The Power of Content Quality Assurance

John Price, CMO Risetime

In today’s landscape, content is the lifeblood of businesses. Its sheer pervasiveness accelerates the volume and complexity of the technical ecosystems needed to support and manage it. In the digital age, where content is king, the quality of your digital assets plays a pivotal role in shaping your brand's image and driving business success. From product images and marketing videos to technical documents and social media graphics, your digital assets are the face of your brand.

Quality control in the content world refers to the editorial and publication processes to make sure content is ready for the audience. Content Quality Assurance (CQA) ensures that digital assets, copy, and all the components of the content are accurate, consistent, and meet specific quality and technical standards throughout their lifecycle. By implementing robust CQA practices, organizations can maintain rigorous brand consistency, comply with legal and usage rights, improve user experience, and optimize content performance.

Why is Content Quality Assurance crucial?

A lack of robust content quality controls can have significant impacts on a brand and the company. Mistakes are costly, even minor ones. Inconsistent and poorly executed content can create a negative perception making the company appear unprofessional or unreliable. Plus, correcting the problem means more time, effort and costs. Legal and compliance issues could result in penalties and bad publicity. Lost revenue and missed sales are also consequences of poorly executed campaigns and product information.

Your brand reputation and integrity are integral to your company’s marketing and identity. Content Quality Assurance can help mitigate the risk of errors, mistakes, and below-par content quality. Putting in place workflows, with checkpoints at every stage in the content lifecycle helps moderate content quality.

Below are the key areas where Content Quality Assurance can help to improve and maintain your organization’s standards of excellence:

Consistency. Make sure your marketing is “on brand” so the assets used are aligned with brand guidelines, including typography, color palette, format, imagery, brand marks, logos, icons, sizing, spacing, etc.

Accuracy and clarity. Ensure information is current and up to date, with verified facts, claims, references, figures, and data without errors that can damage the brand’s credibility. The content should be easy to understand, appropriate and relevant for the target audience and channel, jargon-free with clear language, no missing details or gaps.

Content effectiveness. Optimize content files for faster delivery and load times with proper file format, resolution, and accessibility standards. CQA helps maintain metadata standards and consistency for keywords, SEO, tags, descriptions, and file specifications to improve discovery and search.

Content workflows. Standardize processes and protocols for content creation, production, review, and approval resulting in reduced time, effort, and cost. Utilize collaboration tools for better communication and teamwork. Establish automated workflows for redundant and repetitive tasks.

Legal and compliance.  Ensure compliance with trademark and copyright laws, industry-specific regulations and guidelines, and digital rights and usage. Maintain current regulatory information and create metadata and tagging conventions to track compliance, rights management, and usage.

What does a comprehensive Content Quality Assurance framework look like?

Most organizations have some level of editorial and technical quality controls in place, such as content approval workflows. However, the intentional act of formalizing content quality controls helps to establish a methodology and consistency in content quality. This involves a systematic review of processes at every stage of the content lifecycle, establishing standards and workflows to identify errors, omissions, inconsistencies, and inaccuracies.  Here are some key steps:

1) Planning

• In this first step, the goal is to define and understand the quality standards for the organization and at each step of the content lifecycle. Document brand guidelines, content style, tone, format, distribution and publication channels, and regulatory compliance.
• Determine your quality metrics such as engagement rates, conversion, exceptions, and revisions. Create a CQA team with editors, writers, designers, and subject matter experts and decide on which tools are needed, such as grammar checking, plagiarism detection, proofing, collaboration, review, and approval.
• Document technical standards to optimize distribution, delivery, storage, page downloads, and end-point compatibility. Establish rules for content disposition, archiving, and deletion.

2) Content Creation

• Establish a content creation process following industry best practices and governance standards.
• This includes conducting initial reviews with copy editors and proofreaders to align the brand guidelines with readability, style, and standards for various types and categories of content being produced.
• The process for new content should be reviewed by Subject Matter Experts to verify the accuracy of technical information and conformance to standards.

3) Quality Assurance

• Editorial check for clarity, readability, brand voice, grammar, spelling, etc.
• Technical standards for format, file type, size, compatibility, etc.
• ADA compliance for user experience and accessibility for people with disabilities.
• Identify and test the process for resubmission and policies to remedy exceptions, changes, modifications, revisions, and iterations.

4) Publication

• Conduct a final review before publishing to catch any last-minute or missed errors.
• Distribute content through appropriate channels. Check for technical compatibility and optimized delivery.
• Track content performance and analyze performance to benchmark and identify areas for future improvement.

5) Assessment

• Document processes, standards, best practices, and exception handling.
• Conduct regular audits to identify areas for improvement and encourage feedback from stakeholders to refine the process.
• Train content creators, producers, editors, and designers to enhance their skill set.

By prioritizing Content Quality Assurance in your content workflow and content lifecycle management, you can elevate your brand's digital presence, improve customer satisfaction, and drive business growth. 

In future posts, we’ll explore more of the benefits and values of CQA as well as the challenges. Plus, we’ll draw from what we’ve learned from our Content Analysts at Risetime and share some of our best practices. Stay tuned!

About the Author: John Price is a marketing professional with more than 20 years of experience. He is passionate about the practical application of technology and understands the value of content and its prime directive to help organizations move the needle.