Hidden costs within your content operations

When picking the tools to produce blogs, articles and posts each day, it’s sensible to go with popular tools that your colleagues may already be familiar with.

At that point, best practices are less important than getting on top of your workfload. And since managing writers and editing are both time consuming anyway, it’s easier to go with what works and figure out improvements at a later date.

But once you’ve established a workflow, it actually tends to take a big event to even think about changing the way your team does its thing.

These prompts do come along every now and then and it might even be what brought you here.

For instance, you might be moving to a new CMS. Or perhaps a new hire wants to bring a new way of working with them. And these shifts open the door to asking “what else can we improve as part of this change?”.

Because habits are sticky, and once you’ve identified inefficiencies it’s impossible not to unsee them.

These are good moments to assess if your workflow is supporting your staff, rather than becoming the work that they dread as part of their jobs.

Consider this

When committing to a specific workflow process, remember that every contributor to that workflow needs to be managed so that they understand at all times how the team functions together.

Now take a moment to recall how often you actually hear about editorial operations:

And we’re not talking about managing people to do their jobs, like writing excellent articles or coming up with assignments that are going to keep your audience engaged. We’re talking about operations management. Specifically: the level to which everyone on your team is capable of doing their best work, with the tools that you’re asking them to use.

If you or your colleagues have Slacked those words recently then you know what we’re talking about.

For small teams working in the same office, the burden of operational management can be almost invisible. But distance (remote working), scaling (onboarding new people) and turnover (managing lapsed contributors) make these costs higher and therefore more visible.

That’s often when people find Camayak: because they’re motivated to evaluate how much effort it takes for their editorial staff to manage repetitive ’workflow work’ that became part of their job spec by accident.

If these challenges genuinely aren’t a big deal for your team, then adopting a system like Camayak sounds like overkill. It’s really when a team is either looking to scale or make themselves more robust in the face of change, that content managers want to know three things:

Quantifying the costs of inefficient workflow

Because content workflow is mostly a behind-the-scenes mix of free tools and discreet skills, nobody complains that they can’t list ‘copy and pasting’ on their resume.

But compared to the combination of apps like Airtable, Trello and Google Docs, Camayak dramatically reduces the time spent clarifying confusion around assignments going through your workflows.

And there’s no magic to it. It simply cuts down on your editors’ manual effort by bundling notifications, automating inboxes and handling key functions like publishing content to your CMS, paying writers and displaying insights in easy-to-understand dashboards.

If you’re ready to find out if Camayak could be a good fit for your team, check out some of our use cases.