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Unless you’ve spent the past few years under a rock, you’re undoubtedly familiar with content marketing. Odds are, your company has at least dabbled in the content creation game, if not dived into the deep end and launched full content marketing initiatives.
No matter where you are on your content marketing journey, we’re willing to bet you’ve learned one thing: Content marketing is a lot of work and often harder than it looks.
Creating the perfect piece of content, ensuring it matches your branding, figuring out how to get it in front of the right people, and then judging its effectiveness requires a lot of effort.
It doesn’t have to, though – using a Content Marketing Platform can not only help you streamline your content marketing program for maximum efficiency, it can also help you find opportunities you might be missing.
Ready to learn more? Then read on.
Before we get to some of the best content marketing platforms currently on the market, let’s take a few minutes to explore what a content marketing platform is, how it works, and how it can make your life easier.
Let’s start with a definition of what a content marketing platform is.
A content marketing platform is software that allows marketing departments to easily maintain all the various elements of their content marketing initiatives. It helps marketing teams organize materials, streamline processes, and ensure that created content is being used in the most effective ways possible.
You have a huge number of options available when it comes to content marketing software, and they’re all a little bit different in what they offer. As such, we suggest figuring out what your content marketing goals are and demoing a wide variety of platforms before making a purchasing decision.
This way, you’re guaranteed to get a customized software solution that perfectly matches your company’s specific needs.
Whether you’re just beginning to dabble in content creation, or you have a fully functional content marketing team, you’ve probably realized that there are a lot of moving parts in a content marketing program.
You have people creating blog posts, white papers, infographics, video content, podcasts, images, and a dozen other things to meet your marketing needs.
With all this different content being created, organization is key. A good content marketing platform helps you keep projects on track by allowing you to see everything in development, everything that’s been released, all the key performance indicators you need to see if a piece of content is working or not, and a bunch of other tools.
Too often, content gets created and never used – or never used properly. You can eliminate this with a content marketing platform.
So far, we’ve taken sort of a macro level view of content marketing software, but let’s dive deeper and examine how it can solve some of the most common problems faced by marketing teams around the globe.
We’ve talked a bit about how companies often create content that is either never used or only used once and then discarded (often because other stakeholders either don’t know it exists or can’t find it), which creates a huge drain on marketing resources.
With a content marketing platform, this problem is completely eliminated.
Marketing materials are now stored in a centralized location, so they’re not used once and lost. This alone makes it easier to repurpose content for multiple uses, but as an added bonus, the robust data analysis that can be performed will allow you to figure out the best format for repurposed content too.
Marketers have access to more raw data today that at any other time in history, but with so much data things can quickly become overwhelming – meaning you don’t always know how to determine whether a piece of content was successful or not.
With a content marketing platform that leverages marketing AI, you’ll have access to a robust amount of analytic tools, but you can customize so that you’re not wading through oceans of data to find the metrics that matter most.
This makes it far easier to determine what’s working – and what isn’t – and adjust accordingly.
We work in a global market now – with marketing team members in many companies spread across different locations, working remotely, or just on different teams at the home office.
Keeping everything organized can quickly become a nightmare for a marketing department cranking out content.
Fortunately, this is not an issue once you acquire a content marketing platform. The CMP serves a centralized repository for all of your marketing assets, making it easily accessible to all team members, easily searched for whatever asset you need, and readily available whether they’re in the office down the hall or working halfway around the globe while you’re at home asleep.
This benefit alone is one of the main reasons we’re such big proponents of content marketing software. The amount of time saved by having materials organized and centrally located can have a dramatic impact on your marketing efforts.
These are just a few of the issues a good content marketing platform can help you solve. The beauty of this software is that it’s customizable, so it can not only solve these universal issues marketing departments face, but also the issues specific to your team, company, and industry.
While we’re already seeing some really amazing things with the current content marketing platforms that are out there, new technology is guaranteed to make these products even more amazing in the future.
Artificial intelligence (A.I.) driven content management already exists and will become more prevalent as algorithms and the technology behind them become more adept at understanding language and how people make choices.
As technology advances, we will see platforms that not only predict how content will perform, but will also suggest follow-up pieces, suggest the perfect content for specific audiences, and even potentially help create the content too.
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Talking about the future is great, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that there are some fantastic content marketing platforms out there right now – and they can do some really amazing things to help make your life easier.
At the end of the day, a content marketing platform should help you spend more time creating content as opposed to managing it. Below is a list of point solutions aimed at streamlining the project management and workflow of your content creation and organization.
SEMRush has become one of the industry standard content marketing platforms over the past few years – and for good reason. It offers a full suite of tools guaranteed to make your content marketing initiatives easier.
With real-time analytics, keyword research and optimization tools, and more SEMRush provides a lot of bang for the buck. It’ll even help you with the actual creation of your content.
If you’re looking for a content marketing platform that will help you from ideation all the way through to completion, this is one you should consider.
Another name familiar to most marketing and sales people, Hubspot offers a lot for both sales and marketing teams.
The marketing hub allows you to create content that is SEO-ready, will help you manage your social media, and draft email and landing pages. With marketing automation tools and full-featured analytics, it’s a one-stop shop for marketers. You can even create your own website on Hubspot as it will work as a content management system. Pretty neat.
The sales hub also offers lots of bells and whistles, including contact tracking, lead generation, and a full-funnel marketing system that will allow the marketing and sales teams to more easily chart a path to success.
Storychief is another content marketing platform that’s become popular with marketing teams.
The main reason is because it’s a piece of editorial software that allows for easy collaboration between a number of different contributors. This makes creating and editing content where multiple stakeholders are involved a lot easier than it’s been in the past.
Storychief’s other big feature is that it allows you to publish a piece of content on multiple platforms simultaneously. It can push out content to Medium, Shopify, WordPress, your social media channels, and even your email platform all in one fell swoop.
Couple this with real-time SEO feedback and an easy to use interface, and it’s not hard to see why Storychief has become so popular.
If you’re looking for a content management platform that covers content, branding, and social media management, you should definitely check out Percolate.
With an easy to organize asset management system and a robust set of tools for social media scheduling, Percolate makes it easy to build content workflows and schedule posts days and weeks in advance.
It features enough analytic data to keep even the most hardcore stat geek happy and has a mobile app that makes doing things from your phone both quick and painless.
Percolate has more than enough going for it that it’s well worth a look – particularly for your social media management team.
Scribblelive is a cloud-based solution that offers up a wide variety of tools for content marketers.
From ideation to measuring results, this SaaS offers some genuinely impressive tools to help you get the most out of your content initiatives. The software helps optimize your content marketing efforts with predictive analytics, tools to plan your content, and distribution technology to get it out into the world.
The one downside of Scribblelive is the price – it runs $2,500 a month for the Pro version, which means it’s a more viable tool for larger companies.
As someone who’s been using CoSchedule’s brilliant headline analyzer for years, it’s no big surprise that their content management platform is solid as well.
To be fair, CoSchedule really offers more in the way of editorial calendars and social media management than a straight up content management platform, but if you don’t need all the fancy bells and whistles of the bigger services out there, this might be a good fit for you.
The service makes it easy to re-post popular articles, communicate with team members, assign projects, and create tasks.
Again, it doesn’t offer as many functions as something like Scribblelive, but if you’re looking for a smaller, more focused solution, this one is worth a look.
If you’re looking for a content marketing platform that resembles Google Drive in some key aspects, then Kapost is one to consider.
Kapost will not only let you create content ideas, organize your team, distribute content, and track metrics, but it will also get the right piece of content in front of the right audience.
If you want to take control of your content creation from the start of the process through to completion, this tool has everything you need.
If you don’t already have a content team, or regularly rely on freelancers, then ClearVoice could be the content management platform for you.
One of the biggest selling points of ClearVoice is that it includes an online marketplace where companies can connect with content creators. This eliminates some of the hassle of finding experts, writers, graphic designers, and so on since you don’t actually need to leave the platform.
ClearVoice seems to most benefit companies that specialize in online media, but it can benefit sales and marketing as well. It offers many of the standard features that make collaborating, project management, and data analysis easier.
Ceros is one of the more interesting content management platforms on the list, as it allows content creators to craft interactive content without actually having to be able to code.
Instead, users can create things by simply dragging and dropping them in Ceros’ cloud-based interface. These digital creations can then easily be exported to websites, blog posts, or be used as landing pages. You’ll also be able to track analytics to see how people are interacting with your content.
All in all, Ceros is a great example of how specialized content management platforms are becoming. It may not meet all of your CMP needs, but it could make a great add-on to what you’re already using.
Looking to create content in line with your branding? Then Acrolinx can help.
Acrolinx uses artificial intelligence to analyze your content to make sure it’s taking full advantage of your branding. It does this by learning from previous materials and comparing what you’re currently working on. It then offers suggestions to help you create a more focused piece of content.
Obviously, there’s a bit of a learning curve for the AI here, but over time, Acrolinx can become as valuable as a good editor when it comes to making sure your work is clear, concise, and on-brand.
With a name like Hemingway, this app better be good.
Hemingway Editor is a program designed to help users edit their content to make sure it’s clear and free of grammatical errors. It analyzes a piece of content and marks unwieldy sentences, grammar issues, and so on.
It also features the ability to import files from MS Word and other programs, meaning you can check content without having to copy it over manually.
If you don’t have a grammar and writing expert on staff, Hemingway Editor can provide an affordable alternative.
Tired of boring PowerPoint presentations where you show the same old static slides? Well, Prezi can add some pizazz to your next meeting.
Prezi is a cloud-based service devoted to making your presentations more interesting. How do they do this? By allowing you to easily modify how your slides are viewed.
Zoom in, zoom out, tilt, rotate, or pan to create a new level of visual interest in your slides.
While what Prezi offers is relatively simple (and clearly aimed at a very specific audience), research shows that people get bored of static images in seconds. Adding a more cinematic look to your next presentation could keep your audience engaged.
Like Ceros, SnapApp lets users create interactive content without the need for complicated coding.
Utilizing a drag-and-drop interface, companies can easily create a wide range of engaging content. It’s a perfect solution for companies without coders on staff, as it’s so easy to use that pretty much anyone can create a compelling piece of interactive content with little effort.
It also offers up some impressive analytics to see how your content is performing, including the always valuable A/B testing to make sure you’ve crafted the perfect piece.
If you’re creating content, then a content marketing platform will certainly make your life easier and help you reach your content marketing goals more efficiently.
However, if content creation is not your only sales enablement challenge it may be wiser to explore more comprehensive solutions that not only address your content creation needs, but can also solve for other show-stopping pain points (such as: content distribution and promotion, content recommendations and training, content usage and adoption, content effectiveness measurement and tracking, etc.).
Accent Technologies is the first and only SaaS company to bring together Sales AI and Content Management in a true REVENUE ENABLEMENT PLATFORM. We provide both sales and marketing with better visibility into the performance of their teams and their content. This drives revenue through intelligent recommendations for complex sales scenarios and provides the data for rich analytics that power better messaging, coaching, forecasting, and long-term customer support. Learn more about our solutions or request a LIVE DEMO to see it in action.
