Life, they say is about creating your path, making the journey your own, and defining success and happiness in your own words.
Now think of content workflow as creating a defined path for your business team to follow, making the journey theirs, so that they can move forward with the vision for your brand clearly defined in their minds as they go.
By creating a path and process for your team via a strong Content Marketing Automation you help empower your creatives and marketers to take ownership.
When your team is made to think like owners, they are always looking for better ways to get the work done.
Sure, every organization wants employees who are motivated by pure, unfettered love of the work and mission. But warm and fuzzy feelings don’t pay the bills or send the kids to college.
By asking your employees to think like owners, you’re instructing them to be ultra-conscious of the bottom line and their effect on it.
When they see their efforts are indeed having a positive impact, they instinctively want their bottom line to reflect that—just as any owner would.
Help create a culture of ownership in your team by clearly communicating the big picture, and current reality of the business. Let them know the direction of the brand’s journey.
Now with the path for the workplace clearly defined, there is the need to automate the workplace to save your business money by eliminating costly errors and streamlining your processes to help employees complete tasks more efficiently.
It might also allow you to save money on administrative labor since repetitive, time-consuming tasks will be done automatically.
Ten Steps To Content Marketing Automation Workflow
#1. Map Out Business Workflows
The first and most important step in this journey is to have a clear roadmap in mind where you are taking your workplace to.
Without clearly defined goals, you may end up creating more work for yourself by creating automated processes that require multiple manual processes at various touch points
Your goal is to find bottlenecks. Look for an area of content marketing that your marketing team is struggling with. This mapping out would help you evacuate the obstacle in your way.
This counts for something, it is important because you now have a clear picture of what you are aiming for in your workplace journey.
With that picture mentally created already, at the end of the road, you can tell if you have scored or missed the goal.
#2. Set Clear Process Management Goals
Goals give your workplace a sense of purpose and direction; you are more in tune with the big picture of your business, not just what is happening to it today.
Setting goals is an excellent way to learn more about your business, you find out what your top priorities are, how strategic you can be, and how to solve problems and overcome obstacles.
Goals keep you focused; you make decisions on what matters to your business development, your beliefs, and your values.
Those that set SMART goals as part of their chosen methodology are more likely to succeed. The goals are what focus and drive a team in its process-improvement efforts.
SMART goals set you up for success by making goals specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.
The SMART method helps pushes you further, gives you a sense of direction, and helps you organize and reach your goals.
#3. Think About content marketing automation workflows strategically
These days every business is switching to an automation workflow process to improve productivity & manage all the tasks under a single roof.
So, creating workflow strategically will be a value-addition to any business. Automation transforms manual tasks into digital processes that move businesses to focus on more important tasks while the rest is processed in the background.
Workflow automation help businesses route information, process documents, and verify the information for processing invoices, customer onboarding, accounts payable, banking, and contract management.
Business workflow automation aims to make processes more cost-efficient, streamlined, error-proof, and transparent.
With automated processes in place, organizations save time and ensure best practices are implemented to improve overall operational efficiency.
#4. Evaluate Workflow Automation’s Impact on Your Team
The thoughts of cutting down on labor costs and saving money by automating workflows will get any business owner excited however, while you are in automated mode in your business care must be taken with the team.
Carry members of the team along. If the new system is too complicated and way beyond them to learn, they may fall back to old methods or even dump your workplace to pitch with another.
So when automating the workplace, ensure to occasionally stop in your tracks to evaluate how well members of the team have acquainted themselves with the new system.
Not taking your team`s challenges into account might result in serious zero motivation on it and that is a problem you don’t want your business to run into as that will affect the overall growth of your brand.
#5. Identify the Right Processes to Automate
Nowadays, a lot of organizations feel the need to automate internal business processes for the sake of cutting down operational costs and improving productivity.
No doubt, automation is beneficial however; you must choose the right processes to automate as doing otherwise will make your workplace more slow, cumbersome, and unnecessarily difficult.
Automation gone sour can mean resources spent in vain and may discourage organizations from pursuing other automation projects for a long time, eventually putting them behind competitors who strategically embrace automation and make it work for them.
Identifying the right automation processes can be a challenge, but that shouldn’t discourage you from starting to implement automation in your organization. Just do it the right way and you will be thankful to yourself for doing so.
#6. Create Your Workflow Automation Strategy
A lot of workflow automation fails because they were conducted haphazardly without a defined strategy. Conducting content marketing workflow automation without a strategy will just be a game of whack-a-mole for your efforts.
Rank your tasks by importance. Next, determine which is the most valuable. Only then can you start automating workflows successfully.
Business processes are usually created holistically over time. As such, there are often a lot of areas that overlap, producing redundancies and inefficiencies.
These pitfalls, in turn, lead to unnecessary costs and delays and hamper the overall performance and success of an organization.
As your organization grows and evolves, it’s important to adapt operations in tandem and consistently evaluate workflows to ensure they reflect the best possible way for work to get done.
#7. Choose the Best Automation Platform for Your Needs
Content marketing workflow automation is great but it doesn’t mean that any platform will fit your business. No two business automation platforms are built equal, but picking the best one for you is easier when you know which features should be prioritized when trying to identify the best platform for your needs.
Picking the wrong automation platform could leave you paying money for a solution that doesn’t quite solve your business or customers` challenges.
#8. Use Low-Code to Automate Workflows
With low-code, you can build the software you need to automate faster. If you have developers on staff, they can use the platform to rapidly create solutions using minimal code.
And if you don’t, you can quickly train yourself and your staff on how to build these solutions. Because they use minimal code, most people can learn the platform within two weeks. And that’s coming from 0 programming knowledge.
Low-code is the future of custom application development. With the IT skill shortages out there and the slimming tech budgets, organizations need a quick and affordable solution that scales with businesses.
#9. Test run Automations before publishing
To be sure you are not sinking your resources; don’t be in a hurry to publish when you are at the finish line of your automation process
You should test run the automation to ensure it is effectively working.
#10. Monitor and Improve
To be sure what result your workflow automation efforts are bringing to your table, you need to monitor the process and evaluate the results.
Check if your business is climbing or falling into ruins as a result of the automation. Monitor and collect data on your news processes.
Importance of automated workflow
#1. High-value tasks: By relieving workers of mundane, low-value tasks, automation frees them to work on higher-value, non-automated tasks that only humans can handle.
#2. Savings: Increased productivity generates cost savings.
#3. Visibility: The workflow mapping that’s used to program automation software creates visibility into the processes being automated.
That gives an organization a top-down view of its workflows that can help it remove outdated or mundane tasks that drain time and resources.
#4. Communication: That increased visibility in turn can improve employee and interdepartmental communication and coordination, further enhancing efficiency and eliminating bottlenecks in the workplace.
#5. Customer service advantages: By automating responses to customer inquiries, organizations can improve customer service and customer satisfaction.
Of nearly 300 executives surveyed for the 2021 Global Customer Success Survey from software maker SmartKarrot, 84% said automation is important or extremely important for their customer service operations.
#6.Improved product quality: With human error eliminated, overall product quality improves.
#7. Performance tracking: By digitalizing the tasks within a workflow, automation can track the performance of the workflow from end to end. This enables an organization to easily review how well or badly its business journey is going.
Conclusion
In 2022, most businesses have geared up to embrace digital-first technologies that can play pivotal roles in transforming and automating business processes to help maximize return on investment (ROI).
Automating your company’s workflow can help boost performance by eliminating manual processing that would otherwise be expensive, slow, and prone to human error.
Using automation reduces the need to focus on repetitive tasks such as extracting data, validating documents, or moving data around.
Workflows should be automated whenever possible for numerous reasons, including to achieve faster operations and to increase the efficiency and accuracy of automated tasks.
