Why Every Brand Strategy Must Include Content Governance—and How AI Can Help

If you're serious about brand strategy, you're trying to build a truly valuable brand.

That's why it's a shame most enterprise marketers leave out a key component of any brand strategy.

Not having this one thing can erase brand equity and value literally overnight.

It's called a content governance plan.

A content governance plan is what dictates who owns what content across your company.

This isn’t something that’s nice to have if you’re a large organization. It's a must have.

Why?

Because, without it, big brands lack the tools to control content quality.

And when you don't control content quality, you don't control the messages your brand puts out.

Content that poorly represents your brand has real repercussions. Quality issues reduce your brand's perceived value. Mistakes can actively damage your reputation. And inaccurate messages move markets, especially if you're publicly traded.

A lot of big brands use content marketing to grow, so they're publishing a lot. But most don't have great content governance in place.

Which means any strategy to build brand that doesn’t include content governance plans is half a strategy.

The good news is:

You can start building better content governance today using AI in content marketing.

What Is Content Governance? Why Should It Be In Your Brand Strategy?

Frankly, it can be a nightmare for enterprises to keep content on-brand and on-message.

With content marketing, enterprises are publishing a lot of content. Many parties must edit, vet, and approve each piece of content. This process takes a ton of time.

After all, it's not easy to produce high-quality content as it is. It's even harder to do so across many teams, departments, and countries. A lot of enterprise marketers are stuck in an endless loop of creating and editing content.

That's why a content governance plan is so useful to your overall brand strategy.

It tells everyone who is responsible for what part of the content process. It tells you who owns content architecture, categorization, taxonomy, distribution, and performance tracking. It outlines who owns which content systems, like marketing automation software. It strategically allocates people to specific content production and promotion tasks.

The result is a smart plan that keeps the content machine well-oiled and working properly.

But it's not always that easy.

Even with a great content governance plan, problems arise.

People forget to follow procedures. Roles and responsibilities become muddled. Departments clash or obstruct or fail to communicate.

These problems happen because of the same factor at work across your organization:

Human beings.

Human beings are busy, forgetful, and inconsistent. We’re the point of failure in this content machine. But we’re also what gives the machine power. We ideate, produce, and promote creative ideas that create immense value for brands. In an ideal world, we'd be free to perform only these high-value tasks—and be free of the repetitive ones we're not good at.

This is where artificial intelligence comes in. It enhances the work of humans, so big brands can govern content at scale without human mistakes.

Artificial Intelligence and Content Governance

AI refers to a set of technologies that can learn to improve on their own. Artificial intelligence can get to be a very complex subject very quickly. But you don't need to know all the details to understand the key point here:

You can teach an AI system how to do something, then watch it improve itself over time.

Now this doesn’t apply to every task and every system. There are a lot of AI tools and technologies that are still relatively immature. But sophisticated AI exists that can learn your brand's style, language and tone, then keep it consistent across all your content.

This is thanks to natural language processing (NLP) and natural language generation (NLG). These are AI technologies that allow a machine to “read” text, in the case of NLP, and “write” text, in the case of NLG. Add in machine learning, AI that improves over time, and you get a system that understands your brand. That system can then recommend how to stay on-brand, and learn to recommend even better over time.

Here’s how it works at a high level:

All content creators on a team use a common AI platform to create and edit content. The system learns your brand’s standards, rules, styles, and preferences. Then, the system “reads” content that is created. It scores that content. And it provides recommendations on how to make it better and more on-brand.

The result is that content is way more consistent and of much higher quality. You unify enterprise content teams completely across the entire brand. Human creators all use the same machine-assisted rules and recommendations. That frees up your team to create better content, create more content, and promote it to the right people.

So the machines do content governance, while humans create more and better content.

In both cases, each cooperates to do what they do best, which creates even more brand value in the long run.

How to Use AI to Drive Content Governance

Artificial intelligence can make your content management easier and smarter. Learn how in the webinar below on AI-driven strategies to radically improve content performance.