When your marketing team is small, it’s easy to move articles through your content marketing pipeline. An idea becomes a draft, which gets revised and then published. One or two people can easily oversee all of the preparation, production, and publication that helps you build a blog.



But as a team grows, it runs into constraints that didn’t exist before when it was small. Simply knowing who’s working on what and when is hard when more people are working on more things.



Sharing information and communicating about the different steps of production are key for creating great content. The right tools can ensure that you have a system that scales even when your team is still small. Setting up the right system early means you’ll be equipped to deal with the complexity that comes with a bigger team.

How to painlessly scale your content process

The foundations of your content pipeline are the three P’s: preparation, production, and publication. But to produce a greater volume of content, you’ll need more people — and a system to manage the work that more people will do.



Expanding your content marketing pipeline involves three big challenges: incorporating different roles on your team, staying accountable for multiple deadlines, and working with external collaborators. You’ll be able to create better content if you can overcome each of these challenges, but each requires you to ramp up the way you share information.

Incorporating different roles on your team : When you’re a small team, one person can wear many hats. But as you expand, people will have different dedicated roles like researching, writing, and copyediting. Each person needs to know what they’re doing for many pieces, and each piece needs many people to do different things.

: When you’re a small team, one person can wear many hats. But as you expand, people will have different dedicated roles like researching, writing, and copyediting. Each person needs to know what they’re doing for many pieces, and each piece needs many people to do different things. Staying accountable for multiple deadlines : Multiple collaborators require multiple deadlines to check in on each step in the process. Each step needs to be completed on time to move an article through the pipeline and keep productivity high.

: Multiple collaborators require multiple deadlines to check in on each step in the process. Each step needs to be completed on time to move an article through the pipeline and keep productivity high. Working with external collaborators: Working with people outside of your team to create content can help you build a content strategy that is larger in scope. But you’ll still want to manage all of the work, both internal and external, in a single content pipeline. This way, you can execute a comprehensive strategy rather than wasting time building and re-building processes for one-off pieces.

With the right system in place, you can bring all of the moving pieces together to create a content process that scales.

Create specific roles

On a team of one or two people, each team member is involved in every step of the content creation process—from researching, to writing, to editing. When another person joins the team, the more experienced team members can teach them how to do all steps really well.



As more and more people join, however, it takes much more time and effort to teach everyone how to do a great job on every single aspect of creating a piece. Encouraging team members to focus on doing everything might mean they’ll do an okay job across the board. But if each team member focuses on one aspect of content creation, they can quickly get really good at that one thing. This means you’ll create better content faster and more reliably as the team grows.



Creating specialized roles for researchers, writers, and copyeditors can help you build a team with the structure to maintain quality and efficiency as you add more team members and create more content.

Create personal views and fields for roles

In Airtable, it’s easy for one person to manage their roles on several different projects: each person can create a personal view showing just the pieces specifically assigned to them. This helps each person understand what they’re responsible for, and how they should interact with the people taking on other roles.



For example, a writer can filter her production pipeline to see just the pieces assigned to her, and then view those pieces stacked by their stages of completion on a kanban board.

In this view, one team member can view all of their active projects as they move through different stages of completion in the pipeline.

It’s easy for people in different roles to work together when everyone knows who’s working on what. Team members can see how their independent contributions to a single article come together to move that piece through the production pipeline.

If you create linked record fields for the different content production roles, you can link each role for each article to the appropriate team member. This means that when you open up the record for an article, you can see everyone who’s collaborating on a piece and what specific roles they’re performing.



Set this up by creating a “People” table with a record for each team member. Then link the appropriate team member to the correct role field.

Each article record can have role fields for writers, researchers, and copyeditors. Each links to a team member’s personal record.

When you are growing your content team, you might start out with just a role field for the writer. Then you might add a copyeditor role and a researcher role. You can continue expanding your team and adding roles, and create a new role field for each one.

Keep multiple deadlines

To publish frequently and regularly, you need deadlines. When one person is working to complete an article, they can manage their own time to meet these important deadlines. But with more team members working on completing articles, time management becomes more complicated. If one person falls behind on their work, everyone else has to work to make up the time in order to keep up with a regular publishing schedule.



That’s why you need to have an editorial calendar. This establishes a system where different collaborators have transparent deadlines, and everyone knows all of the deadlines the team has to meet for a piece to publish on time.

When deadlines aren’t met, your publishing can become infrequent and erratic, making it hard for readers to find value in your blog as a reliable source of new and helpful material. To stay on schedule and keep posting frequency high, everyone needs their own deadlines and a convenient place to find them.

Create calendars and due dates

A calendar view can help you keep track of multiple deadlines to aid in weekly or monthly planning. Individuals can create calendar views to show the deadlines that are relevant to their stages of the pipeline.



These views can be filtered so that they only show a single individual’s deadlines, or they can include the entire team’s deadlines so that the team can figure out how to allocate assignments. A writer might find it useful to keep two deadline calendars: one with their own deadlines and another with research deadlines. Looking at these calendars, the writer could estimate that they’ll be drafting about one piece a week and plan accordingly.