What is content governance?

Small content marketing efforts can be simple and effective, but once you start to scale, things get complex fast.

That scaling challenge typically prompts questions like: What’s the best content approval process? Who are the subject matter experts in each department? What are our content archiving policies? Is our content up to date? What are our brand guidelines and who's in charge of them? Do we own this content? Are we allowed to publish it?

The answer to those questions, and more, is content governance. It’s the secret sauce for truly great content marketing — but it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution and to get the most out of it, you’ll need to understand it. That’s not always easy: stakeholders sometimes don’t appreciate the impact that content governance can have on content creation, or feel that adjusting to new governance practices will disrupt existing workflows.  

In this blog, we’re going to explore the meaning of content governance, the benefits it can provide, and how to implement a content governance model that serves your business’s content ecosystem.

Content governance defined

Content governance is the big-picture management of content across an organization. It refers to a set of processes, policies, and guiding strategies that are designed to add structure to your content operations, align content with your brand and business needs, meet regulatory compliance standards, and make sure that every content piece you produce is on-message and of sufficient quality. 

We could compare content governance to the way an orchestra is arranged. If individual content creators are musicians then content governance is the sheet music from which everyone is playing. It dictates timings, cadence, style, and so on, and essentially ensures harmony as the group moves towards its objectives. 

The better the content governance, the more harmonious and pleasing the content, and the happier the audience.

What is a content governance model?

A content governance model refers to the way that an organization applies its content governance and essentially serves as a reference framework for stakeholders at every stage of the content lifecycle. The framework provides all the necessary tools and resources that team members — from content creators to subject matter experts — need to produce good content. 

An effective content governance model can help resolve issues in the content production process before they even become a problem. It might include style guides that help editors make adjustments to content, or a publication calendar that helps the content team coordinate the release of social media and blog posts during a marketing campaign.

An effective content governance framework can help team members determine: 

• The best approval process for new content.

• Which types of content should use a template.

• Editorial standards for blogs.

• How to create a consistent brand image.

• How and when to review old content for relevance.

• The most useful metrics and KPIs to measure the success of content.

What is the difference between content governance and content strategy?

A content strategy determines how your organization will use content to meet its business goals and appeal to customers. It’s a high-level plan that frames the way your team will produce blog posts, social media posts, videos, and other pieces of content that not only communicate your message to customers but give them a reason to pay attention. 

Content governance determines how that content gets managed at ground-level. It outlines the workflows and processes for moving content from the idea or draft stage through to production, and on to refresh or retirement at the end of the content lifecycle. It also makes resources, like style guides and content calendars, available so that stakeholders can produce content with consistency, at a high level of quality, and in alignment with the content strategy.

For effective content marketing, you’ll need both content governance and content strategy.

Why is content governance important?

Building a good governance model will help your organization clarify the important details of your internal content operations — which will, in turn, make your content workflows stronger. 

But there’s more to content governance than administrative efficiency.

In enterprise organizations, content governance is critical to growth since the scaling process usually involves increased content production. Achieving volume goals isn’t necessarily difficult: advances in technology have made it easier to produce content, while the increased availability of channels on which to publish means that there’s space to accommodate new projects and campaigns. 

The problem is that momentum can lead to an explosion of new blogs, ads, media, and internal comms. If you don’t have a way of staying in control of that expanding landscape, the higher volume of content can take a quality hit, becoming fragmented, duplicated, and inconsistent. That situation typically leads to silos which hurt internal efficiency, and eventually to confusion for both sellers and your customers. If we use our “content orchestra” analogy from earlier, it would be like asking your musicians to improvise or just play from memory — sooner or later, the music would fall out of harmony. It’s a situation you could call “content chaos”.  

Good content governance changes that experience, setting out rules and parameters which help you maintain high-quality content and ensure that you create and publish content that aligns with, and promotes, the content strategy. 

With that in mind, your model should enable you to achieve the following objectives:

Recruiting the right team members

A content governance model helps you identify and attract new content stakeholders across the organization — maybe you’ll learn, for example, that sales or human resources want to be involved in the content process. By pursuing and promoting content governance you’ll attract expertise to your content workflows.

Defining roles and responsibilities

When your content processes involve multiple stakeholders, the content governance model will help managers understand what skills they need, and team members what part they can play in producing effective content.

Developing content workflows

Your governance model will define the content process from end to end and help you implement the necessary workflows within it. The model will ensure stakeholders understand important procedural details of the content workflow, such as when they should work on content and where to send it when they’re done, but can also provide a top-level vantage from which you can identify opportunities to streamline.

Establishing standards and policies

Your model will help you determine what written documents you need to communicate the strategy, standards, and policies that underpin your organization’s approach to content. Documents like editorial guidelines, for example, will be critical to both content creators and editors. 

How will content governance benefit my content strategy?

Content governance is not just about avoiding content chaos but serving your content strategy by helping to ensure that every piece you produce is: 

• Consistent: Resources like style guides and brand guidelines help your content creators and editors speak with the brand’s voice and maintain a level of consistency that facilitates ongoing audience recognition.

• Timely: A content calendar is crucial not only for publishing at a regular cadence but helping readers acknowledge your content as an essential, ongoing part of their professional or commercial culture. 

• High quality: Templates, editorial guidelines, and a good approval process support content quality by helping to ensure that it’s accurate and well written. High quality standards are not only a way to impress and engage audiences but can help avoid content catastrophes, such as accusations of plagiarism — and any resulting reputational damage. 

• On-message: Well-written content briefs, well-defined content workflows, and clear style guides and editorial standards ensure that your content says what you want it to say and, ultimately, that readers hear the story you want to tell.

How do you implement a content governance plan?

A good content governance plan should fit the needs of the organization developing it. A model that helps a government institution scale-up their content marketing, for example, won’t necessarily have the same impact for a financial organization. 

That’s why it’s important to find out what good content governance looks like for you, and think about the following steps as you roll out your plan: 

1. Gathering the content team

It’s easy to assume that a content team should be entirely operational in its make-up and include, for instance, only content creators, subject matter experts, and editors. While those team members are essential, the most effective content teams are usually more diverse.  

Since content is a company-wide initiative, you’ll want to recruit team members throughout the organization in order to create a culture of cross-functional collaboration. In practice, this means exploring every department — HR, marketing, sales, and so on — to find out who the content stakeholders are, and assembling your team from that group. 

Be thorough. In addition to subject matter experts, creators, and editors, your team may benefit from SEO or data specialists, content strategists, and anyone with the vision to help guide your content needs. Don’t forget about policy experts who can help define content best practices and ensure that each department follows them.

2. Define team member roles and responsibilities 

Once you’ve gathered your team, you’ll need to define roles within your content governance framework. It can help to think about the following key functionalities during that process: 

• Content strategy: Team members responsible for creating and communicating the content strategy, including mapping the content creation process, and aligning content with the organization’s goals and values. This group may involve executive-level managers, marketing specialists, and SEO specialists.

• Content creation: Team members responsible for producing your content. This function includes pitching, writing, editing, and reviewing content in alignment with content strategy, and with other factors such as brand voice and quality standards. This group includes writers, artists, designers, editors, and subject matter experts. 

• Content operations: Team members responsible for overseeing the production and timely delivery of content across the channels that the organization maintains. This group may include marketing, communication, IT, and SEO specialists, and, if necessary, legal and compliance experts.

3. Model your content workflows

With your team established, it’s time to model your content workflows. 

You’ll need to cover every part of the content process. That means developing a content workflow for using your chosen content management system (CMS), for the editorial approval process, for the marketing team review process, for archiving, metrics reviews, SEO analysis, and any other content-related tasks that you think are necessary. Again, be as thorough as possible to mitigate potential problems in the future. 

The end-to-end content workflow typically involves the following sub-components: 

• Planning: A plan for creating pieces of content in alignment with the content strategy. The content plan should set the scope of the work, its deliverables (blogs, web pages, videos, etc.), and a schedule for delivery. The planning stage should include the production of content briefs to communicate this information to creators. 

• Production: The creation of the content itself according to parameters set in the planning stage. Individual creators will have their own workflows, processes, and styles that take their content from draft to completion. 

• Editorial review: Editors may review content upon completion or at any point during the production stage. Certain content projects may need to go through several stages of review, and it may be necessary to plug in contributions from technical and legal experts as part of the process. 

• Approval and publication: Once editorial changes are implemented, you’ll need to implement a mechanism for approving and publishing content to the relevant channels.  

• Ongoing review: Published content may need to be altered or updated periodically so you’ll need a workflow that facilitates this kind of intervention.

An example content workflow: The diagram below is an example of a content creation workflow. In this workflow, the content creator submits a draft of their content piece which is then reviewed and returned for edits. That process continues until content approval, and ends with the publication of the content. 

Note that, at the last stage of the workflow, the process starts over again by introducing editorial requests for further changes in already-published content. 

This is important because it highlights the idea that content is never “finished,” and should be thought of as a living part of the wider content ecosystem. That being the case, it should be regularly reviewed for relevance, consistent messaging, and style.

4. Create your content policies and standards

This is where you define the “big picture” details of your content strategy within your content governance framework. At this stage, it can be useful to bring team members together to discuss issues like editorial policies and what kind of standards you’ll apply to your content.

Your policies should reflect your organizational values. For instance, your team might have a policy of telling customer stories rather than highlighting the expertise of internal experts.  You should ensure points like that are communicated clearly in your documentation so that creators can reference them as they create content. 

You’ll also need to create editorial guidelines and content standards which answer common content-creation questions like: What’s our tone? How do we talk about ourselves and our brand? How often should we be publishing content? How do we judge the visual quality of our content? When should content be archived?

Ideally, everyone on your team will have a stake in this process. Take your team’s input and synthesize their insight to develop the best possible standards. Team member contributions will also help to ensure that your standards are workable and that everyone can reasonably follow them.

Once your policies and standards are written, distribute them to every stakeholder and ensure everyone in the organization is able to find and access them easily. 

5. Review, rework, improve

Like the content you produce and publish to your channels, you’ll need to periodically review your model.

Establish a review schedule and arrange check-ins with the team as an integral part of your content governance plan. You might ask the editorial team how the approval process is working and whether it could be streamlined, or dig in with the marketing team to find out if the organization’s content marketing approach is aligned with its messaging goals.

Be sure that your model is supporting your content marketing needs. Your organization is always changing, so your content governance model should change along with it.

Content governance and composability

Given the role that content plays in commercial settings, it’s no longer really a question of whether your organization has content governance but what kind of model you apply. The success of your content governance will depend on the functional detail of the framework that you implement, which is why it’s worth being so thorough as you consider and develop your model. 

Don’t ignore the automation advantages that content management systems bring to the content governance process. In a crowded information ecosystem, where a lack of control can lead to content chaos, the right CMS is not only a way to add efficiency and order to your content workflows, but a means to scale quickly and seamlessly as your content needs change. 

Built with API-first architecture, and decoupling frontend and backend functionality, a composable content platform like Contentful pushes those content governance possibilities even further. Composable content brings flexibility to every stage of the content lifecycle, enhancing governance by enabling closer collaboration between technical and creative stakeholders. It’s easier than ever to add new writers, editors, and reviewers, and ensures you stay in control of your content regardless of what, where, or when you publish.

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