As a start-up, you might have had one person in marketing – or perhaps just you as the owner manager - adding content but now you might need input from a number of other departments. As with any work which has multiple people involved, you’ll need good project management in place and efficient workflow. If somebody on the team doesn’t sign off the copy when they should, it can hold everything up.
You won’t want any old content appearing on your website. The copy might have come from the sales team but it might need to go through marketing to make sure it includes the correct promotional codes etc and then, additionally, some content might require legal or compliance approval too.
At the heart of all of this will be a good editor – who not only sorts out grammar and style, but also takes into account the company’s branding and tone of voice. In some cases, the content will be updated for SEO purposes as well. If everyone has the freedom to add blogs to your website, they could potentially clash with other blogs being shared that day or current promotions.
Many web platforms, including Umbraco, include workflow as part of their offering. As the company explains:
Larger sites with multiple editors need a more controlled approach to content management. Umbraco Workflow integrates seamlessly with the Umbraco backoffice to add multi-stage approval processes for content changes, allowing organizations to adopt a distributed publishing model with full confidence the right people are approving content updates prior to publishing.
Along with the workflow mechanism, Umbraco Workflow adds helpful dashboards for your editors, content expiration and reviews, and a fully-featured back office application, with detailed analytics, documentation, and configuration options.
When a job is on the workflow system, then it will typically appear as an action for the appropriate person to deal with (typically within a particular timescale). We work with many clients where the person in charge of a department – whatever that department does – will add data and information onto a page (such as product details or times) and then it will go to the marketing team for approval. The marketing team will generally also check out images that are there to be included – to importantly make sure they are on brand, of the correct resolution, have had any sign-offs from the people featured, as well as ensuring the organisation has the correct permissions to use the image.
When it comes to compliance, a good workflow system will let you set review periods for content on your website – such as your privacy policy or GDPR statement – to be reviewed. This will act as a useful reminder, say every six months, to make sure that statements like this are up to date. You could also set a reminder to look at any ‘stale’ content on your website and potentially remove it. Without proper processes in place, it can all get very chaotic.
It’s always best to plan ahead when thinking about adding processes to your business, so you’re not caught off guard when your business scales up. If you spend the money and allocate the time now, you will not only be in a better position for your business but you might save your brand’s reputation further down the line.
If you want to know more about implementing processes – particularly when it comes to managing your website - do get in touch on tel: 020 3397 3222.