What is content governance and why does it matter?

Client-facing teams are under more pressure than ever to send relevant, personalized content to their books of business. However, too many organizations are still putting the onus on their sellers to find — or worse, create — their own sales collateral. This exposes organizations to immense risk and leaves frontline teams digging through droves of existing assets, only to find and send dated, ineffective content.

With haphazard content practices like these, governance is nearly impossible. Plus, marketing teams are left in the dark and have no way of knowing which content resonates or how often assets are being used. This is a no-win situation that results in: 

• Client-facing teams wasting time digging through dated assets.
• Clients receiving lackluster, irrelevant content from sellers and advisors.
• The inability for compliance managers to monitor what sellers on the frontlines are sending.
• Marketing teams that don’t have clarity about what messaging is landing in the market.

Thankfully, there’s a better way: content governance. 

What is content governance?

This is the formal content governance definition we use here at Seismic: Content governance is a framework that establishes the roles in content creation and maintenance, the standards that will be adhered to, and the processes in place to ensure high-quality, up-to-date, and curated content for buyer engagement. 

In short, content governance is about excellently overseeing your organization’s sales content marketing strategy. It’s what protects prospective and current clients from seeing outdated, irrelevant content, and it’s what protects organizations from putting their name on non-compliant, off-brand collateral.

Why is content governance important?

Without content governance, organizations suffer from challenges that negatively impact their revenue. Three of the biggest ones are:

Misalignment

Unsurprisingly, mixed messaging about what content should or shouldn’t be used makes client-facing teams skeptical of new initiatives and, subsequently, delays results. A content governance framework aligns entire go-to-market (GTM) organizations by establishing standards that ensure everyone’s using messaging and content that’s directly connected to desired business outcomes.

Seller productivity

A lack of content governance leads to seller frustration, confusion, and lost deals. When frontline teams don’t feel like they have on-brand, relevant content to share with their clients throughout their different deal stages, they’re between a rock and a hard place: they can spend copious amounts of time creating mediocre content, or just accept that they don’t have relevant content to share. This hurts morale and reduces productivity. But by offering well-governed sales content via an enablement platform, reps have the content they need at their fingertips.

Content chaos

We’ve been in the sales content management space too long not to know this: Where there is content sprawl, there is confusion. Content chaos hurts both sales and marketing team performance, but thankfully a good content governance model leads to a stronger partnership between the two departments. A content governance process ensures any piece of content someone finds in their sales content management system (CMS) is compliant, customizable, and current. This reduces seller friction and gives marketers the insights they need to create more of what works. 

How to create an effective content governance framework

Wondering what it looks like to implement content governance best practices? An effective content governance framework needs a healthy mix of strategy, technology, people, and process. There’s no one-size-fits-all way to roll out a governance program, but there are three vital elements of the best programs we’ve seen. These are:

1. Establish and define roles and responsibilities

Ending content chaos starts with a clear delegation of tasks and ownership. Together as a sales and marketing organization, agree upon permissions around who can create content, who can edit content, who should review and approve content, and who should audit and clean up content periodically. 

By sorting people neatly into these four buckets, organizations can provide adequate training and enablement for each role so everyone understands their scope of work and responsibilities.

2. Design content workflows and processes 

Once everyone knows their role, it’s time to make the creation, approval, sending, and archiving of content a repeatable process. That’s easier said than done, but this list of questions and considerations is a good place to start:

• Do we have clear definitions of what content is and is not appropriate for our brand?
• How do we want to train our content owners? How often do we want to deploy training?
• What are our content expiration standards, and who’s responsible for archiving content?
• How frequently should we conduct content audits? Who should be involved?
• What consistent naming convention do we want to use?
• Do we want to provide promotion or use-case guidelines for each piece of collateral?
• If content is customizable on a client-by-client basis, how do we communicate that?

Answering these questions — and sticking to those answers — is much more manageable with sales enablement tools, and we’ll touch on that later in this explainer.

3. Create policies, standards, and procedures

This element of a content governance framework is really just the deployment of the workflows and processes you establish based on your answers to the questions above. Stack hands internally on what the ideal state of your content creation, approval, and sending would look like, and then turn those best practices into concrete policies and consistent procedures. 

A successful implementation of new content processes will directly impact the quality of content in your broader organization. 

Quick reminder: Don’t forget to establish a few metrics for success up front to track the impact and ROI of your content management and governance efforts.

The value of a sales enablement tool

For a content governance strategy to turn into action, companies need a robust, well-integrated sales enablement tool. 

The findings in the Seismic 2023 Value of Enablement Report confirm this. After surveying 600+ respondents in sales, customer success, and enablement roles, we learned that without enablement technology:

• Reps spend an average of 10 hours per week tracking down, comparing, or revising content,
• 83% are often unable to locate the content they need when interacting with prospects and or clients, and 
• 90% of those who don’t have access to the correct content say they find themselves comparing versions.

Inefficiency reigns supreme without the right technology in place. However, with a sales enablement platform, organizations streamline and scale their governance efforts because client-facing teams only have access to the latest versions of content, and all of them are compliant, on-brand, and approved for use.

Benefits of content governance

Organizations with effective governance experience several benefits, but for time’s sake, we’ll focus on these three:

1. Improved content quality: Well-governed content is higher quality, period. From pre-approved customizable templates to simplified versioning, content governance processes equip client-facing teams to surface, personalize, and send only top-notch content. With a sales content management solution, teams can even integrate with their favorite tools — like Salesforce, SalesLoft, Outlook, Adobe Experience Manager, and more — to generate compliant, specific content on a client-by-client basis.

2. Increases content usage and ROI: Did you know only 60% of content created by B2B organizations goes unused in the field? This is often due to two reasons: most sales content is unfindable, and most sales content is unusable. A content governance framework ensures client-facing reps only see and share high-value, high-impact collateral. When it’s all stored in one place, they can stop browsing SharePoint and Google Drive for that PDF from last April and find what they need in seconds in their content management system.

3. Improve seller productivity and efficiency: 97% of respondents from the Seismic 2023 Value of Enablement Report cited quick access to the right information as something that helps them speak to clients from an informed standpoint. With faster access to better answers, it’s no wonder sellers are more productive and efficient with well-governed content.

Control content chaos with Seismic

Content governance is something Seismic handles for thousands of organizations around the globe, and we could handle it for your organization, too. 

Take our customer, Citrix, for example. They’ve used our robust enterprise content management software to review and approve more than 4,000 documents, pages, and links; all content uploads and updates go through one of three approval workflows to ensure everything’s on-brand and compliant before any of it ever is available to their base of 2,000 sellers and 200,000 resellers. This is what scalable, simplified content governance looks like. 

Think Seismic could make your dream content governance plan a reality? Schedule a no-pressure demo today to find out.