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May 7, 2025
Having a content review process in place, one that you return to periodically, means that your content stays accurate, consistent with your brand, and in alignment with your marketing objectives.
You likely already have a content workflow. As any seasoned marketing manager will tell you, developing a new workflow that clarifies the review and approval process will bring more value from existing work, but also guide content creation in the future.
You guessed it: the two processes feed into each other and optimize your use of resources over time.
A content review involves assessing and examining content in order to determine whether it delivers on performance goals. This means deciding whether each individual piece needs to be tweaked, replaced, or entirely deleted. The content that stays is analyzed for clarity, precision, engagement, and any number of criteria determined by the content team.
In a nutshell, a strong content review process helps bring in more revenue. Some of the potential of any blog post, sales page, or YouTube video can be lost if it hasn’t been updated for a long time. Often, small tweaks rather than a complete overhaul can refresh the performance of an individual piece.
Content reviewers also prioritize quality, consistency, and accuracy. You can have a rock-solid approval process before publishing, but contextual information changes all the time.
Miruna Dragomir, CMO @ Planable
For example, new scientific discoveries or legal changes can influence the information included, even if a piece was accurate at the time of publishing. So can evolving editorial guidelines. All in all, it’s about how already-published content stacks up to the updated criteria of the present moment.
Whether you’re developing a review and approval process for regular publishing or for a periodic alignment with larger goals, a thorough one can:
Criteria for optimization can change and your brand priorities can shift. Multiple reviewers with a keen eye for your organization’s vision can give an informed green light.
I’ll be honest with you: content review can be time-consuming. File sharing issues pop up all the time, especially if different people have access to different materials. Feedback from various sources can contradict itself, or run in a never-ending loop.
There can be misalignments on:
But it doesn’t have to be this way. If you establish a clear workflow and get the content team on board, every review can be smoother than the last.
Post draft with team feedback and copy suggestion
Planable can help content reviewers stay organized and keep feedback from multiple stakeholders. It’s built for collaboration and approval, so content stays organized every step of the way. You can choose between four types of approvals: none, optional, mandatory, and multi-level.
Then you can easily see every team member involved, when it’s their turn to contribute, and when that final approval has rolled in. A solid approval workflow lets subject matter experts focus on insightful tweaks over admin and ultimately brings better review outcomes.
Here’s how to make sure your content serves your brand, audience, and team. High-quality content is adaptable to changing criteria, so these steps help you sequence all the micro-decisions that make adaptation effective.
Configuring multi-level content approval flow
Every team member involved needs to know what their contribution will be, when they’re expected to chime in, and how their work relates to the work of others. This might look different in smaller organizations (as in, one person can fulfill several roles), but you’re still likely to be working but you’re still likely to be working with people who:
Assign clear tasks to each person, make sure they’re in a logical sequence, and look out for bottlenecks. To streamline the process further, make expectations super-clear at every step.
For this purpose, benchmarks are your friends. Provide everyone with top-tier examples of similar work and you’ll ensure consistency across multiple content initiatives.
You likely use a set of brand guidelines shared with creatives of all stripes that work for your brand, or a house style guide that’s sent to every writer. These docs need to be mirrored by a version developed especially for content review.
Clear checklists delineate each step of the review process and help you maintain consistency when working with different editors, across multiple platforms, during different eras of brand development.
As usual, you should consider a piece of content from the outside in. Your review guidelines can include steps like:
No matter what size your team is, make sure everyone involved with your content output has access to these guidelines.
The more transparent your workflow, the less time your team spends on clarifying misunderstandings and triple-checking the same things. Here’s how to map it out:
Each one will likely correspond to each team member we discussed in the first section above.
Consider the best order for people to chime in, depending on their input and role on the team. If clients are involved too, figure out when to loop them in.
In theory, you could edit the same piece for weeks. Clear standards bring people on the same page as to which piece of content is ready to move to the next stage.
With all your ducks in a row, factor in bandwidth and capacity for each person involved. Once you’ve got a due date for each stage, the review process becomes predictable and effective.
Content collaboration tools are essential for monitoring content creation, from beginning to end. A strategy is much easier to implement when you plan, develop, approve, and publish everything from the same platform. Version history plus a shared media library also come in handy.
Planable comes with plenty of features specifically tailored for improved collaboration during the review process. Centralized feedback is the name of the game.
Team members can leave comments and suggestions on any piece of content, and the resolve option lets every note become a task that’s easily marked as completed.
Post draft with team feedback and copy suggestion
And if you gave clients access to the workspace for quick feedback, you can also create internal comments or posts, visible only to your team.
Internal post setting enabled with cocktail teaser preview
Classics like “make it pop” or “make it punchier” don’t do much in terms of guidance. Feedback needs to be clear, specific, and actionable. Your review guidelines can also include benchmarks and feedback examples so that everything flows seamlessly across teams and the review process.
In addition to precise edits, dedicate some time to making sure the atmosphere allows for open discussion and collaboration. Team members need to be able to ask questions even if they feel a little silly or they’re new to the team.
When feedback moves freely, not just downwards based on seniority, people feel like their contributions are valued. This sense of ease and safety is then reflected in the quality of the content.
An efficient content review and approval process doesn’t just happen, it’s built step by step. Here are four best practices to keep your workflow organized and consistent.
To build a reliable content review and approval process, start by making your workflow crystal clear.
It’s essential to know, for example, who gives the final green light and who’s only in the loop for general updates.
User permissions managed in Planable workspace
Bottlenecks often pop up when content review isn’t an established process yet, or when specific team members have too much on their plate. But when roles and expectations are transparent (plus accessible to the whole team), you can make quick adjustments without the whole operation coming to a standstill.
Shift a deadline, reassign a task, reprioritize specific materials. Tweaks are easier to make if a procedure is already in place.
Speaking of bottlenecks and people having too much on their plates, once you have the content review workflow sequence, the deadlines you assign in order to turn it into a timeline need to be very realistic. Consider the capacity of each team member, how new they are to the team, and how well-acquainted with brand guidelines.
But also leave a little wiggle room depending on how complex your content is. Think of complexity in terms of subject matter, but also in terms of size and format. Implementing feedback on a video is likely to take longer than adjusting a blog post heading.
Either way, make accommodations when necessary, double-check due dates with your team, and you’re good to go.
A good brand manual is your number one helper when it comes to ensuring consistency. Various formats, platforms, and campaigns can build on brand pillars in a way that intersects naturally with your audience’s interests and stays coherent throughout. Brand guidelines ensure that a team, however large, can act as one.
Categorizing posts with labels in Planable
Planable makes it easier than ever to create consistent content. You can:
Obviously, one way to make the review process even smoother is to work with content that already adheres to brand and style guidelines. Give content creators clear, detailed, well-written briefs.
Make sure to:
When creators have a clearly defined framework to start from, their drafts are more consistent, and time spent editing goes down. Each review stage fine-tunes their writing even further, with no need to restart the whole process by majorly reorganizing the whole structure of a piece.
If guidelines and expectations are clarified from beginning to end, everyone spends more time doing what they do best, and the content truly shines.
Review processes are crucial for making sure content delivers on marketing goals, stays current, and best serves its target audience. Your personal definition of “good content” is always expanding. The more your work reflects this, the better it performs.
Create a customized, well-structured content review process, and you’ll improve content quality and consistency in a way that serves your brand long-term. Try Planable and see how an efficient content management tool can spruce up your process.
Irina is a freelance senior copywriter & content writer with an advertising agency background. If she’s not rummaging for good synonyms, she’s probably watching a sitcom or listening to radio dramas with plucky amateur detectives. She loves collage, doing crosswords on paper and shazamming the birds outside her window.
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