Content Governance is Ready for its Slowment

Despite the focus companies around the globe are putting on adopting AI within their marketing teams, one huge thing keeps being overlooked—content governance. Without content governance in place, you really shouldn’t be using AI in the creation of any of your marketing materials.

When you don’t have any content governance in place and employ AI in your content creation processes, you are much more likely to end up with content that feels off-brand and doesn’t connect with your brand fans. So much of the bland, boring AI content clogging our social feeds and inboxes is 100% the result of not having a defined brand voice, a documented content strategy, and other critical inputs that train human and AI writers on what makes your brand unique.

Content governance is what brings your content strategy to life, while also keeping it from spawning Frankencontent. And, let’s be clear: Frankencontent is precisely what you’re creating if you’re putting a blog post prompt into a generative AI tool without context.

Content governance is what brings your content strategy to life,
while also keeping it from spawning Frankencontent.

Erika Heald

Without understanding your brand, without having great examples and input from you, the human being with the experience who knows your brand, AI, will only be able to create content that is the average of the aggregated average of all the content its been trained on. Who wants to be average? Is that your goal to develop average content that makes people go ‘meh’?

Content leaders need a ‘slowment’ to develop their content governance toolkits

During her Content Marketing World keynote keynote, Ann Handley coined the term “slowment,” which immediately felt like an old friend. She’s spoken and written previously about being ASAP (as slow as possible) and why we need more slow marketing moments, not just a relentless focus on efficiency. In a nutshell, a “slowment” is the practice of slowing down at strategic moments to achieve better results.

It immediately resonated because of what many of us had been talking about—too many content leaders don’t feel empowered to invest time in creating even the core governance materials. Marketers I talked with at the conference told me they:

• Haven’t been able to document their workflows to figure out where they can become more efficient
• Aren’t empowered to create style guides that both humans and AI can use to ensure brand consistency
• Are afraid to host a workshop with their leadership team to try to get everyone to agree upon a brand voice chart that can then guide everybody in their content creation.

So, they continue to hobble along, new hires reading the blog and website to figure out what the brand sounds like. New content creators get back redlined content full of edits instead of having a tool that explains the brand preferences and what content formats work for different channels.

How to explain the ROI of content governance to your leadership team

You know that investing in core content, governance, workflows, templates, and guidelines pays you back with brand consistency, better human and AI onboarding, and streamlined processes. These critical content governance tools train your AI and human content creators to recognize what makes your content truly yours.

As I shared in my CMworld session, here’s how to talk to your leadership team to get permission to slow down and put content governance guardrails in place.

Slow is the New Productive

We need to slow down in order to create better content. Specifically, if we invest in content governance, we are able to:

Optimize our workflows by documenting and refining the progression of tasks from ideation to publication. Uncover where we can combine steps and give everyone a necessary reality check for how long it actually takes to do a thing.

Clarify roles by documenting team roles, responsibilities, and expectations instead of trying to reach a middle ground between the often conflicting feedback you receive. Somebody has to be the decider. But if it isn’t documented and agreed upon, then nobody is the decider. Then, you’re stuck creating content by committee and by consensus—content likely to be as mediocre as your typical generic AI output.

Create consistency through building reusable blueprints for consistently creating high-quality content. No more having to remember the different elements you should include in every blog post or ebook. Instead, you have a template that includes those elements and the various style guidelines for what’s working in that channel for your audience.

Measure what matters by tracking key metrics to optimize future content and refine your content strategy.

Align content and communications to your content strategy with reference materials and resources that align content creation with your content strategy.

Increase internal authorship by expanding the ability to create on-brand content to anyone in your organization (and beyond). Having these tools in place unlocks a range of perspectives and expertise throughout the organization, vastly increasing your content program’s potential.

Where to start your content governance journey

While content governance can span a wide range of items, if you are just getting started, there are four building blocks that can help you scale your content creation.

1. A documented brand voice. Who your brand is, and how it shows up in the content you create and how you communicate.
2. A defined taxonomy. A system for organizing and classifying content into a structured framework.
3. Content templates. Reusable blueprints for consistently creating high-quality content for each of your primary channels.
4. A content style guide. A curated guide full of reference materials and resources to align content creation to your brand and content strategy.

Without content governance in place, your content and your content creation can only scale as much as the one human who internalized all of these rules and expectations can get to. How many hours are there in a day? How many hours are there in a week? Do you have so much extra time that you just wish that you could do more by hand? Of course not! We all could use some help.

A lack of governance also puts your content strategy at risk with that one human being a single point of success or failure. What happens if they leave the company? Having a single source of truth for your content strategy is a gamble most companies wouldn’t take with similarly irreplaceable and valuable intellectual property.

All this is why spending the time—and it’s not even necessarily that much time—to create a robust content governance program—is a critical addition to your 2025 goals and budget.

Additional content governance resources

1. My Content Marketing Institute (CMI) article on how to define your brand voice
2. Another article I wrote for CMI walks you through how to use AI to harmonize your brand voice across all your content
3. My content style guide template and an article that explores how to put it to work.

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