Financial Services, Marketing
What is content governance and why does it matter?
By Seismic On November 1, 2023
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Financial Services, Marketing
By Seismic On November 1, 2023
Let's explore what content governance is and how — with the right strategy and tools in place — your clients could always receive relevant, compliant, and effective content.
When it comes to delivering effective and engaging content, many client-facing teams are left to their own devices. But, this is inefficient for sellers and poses numerous risks for organizations. In this article, we'll explain how organizations can benefit from content governance and build a framework that ends content chaos once and for all.
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:
Thankfully, there's a better way: 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 It's what protects prospective and current clients from seeing outdated, irrelevant content, and it's what protects organizations from putting their name on non-compliant, off-brand collateral.
Without content governance, organizations suffer from challenges that negatively impact their revenue. Three of the biggest ones are:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
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.
Reps spend an average of 10 hours per week tracking down, comparing, or revising content.
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:
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.
Organizations with effective governance experience several benefits, but for time's sake, we'll focus on these three:
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.
