Content Governance Best Practices | Brafton

It’s increasingly crucial for organizations to govern and monitor how they create various brand assets. This is true across sectors and for organizations of any size. 

But simply having a content governance plan isn’t enough. It’s important to follow guidelines when drawing up and executing these plans. This article will explain content governance and explore these 7 best practices: 

1. Review your content strategy regularly.
2. Establish clear roles and responsibilities.
3. Create a standardized workflow for content creation and review.
4. Develop and document content standards.
5. Ensure stakeholder alignment and training.
6. Monitor, audit and update your governance framework.
7. Utilize the right tools and technology to support content governance.

What Is Content Governance?

Content governance comprises a framework of policies, processes and standards that an organization uses to manage content. Effective content governance ensures marketing material is accurate, consistent and on brand throughout the entire content lifecycle. It provides structure by defining roles, responsibilities and workflows for content creation, publishing and distribution across all channels.  

A content governance framework is key to repeatedly producing high-quality content. Anybody can write one great blog, brochure or email. And a talented content team can write a series of great assets, but to ensure the content is consistently great while also progressing toward key business goals and staying true to the brand voice requires a framework. Editorial guidelines are an important piece of this strategy, but a coherent set of governance policies that also guide and monitor the content process is key.

Why Is Content Governance Important?

Content governance is essential because it’s the best way — perhaps the only way — to ensure content is factual, consistent and aligned with business objectives. By achieving these goals, content governance can also protect an organization’s brand reputation and improve efficiency. 

A detailed governance model is essential for managing the content lifecycle. In practice, this might involve establishing clear roles for those involved in the content workflow, enforcing quality standards and optimizing blogs and landing pages for searchability and compliance. 

What Are the Benefits of Content Governance?

Consistent content management can reap many benefits. This is true for a marketing agency, a large corporation, a small business and even an individual content creator. By developing and adhering to a comprehensive content governance model, you can benefit from:

• Brand consistency: To be effective, content production must be on time and on brand. Whether you’re publishing content primarily to drive conversions, establish you or your business as a thought leader or satisfy an SEO score, brand building should always be top of mind. Good content isn’t just good in a vacuum — it’s good if it works with existing content to reinforce your brand’s identity.
• Content quality: Of course, an asset can be on brand and still be, well, bad. A content governance plan should pinpoint what good content looks like for your organization and describe a process for reliably and repeatedly achieving this level of quality. Developing a detailed content roadmap is a great way to ensure the writing and design are excellent, no matter the content type.
• Improved collaboration: When everyone’s singing from the same hymn sheet — or following the same content guidelines — it’s easier to collaborate. Writers, designers, project managers and other team members know what to expect from one another and can even anticipate needs.
• Regulatory compliance: Content management is particularly crucial for organizations operating in highly regulated environments. When the wording must be precise, consider compliance throughout content workflows. 
• Risk management: An effective content governance strategy also reduces the risk of investing heavily in a process or type of asset that doesn’t bring value. By building content performance tracking into the lifecycle, organizations can reduce the likelihood of pursuing ineffective strategies.

What’s the Difference Between Content Governance and Content Strategy?

A content strategy is the “what and why” — content governance is the “how.” A content strategy consists of figuring out what content you need (the why) and what forms of content are the best options to satisfy that need (the what). An effective strategy means determining what content can achieve specific goals. Content governance acts as a rulebook for content operations (the how). It comprises the policies, processes and standards necessary to ensure accuracy, consistency and quality throughout the content lifecycle. 

For example, a business might develop a digital content strategy that consists of publishing a blog on its site twice a week and sending out a weekly newsletter to establish authority and drive conversions, respectively. Without governing content policies for how to produce blogs and newsletters that achieve those goals, the business is shooting in the dark, with maybe only a vague idea of where the target is. But with the right framework describing how to write, review and evaluate marketing assets, that business can avoid content chaos and focus on achieving its objectives. 

7 Content Governance Best Practices

Here are 7 best practices to keep in mind when conducting content governance:

1. Review Your Content Strategy Regularly

When creating a content strategy, it’s valuable to plan for as many contingencies as possible. But even the most visionary content strategist can’t anticipate everything. Business landscapes, goals and marketing practices change. And sometimes things just don’t work out how you planned them.

That’s why it’s crucial to review your content strategy periodically. A content audit can tell you if your assets are meeting SEO scores, bringing in views, generating conversions or meeting other marketing metrics important to your organization.

2. Establish Clear Roles and Responsibilities

Good content governance requires all involved to know what’s expected of them. It’s hard to execute a strategy effectively if writers, editors, social media specialists and content managers don’t know which tasks are whose responsibility. Whether content workflows involve SEO research, writing, designing, scheduling or a combination of all these tasks and more, explicitly assigning which personnel perform which task and when helps everyone stay on track.

3. Create a Standardized Workflow for Content Creation and Review

It’s no mistake that the previous sentence includes the word “when.” Knowing who does what is critical, but just as important can be knowing when to execute certain tasks within the content creation process. Some are obvious — it would be really weird and difficult to edit a blog that hasn’t been written yet. However, other factors, such as how long after publishing a blog the email team includes it in a newsletter or how often to perform a content review, aren’t self-evident. With a standardized content workflow, an organization can monitor progress more effectively. 

4. Develop and Document Content Standards

This practice might seem obvious, but many organizations don’t bother with it or otherwise don’t fully commit to establishing and adhering to content standards. This is because many businesses simply focus on one or two metrics, such as views and click-through rate. If an asset satisfies these key performance indicators, then it must be good, right? Not necessarily. 

What if the tone is off? What if the layout doesn’t conform to site standards? What if the information is just plain wrong? Errors like these shouldn’t happen, and they’re much less likely to occur with a clear content governance plan.

5. Ensure Stakeholder Alignment and Training

The best governance framework in the world is useless if the people creating and managing the content don’t know it exists or how to use it. Content strategy might feel like chess with all the assessment and plotting involved, but content governance is a team sport. It requires buy-in and participation from everyone involved in the content lifecycle, from writers and designers to legal reviewers and executives.

Hearing from all stakeholders when designing a content governance strategy helps ensure it meets the goals of all departments or teams. A clear training plan that explains why the governance is helpful and how to follow it is also key. Training ensures that every team member understands their responsibilities.

6. Monitor, Audit and Update Your Governance Framework

Track how well teams adhere to the workflows and policies. Complement this by periodically auditing the content to ensure it remains accurate, effective and on-brand. And based on these results, update the framework as needed. 

7. Utilize the Right Tools and Technology To Support Content Governance

It’s a poor handyperson who blames their tools … but having the right tools is pretty important. With effective tools and technology, you can automate compliance, streamline workflows and centralize documentation. For example, workflow management tools can help enforce standardized creation and reviews.

Furthermore, analytics tools can help you monitor content performance and adherence to standards, feeding directly into your audit cycle. Many great AI tools can evaluate, optimize and even create content.

Ensure Your Content Strategy Works for You

Any organization or individual can be a content creator. 

Creating good content? That takes skill.

Creating content that’s good and that measurably meets organizational objectives? That takes a content strategy.

And consistently and efficiently creating content that achieves the aims of that strategy? That requires content governance.

It can be a lot of work, but it makes content creation easier and more effective going forward. But if you’re feeling overwhelmed, don’t hesitate to reach out for advice.