Workflow Setup

Introduction

Every content team has its own way of working. That’s why we have introduced workflows that you can adapt to your specific operations.

Workflows are essentially a sequence of consecutive steps where each step can contain a set of tasks.

This is an example of a workflow with 4 steps:

You can keep your workflows simple, just like the example above, or you can create more complex flows when that is required.

In this article we will show you how you can manage your workflows.

Navigate to workflow settings

In ContentPlanner you can manage your workflows from within the project settings.

Navigate to your project settings by clicking on the gear icon located in the upper right corner of your project dashboard:

Remark: you can always go to your project dashboard by clicking on the colored bar on top with the name of your project.

You will see multiple tabs in your project settings. Now, select the tab named ‘Workflows’:

Initially, you will see one workflow listed: Default Workflow. Every new project will have this workflow by default. 

It’s entirely up to you whether you keep or change this workflow. You can also create extra workflows for different types of content. Creating a YouTube video requires, for instance, another workflow then creating a blog post.

Default workflow

Open the default workflow by clicking on the ‘pen’ icon (label ‘1’ in the previous screenshot):

You will see two sections on the workflow screen:

1. Workflow Info: these are general settings
2. Workflow Steps: all the steps that makeup this workflow

Let’s have a more detailed look at each of these sections.

Workflow Info

When you press the ‘pen’ button of the ‘Workflow Info’ section (label ‘1’ in the previous screenshot), you get:

You can edit the name and the description of the workflow.

And you can also set the scope for this workflow. Initially, it has the configuration:

• All channels
• All content types

Meaning that when you create new content topics (for any channel and content type), then ContentPlanner will automatically use this workflow.

Imagine that you want to use another workflow for your YouTube channel content, then you create a new workflow where you set the channels property to YouTube.

This is a flexible mechanism that allows you to create different workflows based on the channel and the content type.

Workflow Steps

The default workflow has four steps:

• Idea
• Draft
• Scheduled
• Published

You can see these four steps in the ‘Workflow Steps’ section:

You can change this workflow by pressing the ‘pen’ button in the upper right corner (label ‘1’ in the image above):

Now you can perform different actions:

1. Edit a workflow step: change the name or add a description
2. Add a new step to the workflow
3. Add tasks to a workflow step

You can also change the order of the steps by using drag & drop.

This is for instance the screen you get when clicking on an existing step (one of the colored bars, see label ‘1’ above):

Workflow tasks

Each workflow step can contain one or more tasks that you can assign to team members. If you press the ‘Add task’ button inside a workflow step (see label ‘3’ of the workflow steps section), you will see:

Here we create a task ‘Keyword research’ assigned to Frank. This is not yet an actual task, but more a task template. Meaning that this task will be scheduled when new content topics are created using this workflow.

Summary

ContentPlanner comes with a default workflow. A workflow is basically a sequence of steps that your content has to go through during the creation process.

You can:

• change the default workflow or you can create extra workflows for different types of content.
• assign a list of tasks to each of the workflow steps

So, make sure you configure the ContentPlanner workflows to the way your team works!