Who owns your digital content?
Unclear ownership is a popular complaint amongst digital professionals and much of this pertains to content. So with that in mind I thought it would be interesting to think and discuss digital content ownership. So, who owns what?
Ultimately your website/digital property is a product and your product's presentation layer requires ownership and by ownership I mean; whoever "owns" the content should be defining the roadmap and giving final sign-off on creative. Before we can define ownership we need to list the reasons for producing and changing content:
- Acquisition - mostly landing pages; search, display, affiliate and various content for SEO.
- Conversion - scheduled and unscheduled (one-off) content for existing; customers, users, visitors. Some examples include:
- homepage banners/pages (special offers, seasonal content)
- email (encouraging first/repeat conversions + general communications)
- app messaging (encouraging first/repeat conversions + general communications)
- Products - new products result in new product pages. In addition (an important one), your website probably has digital products such as; shopping cart, account login, mobile apps etc - these would all have product owners.
- Experimentation - A/B and multi-variant, experiments run for a finite amount of time and content changes when there's a successful result. Experiments span all content categories; 'conversion', 'acquisition' and 'products'.
- Personalisation - these are targeted campaigns that run 100% of the time (no end date), examples would include; returning visitors, OS, device, browser. Personalisation would span all content categories.
| Acquisition | Your acquisition/search team should own their content as they're responsible for paid campaigns and SEO. The alternative would be an internal blame game if targets aren't met. |
| Conversion | This team is creating most of your companies content, there could be designers as part of this team and they could also be the same team that's developing content for the other content categories; Acquisition, Experimentation, Personalisation and Products. The name of this department could be something like "Sales & Marketing" or "Campaign management". Ultimately this team owns most of your digital property content including the homepage. However an important caveat, this is ownership of the default/control content and important pages should only change based on the outcome of a test. |
| Products | Assuming your business has products of some description, I'd assign final sign-off of these pages with the corresponding Product Owner/Manager - ultimately these people should be 'on the hook' for their product's revenue. If this feels like an odd fit then it could also sit with the same people that are managing the conversion content. However your digital products such as; shopping cart, account login, mobile apps would have product owners and they would have final sign-off on content. |
| Experimentation | Testing hypotheses are usually based on data insight or visual reviews - the roadmap for this should be owned by the Digital/Web Analytics & Optimisation team (or something similarly named). Owning the roadmap involves adding tests and managing requests coming from; Acquisition, Sales & Marketing and Product. If the requests have weak/no hypothesis then it shouldn't go into your roadmap. |
| Personalisation | Same as above other than all personalisation campaigns are driven by data insight, other stakeholders in the business can have inputs however if data doesn't support the idea or the volume is too low it shouldn't go into your roadmap for testing. |
So in summary your content is owned by 4 departments:
Do you agree or have a completely different idea? Let me know below if you have any comments or questions.
