In industrial B2B, website content is signed off at three levels: trained editors handle routine changes, an engineering or product owner approves specifications and performance claims, and legal or quality review applies to certification, safety and contractual wording. One person approving every page is the pattern that fails.
The design problem is proportionality. Technical claims on an industrial site carry commercial and safety consequences, and a process that treats a typo correction the same way will be bypassed within months. Tier the approvals by risk, name the owner for each content type, and give editors real autonomy inside the lower tier.
Marketing owns editorial quality, structure and publishing rhythm. Engineering or product owns specifications, tolerances, material compatibility, performance figures and application guidance. Quality or compliance owns certification scope and safety wording. Sales and regional teams review commercial relevance and market accuracy.
Write these down against content types rather than against pages, so that a new product page inherits its approvers automatically instead of requiring a fresh decision each time.
A workable three-tier model: routine changes such as typos, images, link fixes and adding an approved document go straight through with a trained editor. Substantive content such as new application pages, capability copy and case studies takes marketing plus one subject-matter reviewer.
Regulated or high-consequence content, including specification changes, performance claims, certification statements, safety wording and market availability, takes the accountable technical owner and, where relevant, legal or quality review.
The engineer who reviews technical content has a day job, and this is the constraint the whole workflow rests on. Batch reviews rather than sending pages one at a time, give a clear brief on what is being asked, and agree a service level both sides can meet.
Where review consistently takes three weeks, the process will be circumvented rather than followed. Naming a deputy reviewer for absences removes the most common single point of failure.
Roles and permissions, draft and pending-review states, scheduled publishing, revision history and structured fields can support the tiers directly, so the route a change takes follows from what it is rather than from someone remembering the rule.
Structured product fields help further: where a specification is a field with an owner rather than free text inside a page, the review scope is obvious and the change is traceable. That is part of how we set up a CMS implementation.
For product and technical content, record the source of the claim, the approver, the approval date and the next review date. Where a specification traces to a test report or a certificate, reference it, so a later question can be answered without reconstructing the reasoning.
Revision history in the CMS covers part of this. The source and the approver are the parts that usually need recording deliberately.
Set a planned cadence for critical pages and add trigger-based reviews for product changes, certification renewals, standards updates, rebrands, market launches and new test evidence. Certification expiry dates are worth tracking explicitly, since an expired certificate stated on a live page is a real exposure.
Good governance should make the site more current rather than slower. Where it pushes content work into email threads and private spreadsheets, the tiers are set too tightly.
Three levels, by risk: trained editors handle routine changes; an engineering or product owner approves specifications, performance claims and application guidance; legal or quality review covers certification scope, safety wording and contractual statements. Marketing owns presentation and publishing throughout. Assign approvers to content types rather than to individual pages.
No, and requiring it is how governance gets bypassed. Set approval levels by risk: typos, images, link fixes and adding an already-approved document can go straight through with a trained editor. Specifications, performance claims, certification statements and safety wording need the accountable subject-matter owner every time.
The accountable product or engineering team owns factual accuracy, with marketing responsible for presentation, structure and publishing. Both roles should be assigned before a range goes online rather than negotiated afterwards. Where product data comes from a PIM, the owner of that system holds accuracy and the website inherits it.
Batch reviews instead of sending pages individually, brief the reviewer on exactly what is being asked, agree a service level both sides can meet, and name a deputy for absences. Keep the routine tier truly routine so editors are not queueing behind an engineer for a link fix. Track review turnaround as a metric.
Yes. Roles and permissions, draft and pending-review states, scheduled publishing, revision history and structured product fields can carry the tiers directly, so the route a change takes follows from what it is. The organisation still needs agreed roles and decision rules behind the platform, since the CMS enforces a process rather than defining one.
On a planned cadence for critical pages, plus trigger-based reviews when a product changes, a certification renews, a standard is updated, or a market launch occurs. Track certification expiry dates explicitly, since an expired certificate stated on a live product page is a real exposure and one of the more common findings in an audit.
We can define content ownership, workflows and CMS patterns around how your teams work.