In today's fast-paced online world, there is an ever-increasing demand for digital content as it provides huge economic opportunities for companies around the globe. According to Statista, global content marketing revenues will reach $88 billion in 2023 and are projected to increase to $137 billion in 2026.
As content marketing quickly becomes complex, enterprises need a content governance framework to ensure that their digital content meets the needs of their target audience while supporting an organization's business goals.
#What is content governance?
Content governance is the process of managing and organizing a company's digital content in a consistent and efficient manner. The goal of content governance is to ensure that the content is accurate, relevant, and meets the needs of a target audience. It also helps ensure that the content complies with legal and ethical standards and supports a company’s business goals.
#What is the difference between content governance and content strategy?
Content strategy and content governance share overlapping elements. However, they are not the same. Both concepts aim to structure digital content to consistently reach the target audience and create value. The main difference between both approaches is the level at which they operate along the content lifecycle.
A digital content strategy involves designing a plan for the creation, delivery, and management of all content, including text, images, videos, and audio, across all of a company's digital channels. It determines how content is used within your company to meet its business goals and motivate consumers to take action.
Content governance, on the other hand, is focused on the management and organization of digital content. It defines rules for how a digital content strategy is executed and can be seen as the management level of your organization's overall content strategy.
#Why is content governance important for your business?
Content governance is important for your business because it helps ensure that digital content is accurate, relevant, and consistent with your company's goals and values. Content needs to be structured, or in this case, governed by clear methods to meet these criteria.
The need for creating content for multiple channels like blogs, social media networks, podcasts, and more, leads to a high level of complexity as more people get involved in the creation and distribution of such content. This is where content governance, in addition to content strategy, comes into play. It provides the necessary structure and guidance to serve customers reliably with relevant content and meet your company’s business goals.
#Benefits of content governance
Improved user experience
By ensuring that content is accurate, relevant, and accessible, content governance can help improve the user experience and increase engagement with your audience as it makes it easier for users to find the information they need.
Additionally, content governance can help prevent the distribution of duplicate or outdated content, which reduces confusion and frustration for users.
Increased efficiency
With clear policies and procedures in place, content governance can streamline content creation and management, reducing the time and resources required to manage digital content.
By improving the organization and management of content, content governance can help companies to increase their efficiency and achieve their content goals more effectively.
Better decision-making and collaboration
By having a clear understanding of your content and its impact, content governance can support better decision-making and help ensure that content supports your business goals.
Content governance can improve collaboration between different departments and teams within your organization by aligning all content stakeholders on content creation and distribution goals.
Consistent branding
Content governance can help ensure that all of your company's digital content is consistent in terms of tone, style, and messaging. Furthermore, it can improve brand recognition and awareness.
Improved Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Content governance can help improve SEO by ensuring that content is optimized and structured, making it easier for search engines to index and rank your content.
#How to create a content governance plan?
A well-designed content governance plan is essential for organizations looking to streamline their content operations and achieve their content marketing goals. A content governance plan is a set of guidelines, processes, and policies for creating, managing and publishing digital content. It helps to manage complexity, overcome obstacles and ensure consistency, quality, and compliance in your content operations.
In the following section, we will walk you through the steps and best practices to implement an effective content governance plan.
#Steps to an effective content governance plan
#Define your goals and objectives
The first step in creating a content governance plan is to determine the goals and outcomes you want to achieve with your content. You can start by reviewing your existing content including your distribution channels. This will help you identify what is working so far and where there is room for improvement. Improving brand recognition or increasing customer engagement can be goals for your content, but there are also many others.
#Establish a content team and define clear roles
Creating and distributing content usually involves a broad range of team members with different tasks and skills within your company. The goal is to build a content team that fulfills a strategic, operational, and specialist function.
In your content team, you need writers, editors, strategists, data analysts, SEO specialists, and more. Go thoroughly through the list of departments and assemble a team responsible for creating, publishing, and maintaining your content.
Once you’ve identified your content stakeholders, it is important to give them clear roles and responsibilities.
Design your content workflows
Once you have assembled your content team, it is time to design your content workflows. Your content workflow is the process of creating, reviewing, publishing, and maintaining digital content. It involves a set of procedures that manage the entire content lifecycle from planning, creating, reviewing, publishing, approving, and maintaining.
An effective content workflow helps ensure that content is produced efficiently and meets high-quality standards while also enabling organizations to track the progress of their content creation efforts. Develop policies and procedures
To ensure that your digital content is consistent, it is necessary to establish a set of standards and policies on how content will be created, reviewed, and approved. These standards guide how frequently content will be published, by which criteria the quality of content will be assessed, and if it reflects the company's tone.
Developing content policies and procedures is not a top-down process. Make sure to include your content team members in this process and synthesize their input into workable content standards. This should include for example a content style guide, editorial guidelines, and a content calendar.
Communicate your plan
While this might seem obvious, it is important to make sure that all of your team members receive and understand the content governance plan. Guidelines and procedures can be precise but are only effective when internalized. Each team member has to know their role in executing it and have an understanding of the role of their colleagues within the content governance plan.
Choose a technology solution
Technology solutions can advance your overall content governance and are essential for your content workflows. A modern content management system (CMS) like Hygraph can enable teams to overcome project blockers, run ambitious projects smoothly, and scale.
To make these benefits more tangible, let's look at a case study that shows how Hygraph helped Samsung improve its content workflows, user engagement, and project efficiency.
As Samsung’s Members platform, a loyalty program that grew over the years, the CMS of the platform was no longer capable of meeting its needs. Hygraph’s API-driven headless approach helped Samsung to improve content update efficiency and allocation of tasks between frontend and backend developers so that each team can focus on their tasks. In addition, with the help of Hygraph, Samsung Germany has overcome global content governance barriers in the form of lengthy local request processes.
Other technology-based tools that can help companies successfully execute their content governance are Jamstack or best-of-breed microservices.
Regularly evaluate your content governance plan
Your content governance plan is not a static model. Once you’ve established it, you should regularly check whether your workflows and procedures are meeting your goals. A good way to do that is by asking your team members if parts of your content governance plan can be streamlined or improved.
#What’s next
Creating a content governance plan might seem like a big endeavor. But once you have it in place, you will reap the benefits from your content marketing efforts. Coupled with a next-generation CMS, your company will have the framework and technology in place to successfully execute your content strategy.
Hygraph is a headless CMS that enables you to create, enrich, and deliver content programmatically at scale by using a powerful GraphQL API to distribute content to any front. As a content federation platform, it enables content teams to produce consistent content at speed and ease. You can define roles for team members or external collaborators and define access rights for reading or modifying content.
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