Proven benefits of a strategic content governance model

Highlights

You’ll learn about the benefits of the content governance model:

SEO enhancement:

• Effective keyword usage
• Well-crafted meta descriptions
• Accurate alt texts
• Strategic internal linking

Improved collaboration:

• Clear roles and responsibilities
• Enhanced teamwork and reduced content management issues

Better planning and execution:

• Efficient resource allocation
• Streamlined campaigns with content calendars

Consistency and quality:

• Adherence to editorial guidelines
• Consistent tone, visual style and writing standards

Transform your content strategy management with a governance model today.

Keep reading to learn more!

Regardless of your business, you’re under constant pressure to create content across various channels—to show your products or services to your target audience. Adding different perspectives to your content and engaging your audience requires creativity, but your so-called “great content” is still missing an important piece. 

It requires discipline in the way you structure and create your content. Maintaining discipline as you scale your business sets you apart from competitors. Business scaling brings in more people, processes, content guidelines and content strategy, resulting in chaos. Only 31% of B2B marketers say their company has the right content management technology. 

That’s where the content governance model works as an antidote to your content chaos.

Let’s understand what the content governance model means. 

What is content governance?

Content governance refers to policies and standards for managing, creating, storing and distributing your digital content. Using a content governance framework, you provide up-to-date, high-quality and curated content for customer engagement. Using a content governance model, you ensure that every piece of your content delivers the message and meets the target audience’s pain points. 

Taking the time to build good content governance models pays off in the long run for every department while reaping desired results for your content marketing across multiple channels and formats. 

For instance, implementing a content governance model will formalize how you create, assign, edit and even approve the various types of content used to promote your products or services. 

In short, a content governance model puts the right protocols so that you produce content that everyone in the team understands:

• What process should be followed to approve new content?
• Which content should be used and created based on the template?
• How do you handle outdated content?
• Which content key performance indicators (KPIs) should be used to measure success?
• What guidelines should be followed before the content reaches the target audience?

Benefits of a content governance model

Content governance is a must for small and large businesses because it makes your content look professional and prevents potential delays in the content production process. Often, good content governance is important because:

Maintains consistency

Multiple people may write, edit and publish different content types—your brand voice and identity may suffer in such a scenario. Using different brand colors on your communication collaterals is sufficient to reduce the brand reputation you created with so much hard work. The content governance model maintains a consistent brand voice and identity across different platforms. 

A governance model makes it easier to follow standard brand and document guidelines for newsletters, social media posts, and press releases. 

Ensures higher quality content

Content production becomes easier when your editors, writers, or marketers have content guidelines at their fingertips because everyone knows what quality standards they need to meet. Content governance is for companies that use multiple sources, such as in-house teams, freelancers, contributors, partners and agencies, to create content.

Case study: How has Contentstack helped LADbible cut editorial time in half and deliver high-quality content?

LADbible Group moved from an outdated in-house content system to Contentstack's headless CMS to meet their fast-paced content requirements. Contentstack's flexible and scalable nature allowed them to integrate smoothly, experiment with new content types and streamline editorial processes—delivering high-quality content.

Key benefits include quick feature rollouts, improved editing efficiency, previewing and scheduling content and a half-hour reduction in editorial process time. LADbible praised Contentstack's support and collaborative approach, resulting in a quicker, cost-effective launch of new content types and a faster editorial workflow.

After using Contentstack, Tom McGiveron, Lead Software Engineer at LADbible said:

“We’re utilizing the freedom that Contentstack gives us to explore new content types and new projects that we just couldn’t have supported with our prior system.”

You can read the case study here. 

Enhances user experience

When your content is accurate, relevant and accessible, you improve user engagement and experience. Users can find the content and information they’re searching for. With a content governance model in place, you monitor the distribution of outdated and duplicate content, which is more likely to create chaos among your customers. 

Improves search engine rankings

Implementing a content governance model enhances your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. With content governance, your content aligns with SEO best practices, such as effective keyword usage, well-crafted meta descriptions, appropriate alt texts and strategic internal linking.

For instance, consider a blog post about the benefits of headless CMS. A strong governance model would use relevant keywords like "Headless CMS benefits" and "Best headless CMSes" throughout the article. It would also ensure that meta descriptions summarize the content, alt texts describe images and internal links connect to other related articles on your website.

Increases workplace collaboration

Teams lacking a clear goal are now aware of their roles and responsibilities and cannot handle issues because they don’t know what to do. One issue that content governance solves is determining the role of each individual in the content planning, creation, execution, publishing and monitoring process. When team members know what value they bring to the table, it strengthens workplace collaboration—resulting in fewer issues during content management. 

Provides better planning

When you have a clear content creation, distribution and management framework, you anticipate needs, efficiently allocate resources and align your content efforts with organizational goals. For instance, a well-documented content governance model allows you to plan content calendars to streamline your campaigns and communications. When you plan your content, you respond to market trends before your competitors.

Steps to build a content governance model

Define your editorial guidelines

Building editorial guidelines streamlines your writing and editing process because they provide clear content standards. The document is the backbone of your content-related work. Primarily, the document focuses on unifying all your content requirements, rules and how-tos. Typically, your style guide includes:

• Tone of voice: Your company's tone defines how you communicate with your target audience. For instance, your voice can be friendly, professional, optimistic, animated, assertive or causal. 
• Visual style: Provide guidelines on how to use images. Every image adheres to a single pattern to create a consistent brand image. You may call it a design book or a book brand. 
• Writing guidelines: Apart from mentioning the writing style, your editorial guidelines include formatting, spelling conventions, symbols, acronyms and punctuation. Writing guidelines can bring structure to your content.
• Content architecture: Content architecture provides a clear structure for your content to increase the user experience. It includes details about the taxonomy, wireframes and templates.

Design content workflows

The next step is creating a content workflow. Content workflows are tasks your content team must complete to finish a piece of content. A well-defined content workflow helps your marketing teams ensure that:

• Content is accurate, timely and consistent.
• Content outcomes and deadlines are achievable.
• Roles and responsibilities are clearly outlined so team members understand their tasks.
• The content meets the marketing strategy and business objectives.
• Content goes through multiple checks, like editing and proofreading.

A content workflow typically includes four stages:

• Strategy: This step ensures that everything matches your overall marketing plan. Analyze your audience's demographics, preferences and behaviors to know them. 
• Creation: Start with thorough research to gather all the relevant information and insights to back up your content. This ensures accuracy and value. Write initial drafts and include your findings and creative ideas to craft engaging narratives. 
• Revision: Review and edit to ensure clarity, coherence and accuracy. During the revision, correct your grammar, spelling and punctuation errors to keep your content professional. 
• Publication: Choose the best platforms for distributing and publishing your content. You can publish your content on your website, social media or email. Plan and schedule publication dates to ensure a consistent flow of content.

Assign roles and responsibilities

After designing your content workflow, allocate responsibilities for each stage. For instance, one team member reviews while another manages your content calendar. Develop a game plan for your internal content team, which comprises content managers, strategists, writers, SEO specialists, editors, designers, creators and leaders. When every team member understands their responsibilities, they write content that captures the intent and directs customers to take specific actions.

Implement tools and technologies

The right tools and technologies help you deliver the right type of content at the right time. Some tools are:

• Workflow and task management tools
• Content automation tools
• Editorial content calendar tools
• Digital asset management (DAM)
• Communication tools

Review and improve

Even if your content governance model is perfect, it requires constant review and thorough maintenance. As business processes change, review and improve your content regularly. To enhance your content governance processes, ask your team for input and analyze the performance metrics to identify areas for improvement. Adjust your brand guidelines, workflows, roles and tools to enhance efficiency and maintain high-quality standards.

Tools for content governance

Contentstack

Contentstack is the only MACH-certified headless CMS that empowers enterprises with the necessary flexibility and agility. It supports complex content structures. This tool is suitable for enterprises that have a composable digital experience architecture. Its user interface is easy, allowing developers and non-technical users to use it conveniently. Contentstack is scalable and offers fully extensible workflows, built-in governance, granular user permissions and superior security.

Contentful

While Contentful is known for its strong API integrations and customizable content model, it falls short of Contentstack's comprehensive capabilities. Contentful supports multi-language and localization essential for global operations and offers rich media management features. But it does not match Contentstack's advanced governance, security features and scalable nature. 

Sitecore

Sitecore is another CMS with built-in marketing functionality that provides personalization and customer analytics features. It offers multi-site, multi-lingual and reviewing features. In comparison, Contentstack is a more flexible and efficient solution offering a simple, user-friendly interface. Developers, marketers and business managers without technical know-how can use Contentstack.

Acquia Drupal

Acquia Drupal is an open-source CMS. It provides a secure and scalable solution for companies of all sizes. It offers flexibility and has a strong community, but the tool requires extensive coding knowledge which is not the case with Contentstack.

FAQs

What defines a content governance model?

A content governance model provides policies, processes, roles and responsibilities for managing content processes. It includes stages like content creation, approval, distribution and strategies.

How does a CMS governance model differ?

CMS (content management system) solves issues related to the governance and regulation of content within a CMS platform. Conversely, a content governance model provides a framework and focuses on the infrastructure for content management. A content governance model helps you manage technical aspects such as user permission, content workflows and system configurations. 

What are the primary goals of content governance?

The primary goals of content governance include:

• Maintaining consistency
• Enhancing efficiency
• Upholding compliance
• Driving quality
• Enhancing collaboration

What elements constitute a governance model?

The key elements are

• Editorial guidelines
• Content workflows
• Roles and responsibilities
• Tools and technologies
• Review

Learn more

Building an effective content governance model is a struggle, but what’s even more challenging is sticking to the plan. As a headless content management system (CMS), Contentstack empowers your business to stay with its content governance plan. 

With Contentstack, your team meets common content goals, streamlines content creation processes and enables collaboration across departments. If you want to improve your content governance model, talk to us today.