How to Organize Your Content Marketing Repurposing Workflow Using SmartSuite

If you are someone who's creating content either to market your business or as your business or your side hustle, you understand how complicated it can be to organize yourself and your thoughts around a piece of content and then get that piece of content distributed in all the different repurposing steps that you need to include in your workflow, right? It's confusing. And it's probably not just me who faces this. As someone who works in the process space, I have personally reviewed, tested, trial toured just about every task management and database tool out there trying to find the perfect solution. In fact, I've made some videos about it. You can see up here through my journey trying to figure out the best way to do this. And today I want to share a tool that I think finally may have cracked the code for what content creators need to manage all of our tasks. Today I'm going to be talking you through a tour of how you can manage content inside the new software called SmartSuite. But before we go into all the shiny features and I show you around my setup, I want to tell you why I think this tool is so interesting. Now, if you are someone who doesn't really care about the why and the logic behind this, feel free to use the timestamps below this video to skip forward to the actual behind the scenes portion. But first, for the rest of you, let's talk about workflows, because that's where I think everything begins. I think when we all start our content creation journey, we start off with, hey, I have an idea for a piece of content. I am going to create it and you just do it. It's done, that's it. And when you are at this stage, I think traditional task management tools or database tools can work really well. You can track this in ClickUp, you can track this in Trello, you can put this in a spreadsheet. It's going to be fine at this stage, but for those of us who actually start to build out our content reality, we build out a repurposing flow that involves not just creating that orig YouTube video, but turning it into a blog or social media post or a short. We're following that. You know those repurposing models that are trending right now? This becomes extremely complicated. Inside of traditional task management tools, we have the ability to organize all of our tasks for a given piece of content. And this in and of itself isn't bad. But the problem with these traditional task tools, as you can see here, is they become very overwhelming and it becomes really hard to See, where is each piece of content I'm creating? I want to see where is the video? Where is the social post? I'm not able to group it in a way that matches how my brain works, no matter how sophisticated and advanced our task structures are. But on the other hand, if we try to put all this into a spreadsheet, we've got a whole separate line of issues where our spreadsheet doesn't let us assign tasks or have due dates. So instead we're just compulsively checking our airtable database, hoping we don't miss something. But there's no real way for us or our team to know, hey, what do I do today? So on both ends, we've got a bit of an issue. When we've got a workflow as complex as this, we're unable to manage a content repurposing flow through just this simple workflow chart. We need to be able to see both tasks and groups of information in ways that are visual in easy to chunk and easy to turn into almost like a game. Enter SmartSuite now, SmartSuite falls right in between the traditional task management space and the database management space. It's kind of in that work management Arena. Inside of SmartSuite, every single solution you create has the option to either create tasks or other data types. You can do that based on the fact that inside of SmartSuite, everything everything is considered a record. You can choose to make an application in SmartSuite that has due dates and assignees, such as these here. Or you can delete these fields and choose to just organize general data such as your playlists or your contributors or your podcast guest directory. You have that flexibility to mix and match both tasks and data. Ooh, and a quick reminder, guys. If you are enjoying this video, check out the affiliate link below in the description where you can try out SmartSuite for yourself for for free. Thanks SmartSuite for sponsoring this video. All right, so we've established that task management tools don't quite work. Database tools definitely don't work. And this one's in the middle. Great. How is it in the middle? Well, let me show you inside this tool so you can see it for yourself. We're going to start off our tour inside an app which is like a section or a database inside SmartSuite called Topic Ideas. And here you can see SmartSuite demonstrate its database list like properties. What we have here is very similar to an airtable database. We've got the ability to add records that could be anything we want Such as how to make coffee. We can click Enter to create that as a row. And we can use the fields, the columns that are visible and hidden, to fill out additional information. If we go inside a specific record, we can see more information that expands upon what we had visible in those columns. For example, inside here, we could add a full description to explain more about our idea. We could track the difficulty of a given idea and even vote for an idea with our team if you have teammates involved. All of these things are overall a lot like what you would see in a Google Sheet if you were like, really good at organizing things, or something like Coda or airtable. Great, right? We've got the database stuff down, and just like a tool like Coda or airtable, we have the ability to see this information in different ways, such as in a card view, a grid view, and so on. On either way, the result of this application is a database of topics to allow us to ideate and dump all of our ideas in one place. Now, if you're not sure why you would have a Topic Ideas area before you get into content creation, check out this video, and I think we might persuade you to its advantages. But this is our Topic Ideas database. Cool. We've basically replaced the spreadsheet need here. So this is our Topic Ideas database. This is not tasks. These are just information buckets that we are dumping stuff into. The second area we have, the second application, is also a database. These are the playlists that we might have on our YouTube channel. And we could also build databases like this for things like our contributing authors, our podcast guests, our categories. We can do anything we want here. But this is just one more example of a database. Together, both the Topic Ideas and the playlist database demonstrates SmartSuite's ability to create a database of stuff that is not necessarily a task, but is instead just a collection of information. And we can continue to add just about any kind of data we want into these areas. And when you start to put all this stuff together, we can see how these two tabs alone can work as a suitable replacement to something like Airtable, Coda, or a Google Sheet or Excel. But really, it's this third tab of content creation where SmartSuite really demonstrates its ability to tackle that other area of task management. Let me show you around. Inside this content creation app, I've created records for each piece of content that I want to create. That's not radical, right? But visible. To the right of these content titles, I've got things like Project Manager, Time Tracking, Timeline Creation, Dates and all these little, you know, pill shaped progress bars. And this is where we start to see task features Shine. This Project Manager field I have set up inside SmartSuite to be treated as an assigned to field, basically turning this random piece of information into an assignment that will then show up in this person's my work their task list on the appropriate day or days. That transformation, just by making this field an assignment field, an assigned to field is really what makes SmartSuite shine. I'm able to go in here, make this overall piece of content assigned to the project manager, give this a name. I could even call it Production Manager. Whatever I want to call this field, I'm not stuck just calling it assignee. I can set up filters as to who is available for this, allow single or multiple assignees, and again choose to have it displayed in my work based on a status field that I get to define. In this case, I have this record set up so that the assignment goes to the production manager and the status is the overall status field here. These are all fields I just created, but I'm able to make these special designations inside the setup to say, hey, this is an assignee and a status. So make sure it shows up in the relevant places. This is basically replicating what we would see inside a task management tool. Now that's cool, right? That's nice to be able to say, hey, it's database, sometimes it's assignments, sometimes that's really neat. And that alone would make this stand out from competitors. But that's kind of just the beginning and not what I think is the coolest feature of this tool yet. If I scroll over to the right, do you see these guys here, these kind of progress bars that are showing up? These columns are the checklist column available in SmartSuite. And this is something that's truly quite different than what I've seen in other software like this. What these columns allow us to do is to go over here, create a checklist, pick a color and all that kind of good stuff and allow us to make buckets of tasks on a per record basis. So I could say do this, do that, blah blah blah. And for each of these checklist items I could have an assignee and a due date. These two fields, just like the overall record, assignee and status, will make a task show up inside somebody's my work. Their assignments area up here at the top and each of these little buckets are containers, can be expanded once filled in to show all of the tasks involved in that bucket of work. What's exciting about this is that we could use these checklist fields for each phase of our repurposing process, for each deliverable, for each piece of content. As you see here, I have YouTube publishing shorts, repurposing, social repurposing and so on. And each time I click on one of these progress bars, which are, yes, fully automated, I'm able to see the progress on shorts repurposing move upward both when I'm inside the checklist area and just from the overview. And this is as simple to create as what I just showed you, where we just type a checklist item. And we could also use some automations to make this a bit faster if we wanted to. Once we have these set up and we imagine having this all pre built, we could even have these assignments preset to certain people for each step of the process. And we know that item is going to show up in that person's task list on the appropriate day, because we're able to then cluster these into containers. As you see here, we can have a nice visual overview at the overall content level of where is each piece of content at? Based on each of the buckets, for example, three parts of an SOP, we can see where it's at on YouTube publishing shorts and so on. It's at four out of five on everything. This kind of nesting of tasks inside of our pieces of content is super, super cool. It spares us from having to create separate pipelines for each type of content. Instead, we can simply have these buckets that we can fill as full or as empty as we'd like. Now, you might be wondering at this point, okay, so I can have my data and I can have my tasks, but these tasks are not nearly enough. Right when I'm doing YouTube publishing, my outlining stage or my image request stage, these things require a lot of instruction. I need a place to put the stuff and these are just checklist items. So I really need more space. Well, SmartSuite allows you to go deeper if you need to. We do have the ability to create sub items if we so choose. These are basically like subtasks in other tools which allow you to go deeper. And if you needed those, there you go. But before you go rushing into subitem land and create all the perils we saw inside a task management tool, I want you to check out one more SmartSuite feature, which are sections. So let me go inside a piece of content here and show you what I mean by sections and why I think they might be the solution that you you were looking for. Because at least for me it was like, oh my gosh, here we are inside of how to make Butternut squash soup. Because this is what I was making last night before I was filming this video. And at the very top we have general overview. This looks very similar to what we saw in our databases. I mean this is nice, but not like earth shattering. And this is where we start off our journey. Just the general information about the video or the topic really. Below this we have sections and this is what I think you'll find particularly helpful. Let's say we want to repurpose our content into short form content. We want to make YouTube shorts in addition to our videos. If I expand this section, I can have a collection of custom fields just for the shorts repurposing section. It's not visible. In fact, by default when I open up this task, this record, it's always going to be collapsed. But I can expand it to see all the information I need in order to get this repurposing back done. I could have the description of the short, the thumbnail link. I could have a link to the file, the MP4, the version history, whatever I needed. I could have it all right here. This prevents me from having to create sub items and get lost in relationships and hierarchy. Instead it's all right here. I can see that same checklist I saw from the overview level. I can have all of my notes here and close this out. When I'm done with Shorts repurposing, then let's just say I want to start working on social repurposing. Great. I've got the option to add my channels here, the file name for my social video or image, my social caption, and again my checklist all visible right here. By having these sections we actually prevent the need from creating sub items. Unless you really want to have a collective assignee for that whole chunk of work. So those checklist groups and the sections I think are kind of a combination that makes SmartSuite a real hit for the creators out there. But of course, if you are someone that wants to go even deeper, maybe you like having all of your pieces of content separate and just connecting them together. I do want to point out that SmartSuite does have the relationship and roll up features that you might know and love from notion, ClickUp, coda, etc. So if I click down here on this playlist relationship, I can actually link my playlist to my piece of content right here. Now don't ask why making butternut squash soup is A business video. My playlists are a little wonky here, but these relationships are as easy to create as any of these other fields you see here. We simply come in here, we create a new field and we choose a linked record field. That's what SmartSuite calls relationships. Once we have a linked record field, we can create formulas based on that relationship. We can roll up based on that relationship. We can do all the normal relationshipy things you might expect from more flexible database tools. But again we get this balance between both data and tasks side by side in one interface. So you see why I think this is pretty interesting. This like in between spot. I love this idea of buckets and being able to break things down in that way. Now SmartSuite has a ton of other features we could and probably should be utilizing to maximize our content creation. Things like the ability to create solution guides that break down how to use each section automations to ensure that we can automatically turn our ideas into actual content things. We also have the ability to send emails if there are stakeholders or sponsors we need to communicate with around our content creation. And I haven't even touched on the fact that SmartSuite allows us to create charts and dashboards to gamify our content creation. In these dashboards we can create charts and widgets to show us how many pieces of content we've produced this month. What is the progress of our overall content. We could link out to our frame IO files, to our Google sheets, to our anything else really. Or maybe our countdown to launch, whatever it is that you're looking to do. We've also got that reporting in here, which is something we normally would only see inside a database tool. But hey, we actually get it built inside of SmartSuite here. So for anyone who's looking to take this kind of repurposing flow to turn it into buckets that actually make sense for your brain to mix both data and tasks without having to do a bunch of MacGyvering. I really think you might want to give SmartSuite a look. Like I said, I've looked at so many of the tools out there and I think this unique combination that we have here in SmartSuite is something that many of us are going to want to keep our eye on. If you want to try out SmartSuite for yourself, give it a shot. Use the affiliate link below this video that supports this channel for free, but also gives you a free trial to play around with all SmartSuite has to offer without having to use your credit card. So why not just see what you think. And if you'd like to see more about the setup I have here, I really just did an overview today. If you want to see a click by click of how this is set up, type the comment details in the comments below. Right? Write the word details. That's what's going to tell me. You want to have a detailed deep dive so we'll know to either maybe create a deep dive tutorial, make some shorts about this. I don't know what we could figure out how to do to give you that information. All you have to do is write the word details in the comments below. While you're down there though, please like and subscribe. It helps this video a lot and costs you nothing and otherwise I will see you guys back here next week for another video. Thanks so much for watching and enjoy the process.