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If you are a marketer or run a small business, it’s likely you publish various types of content on several platforms. But what happens when all the blog posts, videos, social posts, emails, and ebooks you produce begin to mount up so much that you can no longer manage them? If you’re feeling overwhelmed by content, then perhaps you need to make use of a content marketing platform.
If you are a marketer or run a small business, it’s likely you publish various types of content on several platforms (if you don’t, here’s why you should).
But what happens when all the blog posts, videos, social posts, emails, and ebooks you produce begin to mount up so much that you can no longer manage them?
If you’re feeling overwhelmed by content, then perhaps you need to make use of a content marketing platform.
What is a Content Marketing Platform?
A Content Marketing Platform is a tool that helps marketers and businesses manage their content strategy. It helps organize everything from the planning stage of the content production process, through to the implementation stage, and finally the measurement stage.
This allows teams that use a Content Marketing Platform an easy way to run campaigns and check their effectiveness.
Content Marketing Platforms will often integrate with the existing tools you use to create, share, measure content. They will usually include calendars to keep everyone on time during the creation process, and allow comments to streamline collaboration.
What Does a Good Content Marketing Platform Help With?
There are many platforms that help organize content marketing. However, these aren’t necessarily Content Marketing Platforms.
They could be Content Management Systems like Wordpress or Joomla, or more general marketing software solutions like those provided by Hubspot.
A good Content Marketing Platform has a very specific job. It should help with the four stages of content production:
- Planning: Having a strategy in place for your content marketing efforts can increase the chances that your content is working towards your business goals. A Content Marketing Platform can help document this strategy and ensures that everyone on the team is aware of it. It can also enable collaboration during the planning process, helping your businesses create effective content.
- Creation: Creating good content is arguably the most important part of any content marketing strategy (if you need a hand with some simple copywriting techniques, check out this post) . A Content Marketing Platform can streamline your content creation process by allowing managers to assign tasks and allowing team members to see how their work fits into the overall plan. Your platform may also have an integrated calendar so everyone knows where they stand.
- Distribution: If content creation is the most important part of content marketing, distribution plays a huge part in whether the content is successful. However, with so many platforms out there, distribution can get confusing.
A Content Marketing Platform will often integrate with different distribution channels—such as your social media accounts or your CMS—to make it easy to simultaneous share content. Additionally, analytics can keep your distribution efforts focused on the right channels for the content that is being created.
- Analysis: Analyzing your content is the only way to know if there are improvements you could make to your content strategy. A good Content Marketing Platform will allow you to measure the various performance metrics of your content, so you know what is doing well well, and what you need to improve upon. This can help with everything from raising awareness about your product, to building leads and making sales.
Who Should Use a Content Marketing Platform?
Anyone who feels they would benefit from a more organized content strategy should use a content marketing platform. Of course, different types of organization will get different uses from the software.
The platforms in our list range from those with free versions suitable for solopreneurs who produce minimal content, to enterprise solutions that cost thousands of dollars a month.
Here is how a Content Marketing Platform can help different teams.
Large Marketing Teams at Global Organizations
Large marketing teams will likely get a lot of benefit from having all their content marketing efforts in one place. Managers will find the organizational aspects and the ability to assign tasks and see what their team(s) are doing useful. Content Marketing Platforms also make it possible for multiple team members, or even multiple teams, to collaborate on single pieces of content.
Small and Medium-Sized Businesses
Small and Medium-sized businesses could also benefit from the ability to build a simple workflow that covers all their marketing efforts.
As these businesses may not have the resources for a dedicated content marketing team, they will benefit from the ability to make their content production process as streamlined as possible.
One of the solutions on our list claims it can save teams six hours per piece of content produced. This is likely to be a huge benefit if you need to produce content around your other tasks.
Solo Entrepreneurs
Like small business, solo entrepreneurs will benefit from the ability to make the content creation process as streamlined as possible. As solo entrepreneurs are likely to have the least amount of time to spend on content marketing than any of the other groups on this list, they will also get huge value from the ability to analyze their marketing efforts. By doing so, solo entrepreneurs can focus on the strategies that bring the biggest results.
Businesses that Hire Outside Freelancers
If you hire freelancers, you’ll know how difficult it can be to keep everyone on track. A Content Marketing Platform can help with this process by making it simple to assign tasks and see where people are up to in their efforts.
6 Great Content Marketing Platforms
The six platforms on this list each offer its own take on a Content Marketing Platform. Some will be suitable for small businesses, others for much larger teams. Some will have options that may suit both. One thing to note is that many offer a free trial, meaning you can try them out before committing. Here they are:
CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a marketing calendar that it claims allows you to manage your entire marketing roadmap.
It syncs with tools including WordPress, Google Analytics, Evernote, and Google Docs so you don’t have to spend all your time moving between sites. It also allows social scheduling on sites such as Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest, so you can save time when distributing your content. It even has a “Best Time Scheduling” feature that intelligently shares your posts at times of high traffic.
Analytics is taken care of by tools that measure your social messages, shares around the web, and the organic reach of your social posts. If used intelligently, these stats could help you make improvements to your social strategy.
Price: From $40 a month for solo entrepreneurs to $1,400 a month for its enterprise solution. CoSchedule also offers a free trial.
Oracle Content Marketing
Oracle Content Marketing is a Content Marketing Platform that focuses on the process of planning, creating, distributing, and analyzing content. It has a global marketing calendar to help teams coordinate their content efforts around different buyer personas.
The content production process can then be streamlined through workflow templates that are customizable for each process. It’s also possible to assign tasks to different authors.
Oracle Content Marketing has a suite of analytics products that show how your content performs based on a number of metrics including traffic, engagement, and impact by specific buyer personas.
Price: Unfortunately, Oracle doesn’t provide pricing details on its website.
Percolate
Percolate claims to be the leading Content Marketing Platform. The company says its software can help you produce more and better content by removing roadblocks and bottlenecks. Basically, it wants to streamline your marketing strategy.
It does this by allowing you to build marketing plans around events or product releases, and streamline the content planning, creation, and distribution process around these events.
Managers can easily see where each piece of content is in the creation process. The platform also has a handy tool that lets you analyze how often your content is being produced on time, and how often it is late. This could allow you to spot issues within your production processes.
Percolate integrates with several other platforms including Adobe Experience Manager, Office 365, and G Suite. The company claims its software is used by global brands including Sony, L’Oreal, and AstraZeneca. Impressive.
Price: Percolate is an enterprise solution and doesn’t appear to advertise prices.
DivvyHQ
DivvyHQ is a Content Marketing Platform that counts Red Bull and Virgin Mobile amongst its customers.
The software is suitable for teams of all sizes and has pricing plans to match. The main tool works as a hub that allows you to manage your campaigns and content schedules across unlimited shared content calendars. The should show you where you need to be to keep up with your content schedule. There is also a feature that lets you organize content based on specific campaigns.
DivvyHQ’s analytics features allow teams to see how content pieces, topics, and keywords perform across different channels (web, social, email, paid, SEO, video). All in one dashboard. You can also use the platform to create automated email reports based on this data.
Price: Prices start at $29 per month for the starter plan. They move up to $79 per month for the Pro plan and $129 per month for the Enterprise plan. DivvyHQ also offers a free 14-day free trial.
Kapost Content Marketing Platform
Kapost’s Content Marketing Platform helps businesses organize their campaigns across all teams and marketing channels. It works with blog posts, social, videos, and email.
All the content is stored in a centralized system accessible by all teams. This can help those with access get a key view of the overall strategy, as well as revealing analytical insights.
Employees and teams can collaborate during the creation process with comments. An editorial calendar ensures everyone knows where they should be in the content creation process. Kapost also offers integrations with platforms including Office 365, Google Drive, Wordpress, Hubspot, and various social media sites.
Price: Kapost is an enterprise level software with appropriate pricing. It starts at $3,500 per month.
Newscred
Newscred is a content marketing platform that helps marketing teams work through the content process; from planning to tracking.
Teams can use the software to streamline content creation and distribution, and then measure performance. As with all the platforms on this list, the software can help employees collaborate on their marketing efforts.
Newscred also offers an ROI tracking feature to help teams measure how the content they produce connects to revenue, as well as provide data on how content performs across the web. Newscred allows all the integrations you’d expect including social sites, your CMS, marketing automation, and your CRM.
Price: Newscred offers both a standard edition Content Marketing Platform and an Integrated Marketing edition content Marketing Platform. However, you’ll have to contact the company if you want to find out pricing details.
StoryChief
StoryChief doesn’t call itself a Content Marketing Platform but it does allow users to plan, create, distribute, and measure their content marketing efforts. According to StoryChief, using the tool could help you save up to six hours per piece of content produced.
Content can be created within the StoryChief editor. Collaborators can be invited to comment on and make suggestions about the content. Once finished, the software makes it easy to set up multichannel distribution when publishing your post.
StoryChief has plenty of integrations covering everything from social, to analytics, to CRMs, to content management.
Price: Story chief is unique in that it is the only Content Management Platform on this list that offers a free—albeit limited—version of the software. There is also a basic version that only costs $10 per month and allows you to publish five stories a month (up to thirty with an upgrade).
There is also a pro version for $100 a month and an enterprise version that is tailored to your business. Contact the company for enterprise pricing details.
And there you have it - the top content marketing platforms to help you streamline your process.
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