Digital content governance is the system or set of guidelines for how content gets created and published. From the chief product officer to the managing editor, digital and editorial leads alike can benefit from strong content governance through a unified content management system (CMS).
On the one hand, digital leads are responsible for managing their brand’s narrative in an online ecosystem, while the editorial team is concerned with creating the right workflows to ensure content creation and review is quick, efficient, and translates to meaningful output. In both cases, a strong digital content strategy and framework helps to create a consistent brand voice and consolidate content workflows in the process.
Content governance as the key to brand consistency
Digital leads know brand consistency is number one in order to promote a positive image, increase visibility and exposure, reinforce brand narratives, and strengthen engagement. They benefit from speed and flexibility that allows them to quickly launch, test, and update new digital experiences in order to deliver value faster. To maintain brand consistency—especially in a time of rapid change—digital teams also want solutions and processes that can accommodate shifting business requirements, for example, updating a workflow, launching an international site, or supporting new content types.
Through content governance, businesses define specific guidelines, processes, roles, and responsibilities. When this infrastructure is in place, tasks like updating workflows or introducing new content types are quicker and easier for digital teams. Here, however, is where the importance of digital content governance through a unified CMS is important. When you have multiple content management systems in place, this leads to various different workflows and ways of doing, resulting in a slightly different user experience across separate CMS systems even when branding guidelines have been met.
With Brightspot, content governance through a unified CMS gives one single framework and source of truth for digital teams to follow. Brightspot also provides organizations and publishers with the ability to control and modify taxonomies to ensure content and editorial pillars are consistent and remain relevant.
Content governance for smoother workflows
For editorial teams, producing meaningful content is key to customer engagement—and these groups know that the ability to make such content starts with having the right people and processes in place. Editorial leads lean on consistent workflows to ensure content is quickly reviewed, edited, and published. They also want the ability to scale content creation and support a heavy volume of output.
A key component of digital content governance is just this—assigning ownership and creating a framework to enable smooth decision-making. Content governance allows editorial teams to establish publishing guidelines, author permissions, and editorial style guides to keep everyone aligned—and it’s again best done through a unified CMS. With Brightspot’s built-in planning tools, for example, editorial teams can collect the best stories, assign them to content creators and track progress all from one place. These defined roles and processes mean greater efficiency across the team, and the ability to quickly scale operations as content businesses grow. Should the editorial team identify something in their workflow that needs to be updated in order to strengthen engagement, these changes can easily be identified and made. Other solutions like Brightspot’s embedded DAM can help with content governance by tracking the usage of certain digital assets, for example, or ensure gated access to certain critical brand assets.
From maintaining brand consistency to enabling more seamless workflows, content governance has many advantages for digital and editorial teams. With Brightspot, organizations and publishers can benefit from content governance and implement a strong content strategy through a unified CMS that enables changes to be made quickly to keep up with evolving business needs.
