A 5-step guide to creating a content governance strategy (with AI in mind)

Whenever we’ve spoken to marketing leaders about how they’re creating and managing content, there’s always one recurring theme: content chaos. And while some kinds of chaos might be a ladder, content chaos is more like a rickety staircase with missing steps and a wobbly, splintery railing.

From ideation to creation to distribution, there are so many opportunities for messages and documents to get lost or mishandled. Not to mention that your own sales team probably won’t even know if it exists after you’ve created it — even with internal promotion baked into the process. That’s a lot of wasted resources.

Kathlyn Pierce, a principal analyst at Forrester, says it boils down to two things: the mystery meat and an overstuffed pantry. Marketing creates so many types of content that it’s hard to remember what exists, especially without proper management. In the same vein, there’s too much content that nobody knows where to start. That’s why content usage looks like this:

Source

Now, you have to layer in using artificial intelligence (AI), and the problem worsens. If you’re in a regulated industry, it’s hard to remain compliant when your data is thrown into unknown models while creating content or managing it.

It’s not just about content chaos or risk mitigation anymore. It’s about maintaining control over the process while staying compliant. It’s about creating a sustainable framework that enables scale while ensuring quality and compliance.

In this article, we’ll explain the concept of content governance and offer a practical framework to create one for your organization.

First, let’s define content governance

Content governance is the combination of rules, processes, and frameworks that ensure you produce high-quality content while maintaining brand consistency and regulatory compliance.

Think of content governance as the central nervous system of your organization’s content operations. Ideally, it’s the ecosystem that:

• Provides teams with the smallest set of highest-quality assets
• Ensures consistent messaging across the entire buyer’s journey
• Maintains security compliance and brand standards
• Creates clear workflows for content creation and approval
• Establishes content lifecycle management across the organization

While most people confuse it for content strategy because you’re creating a roadmap for production, that’s not true. Your strategy is your game plan (what content you’ll make and why) — but content governance is your rulebook and referee system (how that content is managed, controlled, and maintained).

Why should you care about content governance?

Here are a few reasons why content governance is important these days:

1. Lack of messaging consistency is hurting your brand

Without solid frameworks and processes for production, you’ll notice signs of inconsistency everywhere. A blog post might sound too technical for your audience, but your email might be too conversational and lacking in depth.

Aljay Ambos, head of marketing at Twixify, says the inconsistency ultimately affects your credibility. “Inconsistent messaging was affecting our credibility but adding AI tools into the workflow only magnified this inconsistency,” explains Ambos. “It became obvious that without a clear framework for tone, style, and approval processes, we’d risk confusing or alienating our users. So, content governance wasn’t optional. It was the foundation to scale responsibly while staying true to our brand.”

Also, the cost of this inconsistency goes beyond lost deals. It creates confusion in the market, increases the support burden on your teams, and can even lead to compliance issues in regulated industries. You don’t want to land in hot water because a writer wrote something that wasn’t meant to be there.

2. As demand for content grows, production gets blurrier

Everybody wants content. It’s like a hungry dragon that keeps asking for more — but not necessarily better. While marketing teams try to keep up with that demand, sales and products keep increasing pressure to meet the demands of their prospects.

With AI in the mix, everybody has a way to generate the content they want — but there are no guardrails to improve the content’s quality and specificity. Your internal teams are creating and sharing without proper review or version control. 

The result? A sprawling content ecosystem where tracking what exists, what’s current, and what’s being used becomes nearly impossible. Content governance curtails that by providing structure to the process.

3. Without governance, your campaigns will eventually fall flat

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: even your most brilliant marketing campaigns are at risk without proper content governance. Why? Because campaigns don’t exist in isolation — they rely on a foundation of consistent, high-quality content that supports every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Take a minute and think about your current campaign planning process. We’re sure you’ve seen assets get created multiple times because your team can’t find the original. Also, you can’t measure how they perform because you don’t know if these assets exist..

“Content governance was something I needed to do because I was able to see the insanity that happens when you don’t have any union for the content,” says Iryna Melnyk, a marketing consultant. “The tipping point for a client I worked with had been when a significant campaign rollout where everything had gone wrong. The messaging was all over the place, customers were dizzy, and the campaign missed the mark. I learned a lot through that experience, and it became clear we could do better.”

4. Your team will create content that never gets used by sales

65% of content produced by marketing for sales teams goes unused. It’s a relatively old data point but remains a huge issue for companies. It’s not just about wasted resources — instead, it’s a symptom of a deeper governance issue.

This disconnect runs through every content-related issue you’re seeing right now. For example, sales need case studies, but marketing is focused on narrative guides. Or the quality of your content isn’t hitting the mark because you don’t have enough support built into content processes or any quality assurance in place.

In either case, the lack of governance is costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long run.

5. Without clear ownership, internal production lines also break down

Content creation is a team sport now. Product teams create technical documentation. Sellers create their own customer-facing presentations (often to marketers’ chagrin). Customer success develops training materials. Legal reviews everything. However, without clear governance on who owns what, ownership turns into a game of hot potato.

You end up in a situation where multiple teams create similar content without knowing each other’s efforts. Nobody knows who’s reviewing the final assets or where it’s getting stored. This fragmentation eventually leads to the chaos most teams face today — a chaos customers can feel.

How can you create an AI-enabled content governance framework?

To combat all of these issues, you need to build a content governance framework that accounts for your current challenges and the potential use of AI.

Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how to do so with tips from marketing leaders who’ve been there, done that:

Step 1: Audit your current content production process

First, you must take stock of how internal teams create content and what they’ve created to date. Daria Shevchenko, chief marketing officer at Snov.io, recommends reviewing assets through two lenses: performance and brand alignment.

“Based on these two parameters, we identified good practices and areas of improvement. This gave us food for thought when brainstorming goals we wanted to achieve with future content,” explains Shevchenko. “We wanted to improve the consistency of our image and also increase audience engagement. This gave us a solid base to set up more practical matters.”

Once you have this data, map the current content lifecycle:

• How do content requests originate?
• Who’s involved in content creation?
• What tools and platforms are being used?
• How are approvals handled?
• Where does content get stored?
• How is content distributed to end users?

The most important part? Look for hidden workflows. Maybe your sales team has created a shadow content repository because they can’t easily find what they need. Or product teams are bypassing official review processes because they’re too slow.

Also, ask teams if they use AI in any part of the process and which tools they use. You don’t want to deal with potential data leaks through unchecked AI usage.

Step 2: Take stock of all the content in your library

Next, create an inventory of all the content assets you and your internal teams have. It’s normal for content to “proliferate” and grow unchecked in different drives and systems. The audit will help you identify this, and you never know what you’ll end up with.

For instance, when Tyler Hull, marketing director at Modern Exterior, did a content audit, he ended up with 1,000 pieces of live content. Some were untouched for years.

“Honestly, the results were eye-opening,” says Hull. “We used the audit to create clear categories for content based on audience, purpose, and lifecycle.”

Here’s what you should focus on:

• Inventory and categorization: Document the types, formats, versions, and categorize based on audience, region, use cases, and product/service.
• Quality assessment: Check for compliance with brand guidelines, messaging/positioning, and subject matter accuracy.
• Usage analysis: Dig into analytics data (if you have it) to identify the most/least used content, access patterns, and content gaps. If you don’t have access to the data, ask your internal teams for feedback.

Pro tip: Don’t try to analyze everything at once. Take it one category at a time — and then expand incrementally. You can use AI tools like ChatGPT to help categorize the data. Or, even better, secure sales AI tools that give insight into your content analytics without exposing your company’s data to open-source systems.

Step 3: Design content workflows, processes, and frameworks

Once you know what’s happening within your organization, fix the bottlenecks and define content workflows.

“We set up workflows to define who was responsible at every stage — from brainstorming to publishing,” explains Hull. “For example, all product-related content now has to go through a subject matter expert and legal review before it’s shared externally. Within three months, we saw a 30% drop in duplicate efforts because roles and responsibilities were laid out so clearly.”

Start with the type of content that’s being created. For example, a blog post’s workflow is very different from a video asset. In this case, list the common steps and build a content workflow. Here’s what it usually looks like:

• Brainstorming (due to internal need or a new strategy)
• Ideation (why you’re creating it and how to do it)
• Briefing (finalizing the asset’s guidelines)
• Production (drafting/recording and editing the asset)
• Review process (subject matter experts and legal team)
• Publication (making the asset live)
• Distribution (promoting the assets internally and externally)
• Content management (uploading the latest files to a central drive)

Change the workflow based on the types of content and channels you’re investing in.

Pro tip: In each step, account for AI usage. For example, Snov.io’s team doesn’t use AI-generated content. But they do use it to brainstorm or edit content. If they use data to create the content, they make sure the tools are GDPR-compliant, which means they ask for user consent during data collection.

Step 4: Use the RACI matrix to define roles and responsibilities

The RACI matrix (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) is an excellent way to define who plays what role in the entire content lifecycle.

Here’s how you can apply RACI to content governance:

Responsible (R):

• Who creates the content?
• Who manages revisions?
• Who handles distribution?
• Who maintains the content repository?

Accountable (A):

• Who has final approval authority?
• Who ensures compliance standards are met?
• Who owns the content strategy?
• Who manages the governance framework?

Consulted (C):

• Subject matter experts
• Legal/compliance teams
• Brand marketers
• Sales and customer-facing teams

Informed (I):

• GTM teams
• External partners
• Leadership team

This way, nobody’s confused about the actual owner of a specific task or process, and everyone’s on the same page. Remember: the matrix is a framework — not a hard guideline for internal teams. They should be able to modify specific steps of processes to their own production needs.

Step 5: Document your standard policies and procedures

You can’t govern a group of people without a set of guidelines in place. That’s what your standard operating procedures (SOPs) should do. Nikola Baldikov, founder of Inbound Blogging, recommends asking the team to document their processes.

“I encouraged the team to document everything related to content creation. Now, we’ve built a library of SOPs (standard operating procedures) for every tool, every step of our process — from initial research to publishing and tracking performance.”

That said, he also ran into issues while building the framework. More often than not, his team discovered a better way to do things and had to return to the drawing board. “When something did not go as planned, or we discovered a better way to do it, we had to go back and change some parts of the processes,” explains Baldikov. “But that’s the reality of it — it’s an evolving system. While it takes time to get it right, the payoff is absolutely worth it.”

Your documentation should include:

• Content standards and style guides
• Brand voice and messaging frameworks
• Industry regulations
• AI-specific usage guidelines
• Workflow guides
• Tool and platform usage guidelines
• Knowledge base
• Templates and examples

Treat your SOPs as a living document. Keep updating them (with version history) as and when needed.

Turn content governance into a competitive advantage

Content creation doesn’t have to be a hamster wheel. You need to go slow to go faster in the future. So, spend some time building these content governance systems to streamline the entire content lifecycle.

Also, as AI has changed the way we produce content, consider the potential impact on your organization. If used well, you could turn it into an advantage. But if you let its use go unchecked, it could cost you time, effort, and resources.

If you’re looking for a platform that enables content governance through secure frameworks and enablement-focused features, schedule a demo with us to learn more.