In today’s fast-paced sales landscape, empowering your team with the right content is crucial. Quality content fuels meaningful conversations with buyers and drives deals forward. Yet, with a growing army of content creators – from internal subject matter experts and marketing teams to eager salespeople – information overload and inconsistency can quickly become a barrier to success. According to The Value of Enablement Report published by Seismic, sellers spend nearly 10 hours per week tracking down content.
Is your team equipped to manage content sprawl across your systems? Are there clear guidelines and rules for content creators? If not, it’s time to implement a content governance framework. This framework ensures that the content available to sellers is high-quality, aligned with sales goals, and readily available to your team at the right moment.
Unsure where to start or who should be involved? In this post, we’ll share content governance best practices and tips for developing a framework to control your content creation and management process.
Who to include in your content governance committee
First, select the key stakeholders who will help develop your organization’s framework. Leaders from your content creation teams are a great place to start and should drive the agenda of each content governance committee meeting. Other important personas to include:
- Executive sponsorship – Much like any new initiative, one of the biggest keys to success is leadership’s endorsement and support. When leaders are bought in, you are more likely to get the cooperation and support needed from the rest of the organization. According to Prosci, the effectiveness of new initiatives more than doubles, jumping from 33% to 72% with adequate access to an executive sponsor.
- Training and enablement teams – These teams will be responsible for onboarding and upskilling users on the content available to them. Ensuring consistency in naming conventions and taxonomy of training content and related customer-facing content will minimize confusion and help sellers connect the materials.
- Compliance and legal – The input of the compliance teams is paramount to setting rules and requirements for content creation. Understanding what makes something compliant and the timing around content approval and publishing should be included in any framework.
- IT – If your content requires any sort of inbound or outbound content sync, the technical resources who establish those syncs are vital – they ensure requirements are met to securely bring content into and out of the platform.
- Sales users – Collecting feedback from sellers will lead to two-fold success. The first success KPI is an increase in the adoption of the framework as they create their own content, resulting in more on-brand, on-message materials. The second KPI is content usage, as creators leverage feedback to make content more seller friendly.
The voices and collaboration of these personas are crucial to growing credibility and support of the framework across the organization. Early on, this group should meet at least monthly to track the status of initiatives and progress on action items.
Topics to address throughout the content governance process
Content governance can be an extremely broad topic and apply to many areas of the business. Establishing a defined scope for the initial governance framework is key to a successful launch. Here are some areas you may want your governance framework to focus on:
- Content metadata – Understand how sellers expect content to be categorized and how to reconcile that with categorization requirements from marketing teams and legal/compliance teams. Prioritize standardizing this metadata across your tech stack (DAMs, CRM) early on – a consistent tagging structure will be key to seller success in surfacing content.
- Content findability – Are your sellers struggling to find the content they need in a timely manner? Tagging and organization, and the methods in which content is surfaced to sellers (i.e. profiles, pages, search, etc.) are decisions that should be covered in an initial framework. Conduct a findability survey and establish a yearly cadence to focus your team on areas where sellers are struggling.
- Content performance – Establish a cadence for audits of published content. How often content is being viewed by sellers or being sent to customers are key indicators of quality. Conducting quarterly audits will ensure content stays fresh and up to date.
- Content ownership – While decentralized content ownership leads to a faster time to market and higher content quality, it can be a challenge to track who is responsible for each piece of content. Documenting ownership will make the content audit process smoother and faster. Once initial ownership is established and documented, conducting an ownership audit yearly is recommended.
Each of these topics will help you establish the consistency needed to create high quality content that is easy to find.
How to measure framework success
In today’s world, data points drive decision-making for leaders and help us better understand the effectiveness of our efforts. While anecdotal feedback can clarify sentiment around an initiative, the true measures of success for leadership will be in the improvement of key metrics. Let’s look at some important KPIs available in Seismic and other connected systems.
- Within Seismic – Through the LiveInsights tab in Seismic, there are dashboards and widgets readily available that relate directly to areas of governance. For example, the Content Audit dashboard offers recommendations for reviewing and archiving content based on performance. Widgets in the Search Dashboard like “Searches Without Results” and “Not Clicked Searches” can be good indicators about the findability of content.
Content Audit Dashboard:
Search Dashboard:
- Other systems – Creating and distributing a content findability survey is a fantastic way to collect data. Ask questions like “How do you find content in Seismic?” and “How would you rate the usefulness of each filter category?” The resulting answers will give this committee a deeper understanding of how sellers plan to surface content, what pieces of the governance initiatives work well, and which need to be optimized.
For the data available within and outside of Seismic, creating a baseline should be a key first initiative of the governance framework. Making measurements and data analysis an iterative process will help guide the actions of the governance committee and help demonstrate the success of their efforts.
Benefits of content governance to the business
Yes, it is important to stay organized. But a governance program can bring value to the business beyond classifying content. Here are some of the outcomes and why they are valuable to the business:
- Enhancing the seller experience – When sellers have a seamless experience that is standardized with the other tools they use (i.e. LMS tool, CRM tool), they will make it a part of their everyday routine, driving a higher adoption rate within the platform.
- Enhancing content findability – Sellers spend less time searching for and surfacing content and more time building relationships with their customers, leading to faster sales cycles and bigger deals.
- Breaking down silos across the organization – Give teams across the organization a formalized means of communication and collaboration leading to better cross-functional work.
- Proactive decision-making for content creators – Rather than waiting for anecdotal feedback from the field, marketing teams can access data in real-time to target their creation efforts on content types that resonate with sellers and customers.
Giving your sellers an intuitive and easy-to-use content library that seamlessly integrates with their other tools – while improving collaboration across teams and offering a means for data-based decision-making – is exactly what it means to control the chaos and start driving transformation within your organization.
As we conclude, keep these guiding principles in mind as you create your content governance framework in support of your programs:
- Quality of content is more important than quantity
- Adhering to a Global Standardized Taxonomy across platforms is key for content relevance
- Take a seller-centric approach to classifying content
- Standardized reporting surfaces content utilization and customer engagement over time
- Make feedback an iterative process – talk to your users with a regular cadence
If your organization needs recommendations on the first steps to create this essential framework and scale your enablement efforts, please reach out to your account team at Seismic today – our Strategic Advisory and Solution Consultants can help.
