What is a content marketing platform?
A content marketing platform is a piece of software that helps marketers with all aspects of their content strategy and creation. Content marketing systems assist marketers to create, optimize, monitor, and measuring content.
Who is a content marketing platform for?
A content marketing platform will be beneficial to almost all marketing teams, given that content is the best way to connect with your customers. In particular, a content marketing platform is beneficial for teams with:
- A large web estate: Even the most experienced content marketing teams find it difficult to manage content across a large web estate. That’s why it’s beneficial to have content assets all in one place. For teams coordinating a lot of content or operating at a global scale, a content marketing platform is an invaluable tool.
- Multiple websites: Managing large quantities of content across multiple websites can be very challenging. By using a content marketing platform, teams can better coordinate and optimize content across multiple sites all in one place.
- Few resources: For small teams working on high volumes of content, a content marketing platform can help streamline and automate workflows to boost productivity.
- Taking content to the next level: With tools covering optimization, analysis, and auditing, content marketing platforms are a key tool for teams looking to up their content game.
- Varied content experience: If content creators have different levels of experience, it can be a challenge to hit all nuances of content creation, from formatting consistency and quality checks to SEO, and content accessibility. Using a content marketing platform can help bridge the gap between experience levels and support team development.
What are the benefits of using a content marketing platform?
Content marketing is a high priority for teams of all sizes across the world, and for good reason. Research by Demand Metric found that content marketing generates more than three times as many leads as traditional advertising methods all while costing 62% less.
But content can cover various forms and mediums from written, audio, and video content to more advanced strategy solutions such as search engine optimization, analytics, PPC advertising, content auditing, and more. A challenge an organization can face is from implementing various solutions to support different areas of the content team with their niche. This results in different reports from different tools for different things which can make tracking content marketing efforts as a whole difficult.
Deploying a combined technology solution to bolster your MarTech stack is usually the recommended approach for this reason. Seeing the content of various forms and their progress, and tracking published content performance inside of one platform helps content teams to more effectively collaborate, report, and succeed.
What features should a content marketing platform include?
Finding a content marketing platform that works for your organization’s needs can be overwhelming, particularly when you consider a catch-all platform to manage all of your content. In addition, it can be a large investment and so making sure you get enough “bang for your buck” is vital.
Selecting the right platform for you is going to vary depending on the size of your content team, experience, budget, and content frequency. However, the points below act as a good checklist for features you should look for.
1. Features to support new and existing content
For sites with any combination of a huge amount of content, multiple websites, a global presence, or large teams, the more features you can get to manage existing and future content, the better. The inclusion of powerful features such as advanced auditing and SEO capabilities is a must. The ability to create your own custom rules helps you keep your brand consistent. Of course, comprehensive accessibility testing will help better the user experience as well.
2. Easy to use
Some digital tools can leave teams spending more time figuring out how to use them instead of using them effectively. You’ll want to look for clear and simple UI, built-in tooltips, and easy-to-access support – all of which is a sign that it’s going to be accessible to employees with various levels of experience.
3. Onboarding, training, and support
Getting up to speed with how to effectively implement your new tool can take time, especially when it can slip into some of the more technical aspects such as integrations. If you’re provided training tools and advice from videos, documents, or training calls you can be sure to be up and running as soon as possible to start reaping the rewards. It’s also worth understanding what support you’ll have available to you including average response times, and support open hours.
4. Scalability
The point of a content marketing platform is to provide you with tools to help you find more success and grow your business. So a good tool should be flexible enough to grow alongside your organization without incurring huge cost penalties once your business crosses certain milestones. Consider asking about the platform’s growth plan and new features in the works. You should also aim to understand how the platform can be expanded when you need it to. What is the limit of users you can have, or data that can be analyzed on your package?
5. Customizability
Having the option to create and add your own custom rules to reports and change what data should appear where are basic features you should look for so that you can tailor the platform to your specific needs. The platform should also streamline your existing processes, so you would want to ensure that it can be integrated seamlessly into your existing systems.
6. Project management
A good content marketing platform should act as a central hub for your marketing and content teams. You should look for features such as user groups, permissions, custom reporting, sharable report dashboards, and task assignment features if you really want to boost team productivity.
7. Analytics and heatmaps
You’ll need to allow your team to see the impact of their content, and so you’ll need to include an analytics platform that also includes heatmaps. These enable you to see user behavior on each page of your website, measure the time on page, the amount of content read, and even where users become frustrated.