My Content Production Workflow
Especially for image and video content.
Last month, I started working on making my content more diverse, but I didn’t want to spend more time creating it. So I broke down the workflow for adding video content, simplifying the production process into the simplest steps that could be batch-processed, while also gradually improving quality through small actions. I share the basic structure of this workflow in this article.
The Complete Content Workflow
I divide the complete content creation workflow into 5 parts:
Strategy: This part is vision-driven. It’s about positioning: Who are the audience? What is the core message, tone and scenarios? How do channels differ in purpose and presentation? What is the ratio of content for different purposes and formats?
Planning: This part is a result-oriented, linear presentation with tasks getting clearer from far to near. It includes the main storyline for the coming year, the major milestones, the production progress and status of content within the next 2 months, etc.
Production: An efficiency-driven, non-linear manufacturing process. This is the focus of this article.
Scheduling: Automated multi-platform review and publishing steps, usually assisted by tools.
After-posting: Interaction, logging, and analyzing data to serve as a reference for adjusting other stages.
And here’s the production part.
The Workflow of Content Production
The production stage pursues efficiency while ensuring quality. I divide the key to improving efficiency into two points: first breaking down most actions through meticulous process decomposition so they are independent and simple enough to be processed in batches; then removing redundant actions to minimize waste during execution.
Let’s start with the decomposition of production materials and steps.
1. Breakdown of Content Assets Requirements (An Example)
Define the Types of Your General Content
Break down the major scene types for your content. For example, social media content types fall into these categories: product showcases, product origins, and the stories of the people making the products. Product showcases can fall into a few types: white background or in-context; with or without people in the scene; showing it yourself or having others showcase it.
Document Creative Reference by Categories
This part is about maintaining some files for your inspiration.
Structural Creativity: Story structure, hook, plot, copywriting, etc.
Perceptual Creativity:
Visual: Transitions, layout, motion design, storyboards, fonts, story anchors...
Auditory: Sound effects, music, voiceover narration...
Style & Vibe
Build An Asset Library Based on Themes and Media
Once the routine content and creative types are clear, a portion of the assets can be prepared in batches. Take creating a project process story as an example, the entire cycle is divided into several parts: creative inspiration, the production process, and the final result showcase. The inspiration shots are sketches and references, while the process involves capturing shots of specific steps. You can design a few fixed camera positions: pushing in from different directions, close-ups, with people, or with hands and more. Each shot can have a set duration, so there’s no need to re-plan every single time.
Assets can be divided by different mediums: photos, videos, graphics, fonts.
2. Breakdown of the Production Phase
All production consists of briefing, asset preparation, composition, and intermediate revisions.
With the above accumulation of assets and by tracking the time required for each action, whether you are making a brief or a finished deliverable, you can estimate the time and scope of resources needed to make trade-offs more easily.
For example, hand-crafting a mini animation takes 2 hours, whereas as long as you collect photos daily, making a short beat-synced video takes less than 10 minutes. Both serve to appeal to the algorithm and add a bit of fun to the feed, making the beat-synced video is much more cost-effective than the short animation.
With this level of certainty in production, the ambiguity in planning and scheduling is also reduced. It also leaves flexibility for ad-hoc content creation, allowing you to jump on trends when relevant.
3. Set A Limit to Actions
Once the production process is broken down, you can remove the redundant actions and set limit to all the steps.
The amount of assets for your content volume is a multiplication math problem. When you break down the entire process to a level that suits you, the number of assets needed for each sub-type is actually not that large. You don’t need to film for many hours. For instance, with 2 content frameworks, 3 medium formats (images/text, template videos, short videos), 2 different products, and 5 scenes, you can combine them into 2*3*2*5 = 60 pieces of content.
Just start with a combination that’s easiest for you to get the ball rolling. Then choose some elements that can be improved a little bit the next time.
Summary
Content production isn’t about completing one finished piece after another in a sequence. It’s more like an inventory system for storing and consuming materials and resources: some materials and resources are crucial for the quality of the final product and need more attention, some are fixed and don’t require frequent changes, and some things aren’t worth stockpiling too much (like inspiration). Having this overall perspective can help reduce chaos, improve efficiency, and a structured process can also save creators time and mental energy.
At the end of the day, tasks that are mostly about execution become a lot less ambiguous and overwhelming if you just spend a little brainpower breaking them down beforehand. After that, you’ll realize there aren’t actually that many things you absolutely have to do—or do by yourself—so you can just keep your peace and stay chill.
