Use governance to improve content without spending lots of money

Your business can easily spend thousands on technology. This includes content management systems (CMS) and strategy so you can keep producing engaging content.

However, despite investing in a content management system you and your content team might still have:

• scattered and chaotic content
• inconsistent content that frustrates, confuses and puts off users
• lack of clarity in the team on what should be published and when it’s ready

Use governance to produce engaging content

The answer to your content problems is understanding and defining content governance.

Governance is about who decides what, when and how across your team.

So, how can you make content governance work in practice? Use the following to find out.

Audit your content workflow

You can’t create good governance of your content without understanding the current state of your operations (how you create and manage content).

Start by analysing the different stages of your content workflow.

Usually, you’ll use several stages to get content from idea to published. This is your content workflow.

Think about the stages of creating and managing your content so you can check:

• how content is asked for, sourced, created, fact-checked, reviewed, approved, and delivered
• what your current content standards and policies are
• how you make your content legally compliant and accessible for people
• where bottlenecks happen, such as multiple rounds of drafting and reviewing before publishing
• pain points, such as version control issues when tracking and managing changes, or content without evidence it’s needed

Design your content workflow

Detail the processes you’ll need to produce consistently engaging content.

These include:

• breaking down the content process into specific, achievable tasks
• defining roles and responsibilities and timelines for every stage of the workflow
• deciding how you are going to gather and analyse data to monitor performance

Define roles and responsibilities

You need to align your content workflow with what you or members of your team do as tasks.

Defining roles and responsibilities means everyone knows what they have to do and when to create and manage content.

To do this, you may need to:

• deal with conflicting organisational priorities, such as attracting international versus domestic customers
• encourage collaboration by creating cross-functional teams to focus on specific projects or goals, breaking down silos
• get approval from higher-ranking executives so your content team can prioritise content tasks when necessary

Build leadership responsibility

Governance can be hard to put in place if you or your organisation know it will involve:

• creating new roles and responsibilities
• making bigger changes to the organisation than just content

You need strong leadership to avoid silos. Appoint a Chief Content Officer (CCO), or an editorial board to provide a broader perspective on content.

Your CCO or editorial board should have backing at a senior level to make sure your business strategy succeeds.

Backing at a senior level means your CCO or editorial board can decide how content is asked for and created.

Getting strong leadership in place means you and your team can focus on their job – to produce high-quality content.

Adapt guidelines, policies and procedures

You’ll need guidelines, policies and procedures that to enforce content governance.

As a team, agree on how to:

• conduct user research, for example, A/B testing to refine content for better user engagement
• check the quality of content
• use best practice on search engine optimisation to increase organic traffic and improve search rankings
• make content accessible and legally compliant
• use the right style and tone (PDF)
• archive outdated, duplicate or irrelevant material
• show how frequently content is published with a content calendar

Make sure everyone can use your content guidance so your team can produce consistently high-quality content.

Regularly refine your content governance to include user insights from research and trends so you can keep meeting needs.

Build in collaborative tools and training

You should add tools to your content management process to maximise the quality of your content and process. For example:

• Trello and monday.com are productivity tools to help you plan and schedule content updates and track performance, workflow and collaboration
• GatherContent – a content operations platform that helps teams create, track, review and approve content together in one place
• Figma – a collaborative tool where your team can create, share, and test designs

Use training to introduce new processes and tools. This will reinforce your content team’s governance skills.

Use governance to develop bigger changes

Understanding content governance helps you define the business purpose for content and plan for the future.

Translate what you are doing with content governance to key stakeholders regularly.

Your key stakeholders are more likely to support bigger changes to creating and managing content if they can see the value of your governance framework.

Make sure you or your content team measure the results of improving governance to show how the user experience is performing.

Get in touch so we can help you develop your content governance model.