The Missing Ingredient of Content Governance is…

In enterprise-scale organizations, governance is a necessity. Shared, centralized services can filter disparate groups’ efforts to maintain consistency, efficiency, and efficacy as well as compliance and overall quality.

Content operations share these same challenges, and more. But what does enterprise governance for content look like?

‍What is enterprise governance for content?

At its core, content governance is the framework that ensures your content strategy aligns with your business outcomes. It encompasses the policies, guidelines, operations, and standards that shape how a company’s content is created, managed, and maintained across the organization. 

‍What issues befall content governance?

In a variety of organizational structures, including those that are heavily matrixed, marketing in general and content in specific face internal hurdles including fragmented processes, different tools, siloed teams, and lack of overall visibility into enterprise activities. 

Content quality is often not defined and frequently misunderstood.  What is good enough for some, is unacceptable to others.

Governance, then, broadly seeks to provide and enact ‘rules of the road’ to enable scalable guidelines for multiple content teams across the organization, and to more finitely, provide approval or rejection – and importantly, the reasoning and correction -- of the content efforts of any line of business or stakeholder team. 

‍Enterprise efforts for content governance 

In order to introduce standards and best practices for enterprise content and to ensure adherence to these guidelines, we have seen many Knotch clients stand up various management operations toward content governance:

#1: Editorial Board

With representation across content creation, channels, and lines of business (LOB), the Editorial Board may establish and maintain the content calendar, content pillars, and creative review. Focus here is on individual pieces of content and how these adhere to brand tone, thematic threads, and overall quality of content, along with managing resources such as the Editorial Calendar, allowing for sharing across the organization. 

#2: Content Acceleration Team

Made up of strategic-oriented stakeholders as well as leaders from editorial, campaigns, brand, demand, and customer marketing functions, the Content Acceleration Team (CAT) focuses on governing and integrating content efforts across these stakeholders and their LOBs to ensure optimal use and reuse of content. The CAT protects from “random acts of content,” so that there is a strategic plan to not only create content, but to activate it to prospects, customers, and throughout the organization.

#3: Marketing Leadership Organization

Ensures content, along with all other marketing operations, align for highest-level utilization toward ultimate business outcomes and plans.

#4: Content Center of Excellence

Centralized content hub setting strategy and guidelines for content throughout the organization. The CoE is often also services-based, with content creation flowing through a team of writers, designers, and strategists – all on behalf of the requesting LOB teams.

These bodies also utilize tools for content governance, including:

• Editorial calendars
• Content creative guidelines
• Brand guidelines
• Content request briefs
• Persona templates
• Other best practices guidance

‍Governance needs and examples

Knotch clients are enterprise organizations with broad content ecosystems. They stand up these and other governance functions to oversee content and content-related operations. Examples include:

• ServiceNow enlists a Marketing Leadership Organization to monitor both content to be created as well as content to be retired. They look to usefulness of content for prospects and customers, as well as usage by sales and marketing.
• Novartis established a Content Lab focused on three core areas of focus: production efficiency & automation, editorial quality, and content strategy for the company’s U.S. commercial brands.
• Synchrony has established both an Editorial Council to vet creative ideas across the organization, as well as a Center of Excellence to oversee content tagging, taxonomy, and measurement.‍
• KPMG utilizes their internal agency as a Center of Excellence to ensure content journeys are being planned for and embraced by multiple business units, and that content is written to fulfill journey requirements.

Other client governance efforts oversee adherence to content brand standards, social content standards, SEO and keyword management, the use of AI in content, and more.

‍The operations of governance

While it’s clear that governance of various content functions throughout an enterprise organization is necessary, it may be unclear how that governance should be put into action. With a goal to ‘democratize’ content activities across a broad internal ecosystem, governing bodies face a variety of scenarios:

• A product marketer wants to create more content about a new product update and place it in the blog.
• A senior executive’s pet project team requests thought leadership be created for a topic outside of the editorial calendar’s established content pillars.
• A CFO feels there’s plenty of content, hoping to slash both production and promotion budgets – not seeing the connection to their revenue goals.
• A CMO wants to try TikTok to make the brand seem more relevant to a younger audience.
• A COO yearns to try AI-generated content for increased speed and decreased cost.
• A centralized content team drowns in requests, and feels like a fast-food drive through – with little power to report what really helps move the needle.

The governing bodies are faced with how to govern. 

Mature content organizations have the responsibility to educate and optimize for efficiency and effectiveness. That is, more than a ‘who’s right,’ content governance should embrace a ‘what’s right’ approach. Each is charged with YES and NO, approve/reject, fund/deny decisions. 

But what guides their decisions? What guides governance? 

Most successful governing bodies in history have a True North for guidance, be it a constitution, a ‘rules of the road,’ commandments, etc. Something to always refer to.

‍A mature content organization focuses on what’s right. 

“What’s right,” then, is best served by a clear, dispassionate, and aligned approach to understanding what the enterprises’ goals are and if they are being achieved through the content. 

“I like,” “I want,” “I feel” should never enter into the conversation of content governance. 

“What does the data show?” should. 

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What to do, how to do it, and why do it.

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And scientific proof must support overall content intelligence.

‍Content intelligence is the North Star

Content intelligence is derived from the analysis of content performance that provides insights about audience behaviors and attitudes, and their journey with an organization. It evaluates specific themes, topics, and content types to see which are supportive of the brand and its demand, which may be damaging to goals, and which do nothing – except sap money and resources. Knotch data analysis suggests that for most enterprises’ content efforts, up to 30% of their content actually has negative impact, and another 28% has no discernable impact at all. 

And for content governance, content intelligence becomes The North Star, the constitution, the deciding factor on all decisions to do with content. 

Understanding what works for audiences and what doesn’t fuels not only governance boards’ decisions, but provides the foundation upon which all guidelines, best practices, charters, blueprints, and standards are built and maintained. It allows for a truly objective approach to governance of content activities, not simply subjective. Facts over feelings.

Knotch’s Content Intelligence Platform uncovers what content is working, and why, so content marketers can spend less time guessing and more time acting. See the missing ingredient in content governance here.