How to provide constructive feedback to writers asking for revisions

It is essential to create quality content in order to build your brand and attract key audience members. However, it can be difficult. Outsourcing your content creation might be your best option.

Your brand and reputation are important to your business. You need to be 100% satisfied with the content before you click publish to make sure you are making a good first impression on potential customers.

How can you help your team create unique, consistent content? Your writers will benefit from your suggestions and feedback.

Farmers Insurance's slogan "We know a lot because we've seen many things" is familiar to you. Our writers are sort of the Farmers of content marketing. This is what we do every day.

Our top writers were asked for their tips and tricks in order to facilitate great feedback and communication during editing. This is their best advice, all in one place.

Writing quality content is a priority for businesses that want to be ahead of the rest, with 70% of marketers investing into content marketing. This is something you should do more of. This is a win-win situation for everyone.

Are you ready to find out more? Let's get started.

The Key Takeaways:

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  Writing feedback is a way to improve the quality of your content.
  
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  Develop a strong working relationship by giving constructive feedback to writers.
  
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  Make and update a style manual for your writers so they can follow brand consistency.
  

What is the importance of giving feedback to your team?

To improve the performance of your team, feedback is an important part of any leader’s skill set. Constructive feedback can help you create a better environment, increase productivity, and achieve better business results.

To build a stronger relationship with your customers, your content should be written to address their needs and pain points.

You can help improve the content throughout the project by giving feedback to the developers. This will allow you to enhance your writing skills. MIG starts with testing articles. These are our feedback punching bags.

Your brand can get more content quickly from freelance writers, as 53% of businesses outsource their writing.

Source: Agility PR

These are just a few reasons to give feedback in writing:

• Keep the project on track, and make sure you meet all deadlines
• Avoid major, repeatable mistakes
• Establish healthy relationships with your writers
• Encourage others to achieve better results and professional growth
• You can save your company money by not having to pay for additional revisions
• Increase your market position and thought leadership
• Develop valuable customer relationships

You can keep your writers motivated by providing constructive feedback if you follow a consistent process. This will help your business grow.

Teach your writing style and tone

Give your writers proper guidelines, beyond the Chicago Manual of Style or the Associated Press Stylebook, before you give feedback.

Although you might be eager to give a new assignment off to your writer but you also like examples of style, it allows your writers to refer back to these materials when they have a question and not to you for every detail.

Are you looking for CTAs at each blog's end? What industry terminology is it? What are your buyer personas What is your preferred subheading language? All of these questions can be answered in your stylebook.

Our process; we brief each client with documents. We ask the right questions so that you don't have too many to think about. This is just one benefit of outsourcing content marketing. Without having to work a day, you can gain professional knowledge. This is combined with the extensive research done by our writers, and you have a solid foundation before any content can be written.

These are some additional suggestions for what you should include.

• With a list of benefits that each person can enjoy, target audience
• Information about products and companies with precise details
• If you would like them to be referenced, please provide competitive information
• Capitalization, punctuation and grammar preferences (the Oxford Comma Rule is a controversial subject that's definitely worth mentioning!)
• Tone and voice are key to how your brand resonates.

Your style guidelines can be included with every project assignment brief to ensure that your writers are clear about your expectations and standards. These can be provided in either an e-book PDF or a Google Doc format so that your writers can save it on their computer. Google Docs can be updated at any time, which allows you to change your goals without affecting your work.

Five Ways to Make Your Writing Team Successful

Did you know that 31% of businesses rate the content they publish as successful? Feedback is the key.

Your content idea may be brilliant, but if your feedback is not quality, the project will likely fail. While I know they would love to, they can't read your mind. Sometimes, they need to know about your industry knowledge.

Source: Content Marketing Institute

Let's take a look at some key ways to provide actionable feedback to your writers that will lead to better content.

1. Comment on the Good Qualities of Your Writer

Recent research shows that 44% of people will dissociate if they receive more negative feedback than what they deserve. Negative feedback is not something that anyone likes. So how do you avoid feeling fatigue?

Always begin the feedback loop by commenting about what the writer did well. The writer will be more motivated if you discuss the content as it is. It also helps to highlight what's working and what's not. This will help you better understand your expectations. You can focus more on industry knowledge or search engine optimization if you are having trouble finding positive feedback.

To be able to communicate well with your writer, it takes effort on both sides. Don't get discouraged at the beginning. You and your style must blend together. To do that, constructive feedback is the only way.

2. Partner with your Legal and Cross-Functional Partners

You may need to involve legal and other cross-functional stakeholders depending on the industry. This will make the process more efficient and prevent frustrated writers.

After everyone is involved, you'll be able more clearly define the objectives, features, and what to avoid in your project guidelines.

Your legal and cross-functional teams should review content at the end of the process, not in the middle. This allows the writer to make quick edits and helps you manage time for the stakeholder.

These best practices will make your legal reviews run more smoothly right from the beginning.

• Include any industry knowledge, disclaimers, or regulations that legal may request in the initial project brief. This will ensure your writer is aware of the immediate requirements.
• You might consider creating content that doesn't require a legal review, such as behind-the scenes or how-to guides.
• So that your writer isn't left guessing when they will get the final revision rounds, give your stakeholders a process for providing feedback.

3. In your revision requests, include specific edits

If you are asking for content changes or feedback, be sure to give examples of possible solutions. If your writer continues to use sentence case in their headers, but your guidelines state title case, please comment on it and tell them how to format the text.

Your willingness to provide context to writers shows you are interested in a successful final draft. This helps the writer to be better prepared for future articles. Your future self will be better if you make the revisions and give feedback right away.

Ask your writer questions and give feedback. Asking questions can help the writer to clarify a section or expand their capabilities.

One example would be "Should the SEO services section be replaced with SEO blog writing services?" This is more relevant to our industry and will allow the reader to understand what we do. In this case, the feedback should make the writer feel like they have the right tools to improve the piece. This gives you more context about the work you do and is better feedback.

4. Communication channels should be kept open

When giving feedback to writers, everyone has their own style. Your team may find it hard to understand your content expectations if you make a quick comment. Consider holding regular, in-person or virtual meetings to give feedback in real time.

You can meet with your team to discuss a piece of content you are unsure about, and to talk about the changes you would like to see.

This is why our team has an onboarding procedure in place. It allows for open communication and helps to ensure that we are able to work out any kinks.

5. If you see them, mention recurring mistakes

Marketers may prefer to handle everything themselves than receive feedback. It's possible to be more efficient, but it can lead to writer failure. They won't learn the right tone or structure you want. Your writer will be left scratching their heads if you fail to point out a recurring mistake and then fix it ten times later.

You must be open with your writer from the beginning if you want them to listen to you and trust you. You can also break bad habits and ensure that your writer adheres to your style guide.

Good feedback is key to creating rockstar content

You can stimulate professional growth by providing feedback to your team, or to a content marketing agency. This will allow you create high-quality content that converts.

Although constructive feedback can feel uncomfortable at first it is the best way for your customers to be satisfied with the final product and to reduce the amount of work needed in the future. Are you ready to create engaging content for your business's website? Marketing Insider Group is ready to help you get started.

We'd like to share five additional best practices for giving feedback and asking for content revisions. These are the 5 most common mistakes that have been found that can significantly reduce time and efficiency.

1. Feedback at the Right Time

Timing is key to providing effective feedback. Everybody knows that there is a risk in reviewing work too early in the creative process. This can lead to mistakes and not enough time for corrections. This is obvious. It is a common mistake to make in the creative process, however.

As a stakeholder you need to ensure that the content you are responsible for meets its requirements. This often means checking in with your content creators often and early. Reviewing too soon can disrupt the creative process and cause disruption to the cohesion needed for compelling content.

It is better to communicate your expectations upfront and provide feedback on rough versions of the content than to micromanage its creation. You'll be wasting time on content you could be spending it elsewhere.

2. Send Your Feedback to Context

It will be a time-saver to give feedback on a piece of content once it is available for review. It will yield the same vague feedback if you ask vague questions such as "what do your thoughts?" and "how can this be improved?" Instead, be specific about the feedback you are seeking (and those you aren't).

Let's suppose your team is creating a video testimonial and you would like to get feedback on the first version. You can let your reviewers know that you only want feedback on the story of the video and not the audio mixing. This will ensure that you don't get any requests for work that isn't necessary.

Contextualizing feedback requests instead allows reviewers to concentrate on the actual needs of reviewing and allows for better quality input.

3. Get actionable feedback

Reviewing content is not a way to highlight flaws or shortcomings. It's meant to improve it. Excellent feedback should always offer practical suggestions.

To ensure that your feedback is useful and actionable, make sure it is specific to the issue you are addressing before the content can move on to the next stage. Ask yourself why you don't like it and what you would do differently.

If you are proposing ways to move forward, ensure that your suggestions remain within the original scope. It's not fair to complain about something that was left out in the creative brief or because of limited resources.

You might reconsider giving your feedback if it doesn't lead to a solution that can take place within the required time frame.

4. Separate the Approval and Review Process

It is important to distinguish between requesting feedback and requesting approval. This is one of the best ways to learn healthy reviewing habits.

Not everyone who has to approve can do so. And not everyone who does need to review should be involved in the initial stages of the process. These paths can lead to a mess that is contrary to all the best practices we have discussed.

Instead, limit the review to the stages of the creative process. Only once the project is approved can the final stakeholders be invited to voice their opinions.

Reviewing content should not be about editing and shaping it; approvals should focus on whether the content is suitable for publication (or any other stage).

5. Reduce the number of stakeholders

You have been following best practices and received valuable feedback which has helped you get to the final approval stage. At this stage, you don't need to get approvals from six stakeholders. You won't need to separate your reviewing and approval processes if you have done so thoughtfully.

Instead of creating a committee of content gatekeepers to oversee the process, you might consider including some stakeholders early on. After you have completed the copy, let the legal department and brand team chime into the discussion. It will be better prepared by the time it reaches the approvals required for publication. They will be more aware and likely to say yes. There is less time for dialogue that should have occurred earlier in the feedback process.

These best practices can help you improve your approval and review efficiency regardless of the type of content that you create.