Guide14th October 2024

Content operations: how great content gets made

Learn what content operations are, why they matter, and what you need to consider as part of defining your content ops approach.

Operations and governance

Content last reviewed April 2026

In the most simple terms, content operations are the ‘how’ of content in your organisation. Defining your content operations (or content ops) means having clarity on exactly how you’ll get your content done: the people elements (like workflow and governance), the processes and procedures, and the tools and technology.

Solid content ops are what enables teams to execute a content strategy to a high standard, day in, day out, year after year. But despite that, they don’t always get the attention they deserve. Hence this beginners guide, to help you understand what to consider as part of the process of defining your content ops.

How content ops fit with content strategy

As I wrote in my back to basics guide to content strategy, I love the original Content Strategy Quad from Kristina Halvorson’s Content Strategy for the Web as a way of explaining what a content strategy should cover. To summarise, that’s:

Content elements
- Substance: The kinds of content you’ll create and the messages it will share
- Structure: How content is prioritised, organised, formatted and displayed
People elements
- Workflow: How you’ll go about creating your content
- Governance: How you make and communicate decisions

Read content strategy: the back to basics guide

For me, content ops is a subset of content strategy. That’s not to diminish its importance, or the skill that goes into doing it well. But for me, a comprehensive content strategy should include lots of aspects of your approach to content operations.

Why it’s worth focusing on content ops

In my experience, a lack of focus on the ops is one of the most common causes of content problems. And even teams with a solid content strategy can make this mistake.

I think it’s a tall order to define every aspect of your approach to content ops as part of a content strategy. And that’s because operations are in-depth, detailed work. They take a lot of effort and time to get right, and can really benefit from taking a ‘test and learn’ approach.

I think it’s often a good idea to make content ops a follow-up project after you’ve defined your content strategy. Rather than trying to nail every aspect of the ops as part of the strategy, give yourself permission to take your time with this side of the work, to spend longer getting into those fine details and making sure everything works perfectly. For large organisations, or those producing high volumes of content, this is especially relevant.

Getting your ops right has some key benefits:

Efficiency: Focusing on building effective processes and giving your team access to the right frameworks, knowledge and tools will streamline your workflow. And that can help you get more work/better work done with less investment of time or effort.
Impact and ROI: Content ops can help you put the guardrails in place to keep your content focused on impact, and help you prioritise higher-value activities.
Alignment and collaboration: It can help you break down silos between teams and realise a more collaborative, integrated approach.
Quality and consistency: It can help you maintain standards (and reduce risk), for a more consistent, unified experience.
Scalability: Content ops are the foundation for a scalable approach to content that can keep up with increasing demand.

The core elements of content ops

It’s very rare that you get to define all the elements of a content ops approach from scratch. Usually, you’ll find that there are:

Preexisting elements that work and that you need to document
Preexisting elements that you want to question, change, or refine
New elements that need to be defined to plug a gap

Below, I’ve listed the elements that I think are key to content ops and broken them down to give more detail on what they might look like in practice.

Team and org structure

Where content people and content ownership sit in the organisation, including:

Team structure: for example, is there one centralised team in marketing and comms, multiple devolved teams/individuals in different departments/products/services, or something else?
Funding and budgets: where the money comes from and how much there is to spend

People, roles, responsibilities

Who does what, including:

Content roles: what different roles and job titles you have
Responsibilities and capabilities: the defined responsibilities and capabilities for each of those roles
Stakeholders: who the stakeholders, content owners, and subject matter experts are, and how they are involved

Alignment and collaboration

How you collaborate and communicate across content and with stakeholders, including:

Project teams/governance groups: the cross-functional teams and groups that content needs to be part of
Meetings: what meetings you run, and what meetings you need to attend
Comms channels: the comms channels – like email, Slack, Teams, Yammer, Trello – you use and what role they play in collaboration and alignment
Community of practice: what the community of practice for content looks like, who it includes
Influence and storytelling: How and where you tell the the story of how your work ladders up to the org goals

Process

A granular view of the specific stages and steps that your content needs to go through across its whole lifecycle. Different types of content might need different processes. This might include:

Requests, ideas, briefing: how content starts life, how people engage the content team, how the content team can suggest ideas and projects itself
Planning and prioritisation: how you decide what to do and when, how you decide what’s the most important or best thing to spend your time on
Content creation: how you go about creating your content, the research you do first, how you approach outlining or drafting
Feedback and sign off: how you get feedback from stakeholders in an effective way, what you’re actually asking stakeholders for feedback on and why
Measurement: how and when you measure the performance and impact of content
Iteration: how and when you iterate, refine and improve content throughout its lifecycle
Archiving and deleting: how and when you decide to archive or delete content

Knowledge and governance

Your shared content knowledge and expertise, and the standards you must uphold, including:

Templates and frameworks: templates and frameworks that help people to be more consistent and create more high quality outputs, like templates for different content types
Guidance and policies: the guidelines and rules that people should follow for high quality content, like accessibility guidelines, or a style guide
Checklists and acceptance criteria: the boxes something must tick in order to be published
Training or learning: the training, learning and development on offer for content, or that people must complete

Platforms and tools

The tools and technology that you use across the content lifecycle and to help with planning, alignment and collaboration. For example:

Research: sources of data, insight and information and/or how you share your data and insight with others
Assets and media: how you store and share content, assets and other media for reuse
Content creation: things that help you create content, like Google Docs, Grammarly, Writer, Canva, etc.
Content management system: the platform for publishing content
Measurement and reporting: like Google Analytics, or user feedback tools