It’s important for agencies and the brands they manage to review and approve all social media content and marketing materials before they are published. However, managing the workflow for each piece of content can be a nightmare for both the content creators (i.e. agencies and marketing teams) as well as the final approver or client.
Even with all of the new social tools available, managing the content approval process still presents a challenge. It can be time-consuming to email posts and feedback back-and-forth and keep track of every edit, comment, or request on each single piece of content.
The good news is that with GAIN, teams can not only manage content approvals in a clean, uniform way, but they can also automate the approval process, so content is automatically sent to the appropriate person until final approval has been reached. In other words, GAIN helps teams spend more time creating content and less time actually managing it. If you’re ready to eliminate the back-and-forth emailing and start using an automated content approval process, here are the five steps to follow.
1. Choose tools that will help you automate your approval workflow
The fewer hours your team has to spend on time-consuming tasks, such as getting approval on posts, the more time you can spend on content creation, analyzing key metrics, and engaging with your audience. The first step in freeing up your time is to choose tools that will help you automate your content approval workflow, such as GAIN.
GAIN has the flexibility to create simple or complex content approval workflows. Regardless if your team has 2 or 15 members, and regardless of how many social media channels you manage, you can simplify it all by creating customized approval templates for each brand or client. Choosing an automation tool that allows complete customization to fit your team is critical for successful implementation.
2. Define the approval process
Before you can automate your content workflow, you’ll need to define who the content creators and approvers are on your team. Think about your current process and what each member of your team does for each of your clients or social media channels. This will make it easy to setup your approval templates in GAIN.
Once you’ve outlined how content moves through your team internally, you’ll need to define the client approval process. Who really needs to be notified and give final approval on content before it goes live? Are multiple rounds or levels of client approvals necessary? These are important questions to answer.
An example content approval workflow may look like this:
Internal Creative Team > Internal Agency Approver (or Community Manager) > Client Approver(s)
With GAIN, you can choose to have any single person on your team approve content before it advances to the next approval round, or set it up so everyone in a round has to approve the content before it moves on to the next approver or client.
Additionally, GAIN allows you to auto advance content to the next round once it’s been approved by each person as well as auto schedule content once it has received final approval. For each round, approvers receive email notifications when it’s their turn to review content.
Approvers can also leave all edits and comments on each individual post, so feedback never gets lost in messy email chains again.
4. Let the automation tool do the work
Now that you’ve defined and created your content approval workflows, it’s time to let the automation tool do the work. It can be tempting to still send emails or chat messages notifying team members or clients when content is ready for approval in the platform. However, the faster you eliminate these unnecessary communications back-and-forth, the more effective your automation tool will be and the more productive you’ll feel.
With GAIN, you can automate every step of the content approval process. GAIN will notify each person when it’s their turn to review content, and continue to send automatic reminder emails if someone should forget to approve content that is pending. Automated reminders means you’ll be able to gather approvals faster and save emailing for more important conversations.
5. Keep finding new ways to automate tasks
Once you’ve defined a content approval process, the work doesn’t stop there. It’s important to reevaluate your workflow every few months, or on a quarterly basis, for weaknesses. Examine if there are ways to improve your workflow by eliminating any unnecessary steps so that you can save even more time.
Using GAIN, you can update your approval workflows at any time by adding or removing approvers, rounds, or choosing to auto schedule or auto advance your content. GAIN offers ultimate flexibility so you can customize the tool to fit your organization’s needs and eliminate strenuous emailing of content all around once and for all.
