Digital marketing involves a great deal of work. From writing blog posts, sending emails, posting on social media, recording podcasts, and publishing all these on schedule; there are a lot of tasks that you and your team need to do daily to keep your business running.
These tasks can be repetitive, time-consuming, and overwhelming if not well streamlined. And that’s where a workflow comes in.
Why creating a workflow is great for your business
A workflow is a step-by-step sequence of all the tasks needed to complete a specific job. A well-done workflow will help you streamline, organize, and automate those repeatable everyday tasks to improve efficiency.
When done properly, a workflow will help you delegate repetitive tasks to your team members so that you can free your time to focus on your business strategy and growth.
Steps to create a workflow
Creating a workflow sounds easy, but it can be difficult to know where to begin, especially if you are developing your first workflow. That’s because it requires you to see the entire process from end to end, while paying attention to every minor detail that goes into that process.
Well, here are the steps that I follow when creating a workflow in my business:
Step 1: Mapping the process
This is a lot like creating a rough draft of your workflow. What are the basic steps in your process? Just put down all the steps involved in a specific task on as many sticky notes, and place them on a wall, or on your working space.
Now, some steps might not be in the correct order and that’s okay. Just try to capture as much of the process on the sticky notes. Putting the steps down like this will help you realize that maybe some of them are unnecessary, or that there are additional steps that you hadn’t thought of as actual steps, but they are essential.
Step 2: Design for the 80%
Even for the most simple of processes, there are a lot of what ifs and should haves and a myriad of other details that go into each step. In this step, you don’t need to go into every tiny detail to produce a foolproof workflow process. The idea here is to get the workflow done. So, aim for 80% and quickly get the first version of the workflow done.
Step 3: Write it down
The next step is documenting the workflow and including all the details in every step. Remember to write simply and clearly, as if you were writing instructions to be followed by someone who has not done that task before. The language should be simple and unambiguous so that anyone can follow the workflow.
Step 4: Get feedback
Next, take the written-down workflow of the process and give it to someone else to go through the steps and give feedback. Let them try to follow the instructions and report back to you if some details are unclear or some steps are incorrect. This feedback will help you refine the workflow and continuously improve the process.
Step 5: Iterate. Iterate. Iterate.
The final step of creating your workflow is iteration. Using the feedback you get from testing the workflow, you need to continuously redesign and optimize the workflow process. This way, your workflow gets better and more efficient over time.
Creating a workflow might feel like an additional job on top of what you already have on your plate. But it is a great way to improve efficiency by delegating repetitive tasks, freeing you to do more with your time.