How to Build a Content Production Workflow (With Examples)

A content production workflow is the sequence of steps a piece of content moves through on its way from idea to published page: someone writes the brief, someone drafts, someone edits, someone signs off, and each handoff has an owner and a date. Most teams that publish regularly already have one, even if nobody's written it down: the same five or six steps repeat for every blog post, newsletter issue, or video.

Writing the steps down, with an owner and a date on each, is what lets a team publish on a schedule instead of whenever things happen to be ready. This post walks through the standard stages, shows two example workflows modeled on how real teams run them, and covers a way to manage the whole process in Slack, where the conversation about each piece usually lives anyway.

The stages of a content production workflow

The details vary by team and format, but most workflows are built from the same stages. Process is also where the returns are: the Content Marketing Institute's 2026 B2B research found that 97% of marketers now have a content strategy, and among teams whose results improved over the past year, the most commonly cited reason was strategy refinement (74%), ahead of any new technology. The thing being refined is, for most teams, exactly this sequence:

• Ideation and planning. Topics come from keyword research, sales and support questions, and what the audience keeps asking. They land in a backlog or an editorial calendar, and someone, usually a content lead, decides what gets made and when.
• Briefing. A short document that tells the writer what the piece is for: target reader, keyword, angle, required sections, examples to include, and what the reader should do at the end. A good brief saves a revision cycle later; teams that skip it usually pay for it during editing.
• Drafting. The writer, scriptwriter, or host produces the first version against the brief and a deadline.
• Editing. An editor checks structure, accuracy, and voice, then sends the draft back with comments or fixes it directly. Many teams run a second, lighter pass for SEO.
• Design. Header image, diagrams, screenshots, thumbnails — whatever the piece needs. Design can start before editing finishes if the structure is stable.
• Approval. Final sign-off from whoever owns the outcome: a marketing manager, a subject-matter expert, or a client. This is the stage that most often blows the schedule, because the approver tends to be the busiest person in the chain.
• Publishing. The piece goes into the CMS with its title, meta description, images, and internal links, and gets scheduled or pushed live.
• Distribution and repurposing. The newsletter mention, the social posts, the cut-down clips. Teams that plan this as a stage of the workflow get more out of each piece than teams that improvise it after publishing.

Roles map onto the stages: a content lead or strategist plans and briefs, a writer drafts, an editor reviews, a designer handles visuals, and an approver signs off. On a three-person team one person covers several of these; the workflow stays the same, there are just fewer handoffs.

Shopify's guide to content workflows draws a useful line between task-based and status-based workflows. Task-based workflows track every individual step ("submit draft to editor"); status-based ones track which stage a piece is in ("In editing"). Task-based suits teams that need explicit handoffs and accountability per step. Status-based suits small, experienced teams who'll sort out the handoffs themselves.

Two example workflows

A marketing agency producing client blog content

Say an agency publishes four posts a month for each client. A workable per-post workflow looks like this:

1. The account manager writes the brief from the agreed content calendar and confirms the angle with the client (day 1).
2. The writer drafts (days 2–5).
3. The editor does a structural and voice pass and returns it to the writer for fixes (days 6–7).
4. The draft goes to the client for approval, with three business days allowed — client review is reliably the slowest step, so the schedule has to absorb it (days 8–10).
5. The designer produces the header image and any diagrams while approval is pending (days 8–10).
6. The agency publishes in the client's CMS and sends the link (day 11).
7. Social copy goes to the client's channels, and the post gets logged in the monthly report (day 12).

Multiply that by six clients and the coordination becomes most of the job, which is why agencies tend to formalize this earlier than in-house teams do. There's more on the broader setup in this guide to project management for agencies in Slack, and the same logic applies at the start of an engagement — covered in this post on agency client onboarding in Slack.

An in-house team running a weekly newsletter

A two- or three-person team sending a newsletter every Tuesday runs a tighter loop:

1. Thursday: the content lead picks the stories and writes a skeleton.
2. Friday: the draft is done, with subject-line options.
3. Monday morning: edit pass and link check.
4. Monday afternoon: the marketing manager reads the final version and approves the send.
5. Tuesday, 9 a.m.: the issue goes out.
6. Wednesday: the best-performing story gets repurposed into a LinkedIn post.

A video pipeline works the same way with different stage names — script, shoot, edit, thumbnail, publish, clip — and usually a longer drafting stage. In every variant, the workflow only holds if each step has one owner and one date.

Where teams run these workflows

The classic setup is a board in a project management tool — Trello, Asana, or Notion — with a column per stage and a card per piece, plus a calendar view for publish dates. That works well, especially at higher volume, and it's what most content-operations guides assume. A spreadsheet editorial calendar does the job at one or two pieces a week.

The friction with any of these is that the conversation about each piece — brief questions, draft feedback, "can we push this to Thursday?" — happens in Slack, while the board lives somewhere else, so updating the board to match the conversation is a manual step someone has to remember. Teams that already coordinate in Slack often find it simpler to run the workflow there too, instead of maintaining a second surface.

Running a content production workflow in Slack

The structure that works: one channel per content stream (or per client, for an agency), and one thread per piece. The thread starts when the piece enters the calendar and collects everything — the brief, the draft link, feedback, the approval. Slack's threads exist for exactly this kind of contained discussion, and a thread per post keeps six in-flight pieces from interleaving in the channel.

The workflow itself runs as a checklist deployed into each thread. Slack's own Lists can hold a simple one (this guide to Slack Lists and checklists covers what they handle and where they run out), but Lists don't do reusable templates with per-step assignees and relative dates. That's what Chaser adds: you build the checklist once, with each step assigned to a person and dated relative to the publish date ("draft due 5 days before"), then deploy it into the thread with one command whenever a new piece starts. Chaser reminds each assignee as their step comes due and follows up if a step goes overdue, which takes the "where's the draft?" messages out of the editor's week. Lists ship free with Slack; Chaser is a paid app, priced per user — details are on the pricing page.

Placeholders make the template generic: include a {Post title} variable and "Edit pass" becomes "Edit pass — Q3 churn guide" the moment you deploy it. There's a fuller walkthrough of building these in this guide to Chaser templates in Slack, and the broader picture of tracking work this way in this guide to task management in Slack.

A sample checklist for one blog post

A reasonable default for a standard post, with every date set relative to the publish date:

Adjust the offsets to your reality: agencies add a client-approval step with three business days, video teams stretch the gap between brief and draft. The point of relative dates is that one decision — the publish date — sets every step's deadline at deploy time.

Final thoughts

A content production workflow doesn't need to be elaborate: stages, owners, dates, written down somewhere the team actually looks. The teams that publish consistently are running some version of the checklist above, whatever tool it lives in. If your team's coordination already happens in Slack, running the checklist there — is the version with the least overhead to maintain.

You can try Chaser for free and see how it fits the way your team already works in Slack. Get started and add Chaser to Slack, for free.