Creating marketing communications materials can be challenging. After decades in the business (yeah, I’m “seasoned”… ), I’ve had multiple experiences with review processes—some great, some good, some not so good, and some absolutely horrendous and extremely frustrating.
Over the years I’ve come to identify a number of best practices that can help to both streamline the content review process and minimize frustrations along the way—for both content creators and subject matter experts.
The Ideal Review Process
Ideally, a great content creation process would work like this:
- Project requestor and marketing lead agree on scope of work (SOW) and desired outcomes.
- A project brief is created that is aligned with brand guidelines.
- Content is created.
- Content goes through an approval process where inputs are gathered and vetted by a single individual who synthesizes those inputs, ensures they remain consistent with the original SOW and brief, and provides them to the content creators.
- Another round of review occurs and all is good.
Unfortunately, processes are usually not ideal. I’ve found that there can be numerous breakdowns that occur. These breakdowns can be not only frustrating, but can also detract from the original intent of the work. The result: watered-down content that fails to achieve desired goals, or meet the intent of the original SOW.
One of the Worst I’ve Experienced
When working with a client as a contractor (outsider) there’s not much I can do to impact the review process. Fortunately, most processes work just fine—some better than others.
One memorable experience that wasn’t fine, though, was with a very large company (which may have been part of the problem…) that had multiple people/processes involved in review and managed the review process in what I thought was an illogical and inefficient way.
Long story short: instead of having high level content reviews occur early in the process and copy editing reviews at the end of the process, their review process was reversed. They had an automated algorithmic process for SEO where I was provided with literally dozens of keywords and phrases that needed to be incorporated into the content.
The copy was initially reviewed for SEO and sent through copyediting. Then it went through a series of SME, internal client, and legal reviews. And guess what? By the time those reviews were done, and changes made, the copy had to be back through the SEO and editing reviews.
Why? Because the reviews tended to strip away the stringent SEO requirements and often introduce new copy errors. So, back to the drawing board and around and around we’d go.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
A Better Process
As the internal lead in creating content for several organizations early in my career I worked hard to come up with processes that minimized the back-and-forth and conflict that can sometimes occur. That required careful consideration and discussion, up front, about desired outcomes, audience, key message points—and the existence of detailed and well-documented brand guidelines.
It also required ongoing and clear communication and expectation management with internal clients. Time is money. Unnecessary time spent making edits upon edits, not because of errors but because of failure to pay attention up front, or being “wishy-washy” about requirements or key messages is costly, even in an electronic environment. The marketing departments I managed were often dealing with 30+ projects at a time; unnecessary effort and rework could definitely impact production costs and timelines.
What Gets Measured, Gets Managed
In my last corporate job, my department and I established an expectation of a two-proof maximum. Account coordinators were responsible for educating and setting expectations with their internal clients, emphasizing the importance of reading/approving copy before the design phase.
We tracked our results and were able to see which account coordinators and/or internal clients may have required more than two proofs. We could then debrief on those projects to come up with ideas on how to drive those numbers down. We also debriefed on projects that went through with just one round of proofing to help identify best practices.
Having a Single Point of Contact to Gather/Respond to Feedback
In one of the first jobs I had out of college, one of the things I observed when I would route brochures around for review was that I would get fewer comments/edits from internal account managers if, instead of sending a copy of the brochure to people individually I routed it, starting with the CEO. The more confident account managers might disagree with the CEO or append to the CEO’s comments, but most wouldn’t. CEO sign-off was good enough for them.
I also found that routing copy through reviewers instead of providing individual copies was a better way of avoiding conflicting feedback. It made it a more collaborative process than a series of individual inputs that might or might not align.
As a contractor now, I never want to be put in the position of reviewing individual inputs from multiple company representatives. I’m not in the best position to resolve any conflicting edits that may come through. So I always ask my client contact to receive feedback first and provide me with consolidated feedback from everyone on their team—I explain why that’s important and I’ve never had any pushback.
Efficiency Matters
I’ve always valued efficient processes and have always wanted to accomplish as much as possible in as little time as possible. That’s true even on the rare occasions when I take on hourly projects (most of my book is project- or retainer-based). Inefficiencies hurt. They hurt the budget. They hurt the process. They hurt the outcome.
Need help reviewing your content review processes? We can help.
About Us
Strategic Communications, LLC, works with B2B clients to help them achieve their goals through effective content marketing and management with both internal and external audiences. We work with clients to plan, create and publish high-quality, unique content. Whether on- or offline, or both, we’ll help you achieve desired results at reasonable rates.
In addition to content creation we specialize in helping B2B clients raise awareness and drive website traffic through a strong LinkedIn and X presence.
(Strategic Communications is certified as a Woman-Owned Business Enterprise through the Wisconsin Department of Administration.)
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Tags: client input, client review process, content marketing, editing, proofreading, review processes, SEO, SEO review, slave to SEO