How do you create and uphold content standards for your team?

1 Define your content goals

Before you set your content standards, you need to know what you want to achieve with your content. What are your business objectives, brand values, and user personas? How do you measure your content performance and impact? How do you align your content strategy with your overall marketing and communication goals? These questions will help you define your content goals and identify the key criteria for evaluating your content quality.

2 Establish your content style guide

A content style guide is a document that outlines the rules and best practices for writing, editing, and formatting your content. It covers aspects such as voice, tone, grammar, punctuation, spelling, word choice, headings, lists, links, images, and more. A content style guide helps you ensure that your content is consistent, coherent, and credible across all channels and platforms. It also helps you avoid common errors and confusion that can affect your content readability and usability.

3 Create your content templates and checklists

Content templates and checklists are tools that help you structure and organize your content according to your content standards. Content templates are predefined formats that specify the elements, layout, and design of your content types, such as blog posts, landing pages, newsletters, etc. Content checklists are lists of items that you need to verify before you publish or update your content, such as keywords, metadata, accessibility, SEO, etc. Content templates and checklists help you save time, reduce errors, and maintain consistency and quality in your content production and maintenance.

4 Train and educate your team

Creating and upholding content standards is not a one-time task. It requires ongoing training and education for your team members who are involved in creating, editing, reviewing, or managing content. You need to communicate your content standards clearly and regularly to your team and provide them with the resources and support they need to follow them. You also need to encourage feedback and collaboration among your team and foster a culture of content excellence and accountability.

5 Conduct regular content audits and reviews

Content standards are not static. They need to evolve and adapt to the changing needs and expectations of your audience, market, and industry. That's why you need to conduct regular content audits and reviews to assess the quality, relevance, and effectiveness of your content. Content audits and reviews help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your content, spot gaps and opportunities, and prioritize improvements and updates. They also help you measure the results and impact of your content and refine your content goals and standards accordingly.

6 Use content management tools and systems

Content management tools and systems are software applications that help you create, store, manage, and distribute your content. They can help you automate and streamline some of the tasks and processes involved in upholding your content standards, such as editing, formatting, checking, approving, publishing, updating, etc. They can also help you monitor and analyze your content performance and feedback and provide you with insights and recommendations to improve your content quality and strategy.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?