The ecommerce landscape is shifting as companies adapt to rapidly evolving consumer preferences. As retailers embrace these new challenges, providing high-quality, engaging content on their digital channels that meets customer expectations and drives sales is top of mind. Online retailers are also faced with hundreds of millions of people visiting their websites every day, and increased traffic during major ecommerce events like Amazon Prime Day or Cyber Monday.
Unsurprisingly, it can be challenging for content teams to maintain and refresh their digital experiences with relevant, new content in this fast-moving landscape, while remaining in lock-step organizationally.
Content governance can solve this challenge by offering a set of guidelines and priorities that enable marketers, developers, and everyone in between to work efficiently, effectively, and autonomously toward a shared goal of delivering the best customer experience on their digital channels.
Content governance allows companies to reap a variety of beneficial outcomes:
Enhanced Organization
Historically, content governance was managed manually. When the volume of content was fairly small — and mostly printed or on a single web page — this wasn’t a big problem. In an online world of pervasive media, manual governance and copy-paste duplication of assets is ineffective and simply does not scale.
Content governance that is integrated within the content platform, empowers businesses to clearly define roles and permissions, ensuring that responsibilities are established and teams can operate cohesively while working autonomously. Individuals have their own set of responsibilities and permissions that allow them to work confidently, but with safeguards in place to prevent mistakes or crossover, without approvals or reviews.
Improved Collaboration
By clearly defining roles, content governance also unlocks a new level of collaboration. Members of a team can work in unison by defining individual areas of ownership to accomplish tasks in a timely way.
The ecommerce and retail world moves quickly, and employees are frequently pressured to embrace time-sensitive tasks that require internal collaboration. By establishing clear ownership and roles, teams can expedite processes to ensure that content is refreshed rapidly.
Bolstered Security & Reduced Risk
Weak content governance systems make brands significantly more susceptible to the catastrophic effects of employee mistakes. Failure to properly manage and review content can be the difference between a 5% or 50% product markdown.
Additionally, most ecommerce brands are collecting and storing sensitive customer information. If this data were made public, the company would be dealing with a legal and PR crisis.
There is significant risk with many people having access to a company’s website, and mistakes are unavoidable without a content platform for effective content governance. Fortunately, content governance safeguards can protect companies from crippling mistakes that destroy their brand reputation and potentially cost millions.
Enhanced Efficiency & Creative Freedom
Content governance is also good for the bottom line: it can drastically reduce costs by bolstering internal organization and collaboration. Coordinated teams will get work done faster, reduce overlap and time spent fixing mistakes, and meet goals efficiently.
Content governance is financially beneficial and frees employees to focus on more strategic projects. With dedicated content tools, ecommerce teams can reserve time to focus on innovating so they can deliver the digital experiences required to stay ahead.
Ecommerce brands that use modern content platforms to enable content governance will benefit from enhanced speed and accuracy, which will ultimately allow them to deliver a better customer experience and capture market opportunity.
Nicole France is a passionate customer advocate evangelizing new ways of thinking about content and organizing the work of digital business. It’s the wave of the future — and her mission is to make sure everyone knows why. She brings the perspective and critical thinking of an industry analyst and the first-hand experience of a practitioner. Before joining Contentful, Nicole worked as an analyst at Constellation Research and Gartner. She also held a variety of strategy and marketing roles at Fujitsu, Equinix, ITSMA, and Cisco. A graduate of UC Berkeley, Nicole enjoys the outdoors, flying small planes, and embarking on yet another house project in her spare time.
