Content governance is an essential part of any content strategy. It ensures that all content produced by your team remains consistent, up-to-date and in line with business goals and objectives. Even better, a good content governance plan can help you make the most of your resources, make better content decisions and assess the value of your efforts. Here’s why you should implement content governance, plus five steps to get started.

Why Your Content Strategy Needs a Content Governance Policy

Content governance is the process you set in place to create and maintain your organization’s content. Content governance ensures that everything you publish is purposeful, all contributors know their roles and your brand is well represented. A good content governance model has a number of benefits:

• Consistency of voice, tone and brand: Part of your content governance plan should include style guides, brand guidelines and an established voice. This ensures that your content feels authoritative, cohesive and trustworthy.
• Alignment on goals and priorities: A content governance plan forces your team to regularly discuss goals and to organize efforts around the most important objectives.
• Efficiency of content production: Creating content in silos is one of the most common content marketing mistakes. With a good content governance plan in place, all contributors know what they’re responsible for, and teams can more easily plan and repurpose content across channels, reducing redundancies. For example, with planning and resource allocation, an article you plan to write can easily turn into a blog post, podcast episode and social media campaign.
• Visibility into your content’s value: Managing content production allows you to monitor what performs well, and makes auditing content more manageable and efficient. It allows you to better track what you have and where you have it, so you can easily replace outdated content and continuously tweak valuable content to work harder for you.

How to Implement Content Governance in 5 Steps

Implementing content governance models doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Start with these five steps in mind.

Identify stakeholders, roles and responsibilities

Ensure that all areas of your organization are represented in your content creation strategy. Do you have people in several departments creating content? Or just one department that creates content without visibility into other departments’ business goals? Remove the silos and involve the stakeholders who need to be at the table in regular discussions. Clearly define who is responsible for being a part of content creation and what their roles are, including subject matter experts at the organization.

Keep goals and priorities at the forefront

Don’t create content for content’s sake. Establish what you hope to achieve with the content (ask your stakeholders!) And make sure you make it possible with content that’s easy to find and calls to action that are clear and measurable.

Document guidelines and processes

All content creators should be able to refer to a set of documents that clearly outline brand and style guidelines, workflow processes and content plans. Establish tracking documents that allow you to efficiently assign, monitor, access and edit your team’s work. This can take the form of a simple Google doc, or more intricate tools like Airtable.

Determine a structural framework

Establish a meeting cadence with stakeholders, and create content-planning documentation and workflows that are thorough, yet flexible. For example, when creating an editorial calendar, be forward thinking and brainstorm ideas months in advance. Include all drivers of content, including, for example, your organization’s events, announcements and seasonal topics. Plan for a multi-channel approach, with thoughts toward all of your platforms, like social and podcasts. However, be nimble with your plans, so you can react to fresh ideas as they arise.

Measure and analyze efforts

As part of your content governance meetings, look backward as well as forward. Analyze how your past content is performing to help inform what you do next.

Ready to Get Started with Content Governance?

The foundations of an effective content governance policy are goal-setting and processes. Our guide How to Make Your Content Work Harder for You covers how to implement these pillars plus others that will support a strong content program. Fill out the form below to claim your copy.