Content is the core of customer experience. A company’s product or service may be phenomenal, but if the company’s content – marketing, messaging, customer service communications, product documentation, or even the voice and style of the brand – is poorly written or unfocused, you’ll struggle to engage customers. to attract and retain.
That’s where content governance comes into play. It involves a systematic approach to measuring the status of your current content and actively guiding content creation to achieve your stated goals, such as more newsletter signups or higher conversion rates. Content governance systems take the key elements of a style guide and content strategy into even more thorough, actionable, and holistic frameworks for your entire business. Going beyond strategy, it uses AI and NLP to generate actionable advice on how to improve content.
The biggest benefit of this is content that inspires trust. The more companies can maintain quality in their support content, the more likely customers are to trust the solutions provided.
Choose stats that matter
Your business probably already uses vanity metrics, such as open rates, shares, and time spent on a page, to gauge how well your content appears to be performing. But how does that translate into a return on investment (ROI)?
Vanity metrics don’t measure how engaged prospects are; they simply measure the relative popularity of your business.
For example, vanity metrics might indicate that a landing page is performing poorly, but they won’t tell you why. You can see that a page has high bounce and exit rates and customers are quick to click away from it, but there’s no indication of the reasoning behind those stats.
The truth is: vanity metrics don’t measure how engaged prospects are; they simply measure the relative popularity of your business. This makes measuring ROI difficult. With a content management system, you need to make sure you’re tracking the right metrics for your website.
In particular, you should gauge how clear and inclusive your language is, and how well the tone fits your customer base. If a web page ranks poorly in these categories, it’s likely there are spelling errors, run-on sentences, monotonous language, and inconsistent product references on the page.
Take IKEA for example. With so many product names, manuals, and support articles, maintaining consistent terminology across departments is a priority. Making your own furniture is hard enough without getting bogged down in contradictory descriptions of assembly parts or not being able to find a how-to article because the product is spelled differently.
Here’s another example: A landing page for an online sports store opens with a phrase like “Running shoes for every athlete, no matter how hard they train, how long they run, or how far they go, we’ve got shoes for them.” could lead female runners to assume the site is for male athletes only.
Problems like this are instant turn offs and drive away many potential customers. Tracking performance scores beyond popularity can give you a better idea of why a particular page or content funnel isn’t performing as well as it should. You will also better understand what problems you need to solve.
With all that in mind, here are some essential steps to take when implementing your own content management system and how each step will affect your company’s ROI.
Create a brand style guide
Brand cohesion keeps your content consistent across the company. Decide which terminology to use in assets such as sales pitches, website copy, blog posts, Google Ads, customer service messages, and product documentation. Which language best suits your target group? If you don’t already have a style guide, take a moment to find out what it looks like and upload a final, digital version somewhere your writers can easily access it.
