fixes
• build internal links
• and follow Search Rater Guidelines

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It also has a plagiarism section and Grammarly Business built-in, so you don't have to worry about buying licenses for each of your writers.

Distribution

Jobs to be Done

• The first thing you need to do is determine which channel your content is going out to — such as the newsletter or a social media page.
• If it's going out on social media, you'll need to ask your social media team to make the relevant posts.
• Social media posts need a boost. That means messaging your team to engage with posts from their accounts.
• You'll need to let your Sales Team know if it's a sales enablement piece.

How It's Done Today

When it comes to newsletter content, lots of marketers keep a spreadsheet of ideas and relevant articles.

They also have Slack channels for asking employees to engage with social posts, often called #social-boost or #promote-online.

There are similar channels for messaging Sales and Social Media teams.

This can all seem like a lot of legwork, especially since most of it involves chasing down team members — who are too busy to answer your messages. Talk about exhausting.

The Cost

Time lost: We talked to some of our existing customers and it turns out you can spend up to three to five hours a week on messaging relating to distribution. Most of those messages go unanswered. Yikes.

No distribution means no leads: The added friction of repurposing for social media often means companies just forget to distribute completely. Your content just sits on your site — and no one sees it.

Stale data: Spreadsheets like the one you might be using for newsletter ideas get neglected and overcrowded. It's easy to miss something important.

Letterdrop Automates Distribution — And Amplification

With Letterdrop, you can distribute in a matter of minutes.

You can schedule socials at the same time that you're prepping your blog for publication. And the AI gives you a jumping-off point with a first draft for social posts from the blog post that matches your tone and voice.

As for amplifying your social posts, your team can connect their LinkedIn accounts to Letterdrop. From there, you're able to automate likes and comments to reach the prospects in their network. You can even ghostwrite for them with their permission.

Automate Your Content Workflow Today

Streamlining your content workflow with automation is a no-brainer. You get a faster turnaround time for content, which gives you a competitive edge. Content becomes more optimized and engaging, leading to more visibility and conversions. Better communication with your team means more efficient collaboration and feedback.

No more missed deadlines, email chains, and endless shadow databases.

A streamlined workflow also means there are fewer demands on your time. And all it takes is an audit of your workflow and a little help from us at Letterdrop.