In today’s era of content marketing, you should build your content strategy with optimization in mind. But in many cases, companies have no strategy at all when it comes to content creation, distribution, and publication.

Content governance is especially important to companies that rely on content marketing to generate sales. Without a concrete system for content management, from its creation to its publication and distribution, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and lose focus.

You’re in the right place if you’re wondering how to establish standards and workflows for content creation, distribution, and publication. This article will show you how to implement a content governance plan to optimize your content marketing processes.

What Is Content Governance?

Before we go any further, you must understand what content governance is. So let’s explain it briefly.
Content governance is a set of processes that ensure the quality of your content and drive alignment across teams. It’s a framework that allows you to define, implement and manage a set of standards for creating, managing, and distributing content.

Content governance helps you and your content team:

  • Create a consistent brand experience across all marketing channels
  • Ensure regulatory compliance by controlling what gets published on each channel
  • Reduce the risk of posting information that could damage your reputation or legal status
  • Create reusable content assets that you can repurpose across multiple channels

The primary purpose of content governance is to improve the quality of your content management processes by reducing the time it takes for approvals and the number of times you have to rewrite content, as well as creating consistency in how your brand speaks to customers.

Creating An Effective Content Governance Plan

Creating An Effective Content Governance Plan

Creating an effective content governance plan is a challenging process. If you’re new to content governance, it’s helpful to take a step back and consider how your organization currently manages its content.

Is your content creation process well-organized? Are you using tools like Buffer to schedule your content or Desygner to design it? Is your brand voice consistent across your content pieces and marketing channels?

If you answered no to these questions, then the chances are that your organization could benefit from implementing a content governance plan. Here are some tips for getting started.

Define The Roles And Responsibilities Of Your Content Team

You must define the roles and responsibilities of your team, such as who will be responsible for which portions of the content governance plan. You may have one person in charge of writing all policies, another in charge of creating the rules and guidelines, and another responsible for implementing them.

You can also consider creating an organizational chart that clearly defines each role in your company and how they work together. For example, you can create a shared document outlining who will be involved in what parts of the process, such as approving copy or editing content before publication.

It will help limit confusion about who should do what part of the job and prevent mistakes due to overlapping responsibilities or lack of communication between team members.

Also read: Twitter Single Tweets To Support Image, GIF, And Video Contents

Determine Your Content Guidelines

Determine Your Content Guidelines

Even if there’s just one person on your content team, having specific content guidelines will ensure that each piece of content they create is aligned with the company values, goals, and brand. And suppose there are multiple people on your content team or even many departments involved in the content creation process. In that case, content guidelines must keep a consistent brand voice across all your marketing channels.

In addition to these guidelines, everyone on your content team should be able to easily find and access all of your brand assets that they may need to use to create content. Tools such as a DAM software (Digital Asset Management Software) or Desygner’s Corporate Marketing Hub allow you to keep your brand, marketing, and content assets in one place.

However, even though you may have your content guidelines and brand assets prepared, you still need to ensure that everyone involved in content creation, management, or distribution follows them. Tools such as Desygner’s Brand Guidelines Enforcer can help you do that by allowing you to control how your team members change each brand asset or piece of content and ensure that the changes don’t misalign with your brand voice.

Create Content Workflows

Creating content workflows is possibly the most important step in developing a content governance plan. Having efficient content workflows allows you to set a clear structure for creating, approving, and reviewing content.

For example, you may want to create an approval process for blog articles or social media posts before publishing them. Or perhaps you want to include a review step when publishing new landing pages on your site. Each element in the workflow should have a defined goal and, ideally, a person responsible for its success.

A sample workflow for blog content, with specific roles assigned, can look like this:

  • Plan (content strategist)
  • Write (a content writer)
  • Edit (editor or proofreader)
  • Review (content manager)
  • Publish (content manager)
  • Distribute (social media manager)

Content workflows can be built into content management systems or housed in stand-alone tools.
For example, content management or task management tools such as Monday.com, ClickUp, or Asana are designed to help you track each piece of content’s stages until publication.

Editorial calendars, such as CoSchedule, Trello, or Buffer, can help you track what needs to be published and when. And Desygner’s Marketing Localization Engine can help you automate content localization so that you can distribute your content beyond your local market.

Establish Regular Audits To Measure Results

Establishing an audit process is the first step in measuring the effectiveness of your content governance plan. Audits can range from simple checks on brand consistency to more complex reviews of the effectiveness of your content strategy.

Regular audits that measure key performance indicators (KPIs) of your content on each marketing channel are the best way to identify what works well and what doesn’t so that you can determine what changes need to be made.

For example, plugins like Yoast SEO offer analytics that shows how well your pages are doing based on best practices in search engine optimization (SEO). Other tools like Grammarly can provide automated proofreading services to ensure that all your written content pieces adhere to company standards.

Set Your Content Governance Plan In Motion

Set Your Content Governance Plan In Motion

A well-planned and goal-oriented content governance model will help you streamline your content creation, management, and distribution while minimizing the gaps. It’ll also allow you to eliminate redundant processes, optimize workflows, and avoid wasting time on unnecessary communication between internal teams or departments.

With the proper content governance process and tools, your content team will always be on track to create the next best piece of content for your brand. So, if you aren’t already implementing a content governance plan, it’s time to set it in motion!

Wrap Up

If implemented correctly, a content governance plan can positively affect your business. Not only will your brand create a consistent customer experience across marketing channels, but you’ll be able to work more effectively as a team. Best of all, your publications will align consistently with your overall strategy.

Don’t forget that even the best writers need some editorial oversight. So instead of letting your next great guide languish in an overworked editor’s inbox, please use these content management standards to keep them on track and your audience engaged.

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