Content governance is a set of guidelines that manage and control the content that we create. It ensures our content aligns with our brand, meets our standards, and adheres to legal guidelines.
Let’s break it down.
- Why content governance matters
- Key elements of a content governance framework
- Benefits of having content governance in your company
- How to implement it in your organisation (and what tools you can use for process automation)
What is Content Governance?
Content governance serves as the compass for how we craft, manage, and sustain our content.
It encompasses rules, steps, and benchmarks to ensure our content aligns with our goals and meets our standards.
Policies dictate what content gets made, who makes it, and how it’s used. They set clear guidelines to avoid confusion and maintain consistency.
Procedures are the actions we take to create and manage content. They map out the workflow from start to finish, ensuring everyone follows the same path.
Benchmarks (or Standards) set the bar for content. They cover aspects like tone, style, and accuracy, ensuring all content meets our standards.
There are two main types of content governance
Centralized — when one team oversees all content-related tasks. This ensures a unified approach but can slow things down due to bottlenecks.
Imagine, a communications team that gets bombarded with the requests for content from different departments. We’ve seen it — it’s no fun.
Decentralized — when multiple teams handle their own content, following shared guidelines.
This speeds up content creation but risks inconsistency if not managed well.
Well-structured approach and leadership are the key.
Make corporate content governance a priority, and if your approach is not purely formal, you will definitely find the type of content governance that fits your organisation.
Why Content Governance Matters
Content governance helps maintain consistency. When we have clear rules, everyone knows what to do.
This saves time and avoids confusion. It also protects our brand.
With content governance, we get consistent, high-quality content. Our team works more efficiently.
We also reduce risks related to legal issues, while consistent content builds trust with our audience, as they know what to expect from us.
In one word — we build trust with our audience and streamline our processes.
Consistency, quality and accuracy
Content governance is crucial for maintaining consistency and standards. It ensures that all content aligns with your brand voice, making our brand more recognizable.
It also guarantees content accuracy, which builds trust with our audience.
Consistency in brand voice means that every piece of content sounds like it comes from the same place. This helps build a strong brand identity.
While accurate content simply means fewer errors, which enhances your brand’s credibility.
Boosting efficiency
Content governance also boosts efficiency. With streamlined workflows, everyone knows their role and what to do next.
Confused minds don’t sell (and can’t write really). And if you have an organisation where more than two people write your content, efficiency becomes an issue.
Orchestrating who does what significantly reduces the time spent on each task, making the whole process faster.
Reduced redundancy means that teams don't waste time creating duplicate content or content that is not advancing your brand anywhere.
This frees up resources for more important tasks and improves overall productivity.
By implementing content governance, we ensure that our content is not only high-quality but also produced efficiently. This sets us apart from competitors and helps achieve our goals.
Key Components of Effective Content Governance
Guidelines and Standards: Establish rules for tone, style, and format. This keeps our content uniform.
Roles and Responsibilities: Define who does what. This avoids overlap and gaps in our process.
Approval Processes: Have a system for reviewing and approving content. This ensures accuracy.
Compliance and Legal: Make sure our content follows laws and regulations. This prevents legal issues.
Harmonizing content strategy
Any successful strategy starts with definition of its objectives. What do you want to achieve?
Objectives: You need crystal-clear objectives to steer your content. These objectives should mirror your business goals.
Are you aiming to amplify brand awareness or boost sales? What are the main messages you’re trying to convey with each piece of content?
Every text must have a clear mission.
Next (and not in the order of importance) — deep understanding of the audience you’ll be adressing.
Target audience: Understanding your target readers is paramount. You should grasp their needs, challenges, and interests.
This will enable you to craft content that truly connects and captivates.
Luckily, definition of your audience profiles is also part of your brand voice guidelines so, by now you should already have it covered.
Roles and responsibilities
While the types of roles highly depend on the organisation, we list here the most common ones.
Content Creators: These are the artisans of your content. They write blog posts, video scenarios, social media content and texts for infographics — anything, really.
Their mission is to come up with captivating, top-notch content.
Editors: Editors polish and perfect the content. They ensure it meets our standards and embodies our brand voice. They also scrutinize grammar, style, and factual accuracy.
Fact checkers: These also can be experts that you’re interviewing within the company to create your content (when needed). Or a separate “gatekeeper of facts”.
Just make sure that what you claim makes sense (and is true in fact).
Localisation experts: Often companies have to localise their content to reach audiences globally.
People approving the content: They are those who sign off on a piece of content and approve it for publishing. Ideally, these should be people who trust the editors to do their job and don’t go into tiny details. Their job is to make sure the text is
Technology and Tools
As we say at Writitude, there’s no consistency without automation. Thankfully, there are a lot of tools (with a different price level) to build your content governance stack.
Content Management Systems (CMS): An efficient CMS will help you organize and publish content effortlessly. It streamlines the process, making it simple to manage various content pieces.
Analytics Tools: Tools like Semrush and Google Analytics or Umami (for more privacy-concious organisations) monitor your content's performance.
They offer insights into what resonates and what falls flat. This data will help you fine-tune your strategy and enhance your content.
Content Governance platform: A tool like Writitude will automate all your content writing guides ensuring compliance and brand voice consistency.
There are over one hundred tone of voice and style consistency rules that you can attach to your guidelines.
Such guides can be shared with all of your content writers, making sure they can access all of the latest changes (because a tone of voice guide is always evolving).
Content Governance in Different Organisations
For large enterprises that manage global content
Having multiple departments writing content, as well as many goals and processes in place, we don’t know how large organisations can even survive without content governance framework in place.
Big companies juggle tasks across various regions and languages. And content management acts as their conductor.
With clear guidelines, they ensure all content harmonizes with the brand's voice and values. This uniformity builds trust worldwide.
Navigating Legal Waters
Following the law is crucial for big companies. From data privacy to advertising standards, they must comply.
Content governance processes keep them on track. They ensure all content meets legal standards, reducing the risk of fines and legal issues.
Enhancing Brand Value
A strong brand is a treasure. Content management helps big companies maintain a spotless brand image.
Consistency in their brand voice and style enhances brand value. It makes the company more recognizable, while it is perceived as more reliable.
For Small and Medium-Sized Businesses (SMBs)
Speeding Up Content Creation
For SMBs, every resource counts. And building the basis for their content governance management is their fast lane.
It provides clear rules, cutting down the time and effort to create content. This efficiency frees them up for other crucial tasks.
Many SMBs also work with outside agencies and freelancers. And sharing their automated brand voice and style guides makes it just so much easier to ensure the content is on-brand.
Maintaining Brand Uniformity
Uniformity is key to a growing brand. Content management ensures all content echoes the brand's voice and values.
This consistency helps SMBs build a recognizable brand. It also builds trust with their followers.
Increasing Brand Presence
A consistent brand image helps SMBs shine in a crowded market. Content management ensures all content aligns with the brand's identity.
There’s no doubt — this alignment boosts brand presence and attracts new customers.
Implementing Content Governance with Writitude
As we were writing, Writitude offers a treasure trove of features for automating any brand voice and content management.
First, the Writitude Wizard helps you craft your brand's tone of voice. This tool guides you through the process, ensuring your tone is clear and consistent.
Next, Writitude provides functionality of creating glossaries of forbidden or essential words that are required in your texts.
These glossaries help you dodge common pitfalls and ensure your content aligns with your brand's rules.
Writitude also includes a library of predefined tone of voice guides that can serve as a basis for building your own tone guide.
This library is a goldmine of resources to help you understand and build your brand's voice. You can tap into these resources to ensure your content is always on-brand.
Use Matcher to match your sample text with the guides from Writitude’s library and copy it to further tune it into your custom tone guide.
Last but not least, Writitude’s Analyzer lets you scrutinize texts and gain insights into relevant tone of voice rules that should be added to your guides.
This tool helps you spot areas for improvement and ensures your content meets your brand's standards.
The platform provides clear rules and tools, making it easy to manage your content. This simplicity saves time and minimizes errors (and there’s a free account to start with!).
Writitude also elevates content. The platform's tools help you produce top-notch content that aligns with your brand's voice. This excellence boosts your brand's credibility.
Writitude ensures tone of voice consistency. The platform's rules and tools help you maintain a consistent tone across all content.
This consistency strengthens your brand's identity and helps you build a loyal following.
How to Implement Content Governance
By following these strategies, you can create a robust content governance framework that supports your business goals and ensures high-quality content.
Ready? Let’s go.
Step 1: Start with a content strategy. What do you need your content for? What type of content?
Outline the goals and the resourses you need to achieve them.
Then, align your content strategy with your business goals. This ensures that every piece of content serves a purpose.
For instance, if your goal is to boost sales, craft content that highlights product benefits. If you aim to build brand awareness, focus on storytelling and brand values. Always ask, "How does this content help achieve our goals?"
Step 2: Next, define clear policies and standards. Go specific — what words you use and don’t use? How do you talk in crises situations? What content formats do you follow? What style rules do you commit to uphold?
Step 3: Based on those decisions, create your brand’s guidelines. These guidelines will steer your creative endeavors. They will maintain a harmonious voice and ensure high quality of your texts. Without them, content can become chaotic and off-brand.
Automate them and share the automated guides with your team.
Step 4: Assign roles, duties and establish the approval process. Clear roles prevent muddle and ensure accountability.
Designate who handles content creation, editing, approval, localisation, fact checking and publishing.
Everyone knows their tasks and deadlines? Great, this is exactly what you want. Use a content calendar to keep track of who does what and when.
Step 5: Monitor and review your content regularly.
Adjust your plan and tone of voice and style guides as needed. Regularly review and update governance practices.
The digital landscape changes fast. What worked last year may not work now.
Schedule regular check-ins to assess your policies, tools, and strategies. Make adjustments to stay current and effective.
Step 6: Utilize Technology and Tools for Efficiency
We must harness technology and tools for efficiency. Content management systems (CMS), project management tools, analytics software or comprehensive content governance tools to streamline our processes.
These tools help us plan, create, and measure content more effectively. They save time and reduce errors.
Ensuring the harmony and consistency of corporate stories is crucial for any company. It keeps a brand message sharp and unmistakable.
Got questions about how Writitude can fit into your content strategy? Let's dive in!
