How do you leverage content governance and roles to improve content quality and consistency?

1 What is content governance?

Content governance is the framework that guides your content strategy, creation, delivery, and evaluation. It includes the policies, guidelines, workflows, tools, and metrics that ensure your content meets your business goals and user needs. Content governance helps you align your content with your brand voice, tone, style, and accessibility standards. It also helps you optimize your content for search engines, performance, and security.

2 What are content roles?

Content roles are essential in the content lifecycle, as they define who is responsible for what, when, and how. Depending on the organization size, structure, and culture, these roles can vary. Common content roles include the content strategist, who sets the content vision and oversees the governance framework; the content manager, who coordinates production and ensures quality and consistency; the content creator, who produces content based on strategy and guidelines; the content editor, who reviews and edits for clarity; the content marketer, who promotes and distributes across digital channels; and the content analyst, who measures effectiveness and provides insights.

3 Why are content governance and roles important?

Content governance and roles are essential for creating and managing content that is relevant, useful, engaging, and trustworthy for your audience. Without them, issues such as content duplication, content silos, content inconsistency, and content decay can arise, which can confuse users, harm SEO ranking, reduce visibility and reach, damage brand reputation and credibility, and reduce content value and authority.

4 How do you leverage content governance and roles?

To leverage content governance and roles, you need to follow some best practices. Establishing your content goals and audience is essential to ensure that your content is aligned with your business objectives and user expectations. Additionally, it's important to document your content governance framework in a clear and comprehensive document that outlines policies, guidelines, workflows, tools, and metrics. Assigning and communicating your content roles is also necessary in order to provide the necessary training and support. Lastly, you should monitor and improve your content governance and roles by regularly reviewing and evaluating them, as well as collecting feedback from your content team, stakeholders, and users to improve the quality and consistency of your content.

5 What are some common challenges and how to overcome them?

Content governance and roles may be met with resistance or indifference from stakeholders who don't see the value or need of them. To combat this, it's important to demonstrate the benefits and impact of content governance and roles, and involve stakeholders in the process. Additionally, you may not have enough time, budget, or talent to implement and maintain your content governance and roles. To address this, prioritize your content governance activities, and leverage existing or external resources or skills. Lastly, conflicting or unclear expectations or goals between stakeholders may lead to siloed work or different tools or systems. To combat this, align and communicate your content vision and strategy, and foster a culture of collaboration and transparency among stakeholders.

6 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?