Keeping with the theme of the best sales and marketing software, today we are going to take a look at the best content marketing software currently available. For those who don’t know, content marketing is the process of creating content with the intention of informing, educating, and entertaining the readers. It is often employed as part of an overall marketing effort and in concert with other forms of marketing.
Content marketing software is software that is designed to facilitate the creation, distribution, and performance measurement of content. There is a significant amount of overlap between content marketing software and other forms of marketing software, but there is indeed some core functionality we can use to define what content marketing software does.
Core Features of Content Marketing Software
Content Creation and Collaboration – In modern content marketing, it is typical to have teams of people dedicated to the creation of informative and educational content. There can be multiple authors, uploaders, editors, etc. that all have a role to play in the creation of an article. Many times these people will be operating remotely and will not be at the 
same physical location. This presents the challenge of facilitating effective collaboration, which is one feature offered by content marketing software.
Scheduling – Along with the need to enable collaboration between team members is the requirement to handle task scheduling. With team members in many disparate geographical locations the need for effective and robust scheduling solutions is higher than ever before. The best content marketing software will include functionality for allowing team members to share schedules to allow scheduling of critical tasks.
Workflow Handing – As we alluded to above, the fact that content is created by a team means that there will be some workflow associated with production. Good content marketing software will enable the team leader to assign each team member a portion of the workflow (i.e. a task) and assign her the associated work. A robust notification system can allow other team members to engage their tasks when the work is ready for them. For example, it does no good for the editor to sit around waiting for the writers to finish the content. They can be engaged in other tasks while the writing is underway and notified when it is time for them to edit.
Permissioning – In keeping with the concept that each member has a well-defined role to play, we have to deal with user permissions. We wouldn’t want an author publishing an article accidentally before it has the chance to be edited. The best content marketing software has features to control member permissions to ensure that someone does not inadvertently publish the article, or delete old articles.
Content Storage – The ability to store, search, and archive content is critical for large scale operations. This functionality should be extended not only to written content but to audio and video as well. Integration with existing file storage repositories is also a handy feature to look out for, should your organization use one of the larger cloud storage solution providers.
In addition to the basic functionality above, there is a wealth of advanced functionality available as well. High quality web based content management systems may provide some combination of the following features:
Push based Distribution – Once content has been created it could be distributed to a wide variety of platforms. For instance, the business may wish to push content to their blog as well as an email campaign or landing page simultaneously.
Content Retirement – where does content go when it retires? Not to the old content home, but rather it gets put out to pasture, i.e. archived. If your business is only putting out a moderate amount of content (say 1 blog posts a week) this could be done manually with little to no effort. However, the more content you produce the more cumbersome that process can become. The best content marketing software will therefore integrate some sort of expiration feature that allows you to decide when the content will be archived, at the time it is posted. This is a set it and forget it feature that comes in really handy for large operations.
Advanced Analytics – If you’re running an “industrial scale blogging operation”, then the chances are high that you need some sort of software to track the performanc
e of each post. You will want to know how many shares, likes, tweets an article received. Not only that, but it’s important to know how many times an article contributes to a conversion on your website. After all, if your audience is demanding to know about cute kittens, and you post about guinea pigs, then it’s something you’re going to want to know. The ability to analyze the wealth of data available to you is going to be critical in creating the most profitable and engaging content for your users.
User Tailored Content – Of course, the purpose of content marketing is ultimately to sell something. However, not everyone is going to enter the sales funnel at the same point. Some people are ready to buy, and some are just looking for information. By knowing which stage readers tend to be in, marketers can tailor the content to the correct stage in the buying process.
Considerations for Selecting a Content Marketing Software Solution
As always, there are a number of factors to consider before you take the plunge in implementing the use of a content marketing system. In particular, there are some issues to consider with respect to the software itself as well as your own organization.
With respect to the software itself, you want to understand the pricing model. With this type of software it is typical to use the software as a service (SaaS) model that allows you to pay monthly for access. Access can be had from anywhere, which is perfect for the geographically dispersed team that is common in modern content producing organizations. This is in contrast to older licensing models in which you paid a large fee up front to license the software on some number of machines. The SaaS model is less expensive at the outset, but can add up over time.
Another factor to consider is mobile integration. Does the software support all devices? Can your people work from a tablet as well as a desktop? This is important when people go on vacations or need to work out of their normal habitat. Just something to consider before taking the plunge.
As far as organizational concerns go, you need to make sure that everyone on your team is onboard with the software. If there is significant resistance among your team, then you are going to have a difficult time enforcing the use of the software. This is suboptimal, to say the least. You want to have that conversation up front and before you go all in on a particular software package. Perhaps some of your team members have experience with one package or another, and can make an intelligent recommendation as to which should be used for the organization. Make sure to avail yourself of the experiences of your team.
Another factor to consider is the use of a free trial. Some vendors offer a free trial so that you can try out the software before you get married to it. This sort of test drive procedure is a little bit rare, and only a few of the vendors offer it. Feel free to take advantage of this so that you don’t get stuck using a piece of software you don’t like.
Beyond the free trial and potential adoption issues, you want to know if the software can integrate into your currently used platforms. Does it integrate into your sales software so that you can plug content right into your email campaign? This is a huge benefit, as it cuts down on the number of steps needed to go from content creation to mass delivery.
Conclusion
A wise man once said: “content isn’t king, it’s everything”. There is an enormous amount of truth in this statement. The modern human is addicted to content. We crave it, we need it, and we need it NOW. An organization’s ability to meet this need for content delivery at a frenzied pace is critical to their long term survival. If you are only going to be able to produce one blog post a month (extreme example for illustrative purposes only, of course) then you are not going to get very far in making a dent in the audience.
You must strive to be
ever present at all times. Ideally, you want enough content that your audience can binge for days. This is the Netflix era, after all. The more content you can toss out there, the better. The best content marketing systems will help you to create and distribute as much material as humanly possible. This will be an enormous advantage for your business over the long term, as your competitors struggle to keep up.
Seek out software that meets the needs of your organization. If your team is scattered across the globe, your needs will be different than a business whose content creation team is all in one room. Make sure the software can integrate with other software solutions you currently have in place.
Never forget that you must create content, and loads of it, to survive. Go out and find a great content marketing software solution that helps your organization take their operation to that next level.
If you need help in finding software, check out our list of the best content marketing software. We think you will find it quite helpful in getting started, as it provides a wealth of reviews from real users just like yourself.
We hope this has been helpful. Stay tuned for our next post!
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