Marketing.ai Content Marketing Software Report

CONTENT MARKETING Software Report What does it take to be successful at content marketing? How do these needs translate into software requirements?

Introduction If you’re evaluating content marketing software, this eBook will interpret your needs into software requirements. But, before evaluating software to help you achieve success with content marketing, it’s important to establish what it takes to be successful.

In short, successful content marketing is predicated upon first having a well-defined and well-understood vision and strategy for how your content aligns and will align across a customer, buyer or audience journey. But strategy and vision is only successful if your team can execute the content in alignment with that strategy and vision. Therefore any software that wants to use the content marketing tag should have at minimum a way to centrally store strategic objects such as Themes, Personas, and Customer Journey or Buyer Cycle Stages, as well as planning and execution tools such as Collaborative Editorial Calendars, Assignment, Drafting, Approval and Publishing Workflows. Once your team gets to this point, however, you quickly start pushing up against new walls and will want an even more integrated system to accomplish content marketing--this is where end-to-end content marketing software comes in. It is these kinds of software suites that are the focus of this comparison. While other tools and channels are important connectors to these systems, they cannot on their own help your team be successful with content marketing.

We will examine over 60 different features and how you can use them.

Define vision and strategy.

Outline the customer journey. Keep track of strategic objects. Planning and execution tools.

End-to-end workflow.

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In this Report... How can content marketing software help you achieve success? In this report, we’ll examine the following key areas: 1.

Define and document strategy; centrally, in a framework.

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2.

Collect content requests and ideas; easily collaborate on

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ideation. 3.

Editorial calendar views: ideation, production and publishing

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views with the ability to filter. 4.

Role-based workflows: assign, draft and approve content.

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5.

Asset library: central storage and tagging for quick search and

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retrieval of assets. 6.

Publishing and promotion: distribute approved content to online

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channels such as websites, blogs or social media. 7.

Content-centric analytics: insights specific to content marketing

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showing aggregate strategy performance in addition to the results driven by individual items, content types and channels. 8.

Flexible integrations: access to other key tools and ecosystems

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that are ancilliary or connect to content marketing efforts such as CMS or blog platforms, social media channel accounts, web analytics, marketing automation tools and more. Comparative checklist of content marketing software ven-

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dors: Based on the criteria we outline, who offers what and how much does it cost?

Let’s look deeper at each...

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1. Define & Document Strategy Content Marketing Challenge

How Software Can Help

Understanding the customer:

• Represent personas and make that information available so your team understands who they are writing for and why.

Content marketing puts your audience at the center of your strategy. Your content will not only have to speak to specific personas but will also have to cater to their changing needs throughout their individual customer journeys.

• Outline and share the buyer cycle with your team. • Keep track of how much content is being produced for each persona and buyer cycle stage • Help you identify if there are any content gaps in this journey.

Organizing content strategy: Content marketing is often organized around various themes. Themes are logical groupings of content such as blog categories, campaigns, or high level company objectives. Identifying themes helps you break down your overall marketing strategy into a content strategy. Communicating strategy: Since every organization is unique, you may have your own way of thinking about strategic objects like personas, themes, the buyer cycle and more. It’s critical to find a software that let’s you add strategic objects to a flexible framework rather than a rigid platform.

• Configured representations of your themes. • A way to link themes to planning, creation, tracking and measurement of content.

• Flexible configuration of strategic objects such as names you use, variable values, descriptions.

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Define & Document Strategy Key Software Features

Personas Creation

Buyer Cycle

Persona Journeys

Who are you targeting your content to? Build out your personas and share them with team members. As content is created, keep track of how it targets different audiences.

It’s important to define your buyer cycle--how many stages will you use and what will you call them? The system should let you label, describe and map content to buyer cycle stages.

Once you know who you’re targeting and the stages they go through, you can connect how personas interact with content across the buyer cycle.

Themes & Subtheme Creation

Theme-Cycle Grid

As you plan your content strategy, you will identify themes (and potentially subthemes) to group your content. The system should let you label, describe and map content to themes.

To identify content gaps, you’ll want to visually see how your content for each theme speaks to the different stages in your buyer cycle. Does your system help you identify these gaps?

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2. Collect Content Requests and Ideas Content Marketing Challenge

How Software Can Help

Ongoing ideation:

• Capture and store your ideas in a bank.

Content marketing requires content to be produced on an ongoing basis, which can make ideation an exercise in creativity. Since you never know when inspiration might strike, you’ll need different strategies and tools for capturing all your great ideas. The benefit of having all your ideas in one place, is being able to easily assess them when you plan out your editorial calendar. Team participation Content marketing is a team effort, with expertise and insights coming from all sides of the organization. You’ll need a way to involve team members and perhaps even your greater organization in ideation and brainstorming. If you truly want to keep your team motivated and contributing, you’ll also need a way to keep track of who’s contributed what.

• Attach strategic metadata to your ideas for easy search and retrieval as well as reporting purposes during editorial planning. • Easily push ideas from the bank to your editorial calendar when needed.

• Easy ways to submit ideas from both inside and outside the system. • Ways to request and gather ideas from your team. • Ways for your team to request content they need produced.

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Collect Content Requests & Ideas Key Features

Idea Bank A central place to collect, store and curate ideas before pushing to them to your editorial calendar for execution. Tag ideas with strategic metadata for easy search, retrieval and reporting.

Request Page Systems should provide easy to configure request web pages to be shared with the team. These pages should be secure and also ingest those requests into the system directly.

Request Tracker Requests are from members of the wider team who need content produced. A request tracker should have easy ways to ingest new requests and track them througout their lifecycles.

Mobile App Ideas and Requests strike at any time, like right after that sales meeting with a customer! An app to add ideas and requests from your mobile phone or tablet is therefore a must.

Chrome Extension Ideas can strike anywhere, especially while surfing the web. An extension should be provided to quickly add web page links, text and images to your idea bank directly from your browser.

API There are many other systems you might want to directly add ideas and requests from as thoughts occur. Therefore the system should provide an inbound API for this purpose.

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3. Editorial Calendar Views Content Marketing Challenge

How Software Can Help

Creating a central editorial calendar:

• Everything that flows through the editorial calendar should be only 1-2 clicks away in a directed flow.

Your editorial calendar is the center of all of your content marketing work, so your tool should be calendar-centric as well. Maintaining the editorial calendar: Since populating your editorial calendar will be an ongoing process, streamlining this activity can save you hundreds of hours in the long run.

• Easy ways to get ideas from your idea bank to the editorial calendar. • Easy way to add brand new content items directly to the editorial calendar. • Ability to add unlimited content types. • Ability to tag new calendar items with strategic metadata.

Strategic editorial decisions: Your editorial calendar isn’t just a production schedule--it helps you visualize your content plan at a high level. Your editorial calendar should provide you with strategic insights at a glance and easy ways to act on them.

• Ways to differentiate/color code content so that you can see how the different content types are distributed at a glance. • Advanced filters that allow you to view content on your calendar through the lens of various strategic metadata. • Drag and drop functionality to reposition content items as required to improve strategy or scheduling.

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Editorial Calendar Views Key Features

Push to Calendar The ability to push ideas from the Idea Bank directly to the Editorial Calendar streamlines editorial planning.

Custom Content Types After adding new content types, you must be able to easily create custom names for your content types to match how your team works.

Visual Identification Calendar items should be clearly marked by color key and icons to visually identify key information, such as content type, at a glance.

Custom Color Schemes To quickly identify content types in the calendar, you should be able to choose custom colours in a fine-grained way, using color-pickers and hexadecimal codes.

Unlimited Content Types Content marketing is about a lot more than web and social content. The system must have the ability to add any number of content types.

Drag and Drop It should be easy to move items around in the calendar, including the ability to dates adjust automatically as items are moved around.

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Editorial Calendar Views Key Features

Ease of Creating New Items

Tag with Strategic Elements

Advanced Filters

There should be a way to add new items just by clicking on your desired calendar day directly, as well as a “new item” button on every screen within the system.

When creating items there must be a feature for tagging those items with the elements created in strategy, such as themes, personas and buyer cycle stages.

Your calendar should be able to filter on many dimensions simultaneously, such as assigned author, workflow stage, content type, theme, persona, buyer cycle stage and more.

Multiple View Types

Global & Sub-Calendars

The Editorial Calendar should have more than just the classic grid calendar view, it should also have List, MyCalendar, Production, and Upcoming Assignment Views, among others.

As your needs grow, your calendar should flex to provide sub-calendars with unique organizations, roles and permissions while also providing a global roll-up calendar.

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4. Role-Based Workflows Content Marketing Challenge

How Software Can Help

Managing production workflows:

• Create assignments and specify

After planning content items in the editorial calendar, it is important to be able to connect them directly to an execution workflow so you can easily manage production. It’s important to ensure that the final produced content items end up in the correct place, at the

content item details. • Automatic notifications sent to your team upon assigning work. • Casading workflow that guides your team members through the next steps.

correct time.

• Configurable workflow stages for

Supporting your team’s work:

• Tag assignments with strategy

Once your team members receive their assignments, they need a way to do the work. Then, once the work is complete, they’ll need a way to communicate with their team members and to trigger the next step in the workflow, whether that’s

different content types and projects.

elements to refer back to. • Draft editor that matches the content type. • Option to add content as file attachments.

an approval, a request for revisions or

• Store comments in the workflow.

a request to publish the content. The

• My Calendar feature to help your

completed draft should be accessible

team members keep track of their

to the team so that they can see the

due dates.

whole content picture, perhaps even Permissions: With many people at work in your calendar, you’ll want the ability to control who has access to your strategy and content as well as who can make

• Assign roles and permissions to team members • Lock certain features for certain types of roles.

changes to it.

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Role-Based Workflows Key Features

Synopsis & Summaries To provide details about the content that is being assigned, the connected workflow system should have space for adding synopses, summary and descriptive information.

Configurable Workflow Stages For each content type, create different workflows and configure their unique stages, including who is involved and what happens. Choose to lock workflows down or leave them open.

Assignment Creation There needs to be a simple and easy way to assign work to users with the click of a button.

Multi-Step Stages Complex scenarios may require that sub-steps within a stage are met before it can move onto the next stage. Functionality needs to be provided to facilitate this use case.

Notification System As work is assigned or completed, the system should automatically notify users by email and via system inbox. There should also be a way to specify notification type and frequencies.

Drafting A robust draft editor should have full CMS-like functionality: add images in-line, embed media, edit html souce, WYSIWYG formatting and styling, previews and other advanced features.

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Role-Based Workflows Key Features

Enable Attachments Ability to attach files to calendar and workflow items for authors who prefer to use standard word processing programs and for attaching related assets for sourcing and context.

Approvals Without a system in place, approval workflows usually happen ad-hoc via email or not at all. A key requirement then, is to make it easy to submit work, approve it or request revisions.

In-Workflow Details No one likes to hop between screens while working; it is therefore important to provide workflow details in tabs that are easy to display and hide again from right where you work.

Locking Across the workflow system, there should be the ability to apply locking features based on certain elements and actions such as user role and workflow stage (i.e approved or not).

Comments Team members want to be able to provide comments throughout the workflow. A flexible commenting system that is accessible while working and also as one dedicated feed is key.

Ease of Accessing Strategic Elements Given the work on strategy and the need to align workflow with that effort, it should be easy to tag workflow elements and stages so as to ensure that alignment.

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5. Asset Library Content Marketing Challenge

How Software Can Help

Content is everywhere: Content marketers produce a lot of content, of many different types--from blog posts to whitepapers to images, videos and beyond. Your asset library will need to support all the content your team creates.

• Store all your content in one place.

A complete view of content picture: Before you start work, you need to collect and audit your existing assets to see where the gaps lie for creating new content. After you create new content, you need a way to store it and make it available to your team to put to use. To collect and store assets, you need some form of an asset library.

• Make it easy to add all your content

Find and retrieve relevant content:

• Help find content with strategic

After storing content, it should be easy to retrieve it later, whether that’s to give it to your customers or to your internal team. Or, you might want to review it yourself as part of a strategic content audit. Sharing content and managing access: When it comes to sharing content, it’s

to the library, as it’s created. • Have a way to upload existing content to the library for a complete picture of all available content assets.

metadata and keyword search. • Quickly preview content or download it. • Easy access to content while working, to refer to and use. • Keep content in the right hands with different permission levels.

important to be able to manage access. Some content might be confidential and needs to be walled off; other content you may eagerly want to share publicly.

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Asset Library Key Features

Easy to Add New Assets It should be easy to add new assets by creating new content items, tagging them with strategic elements, uploading related files, and even the option of adding items in bulk.

Color Coding Assets should be color coded following the same conventions as editorial calendar content. This ensures quick identification and reinforces visual understanding across the system.

View in Browser or Download to Drive There should be options for both viewing assets in the browser or downloading them to a local drive.

Multiple Asset Types The system should be able to handle different file types such as images, links and document formats.

Access Throughout System Once you have collected your assets in the library you’ll want to put them to use. Assets in the system should therefore be easy to find and retrieve as they are needed.

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6. Publishing & Promotion Content Marketing Challenge

How Software Can Help

Content distribution to audiences:

• Connect up directly to systems that

When a content item is completed and

can publish and promote that work

approved, content marketers need a

via API. If API is not available, help

way to distribute the content to their

marketers to pull back data through

audiences.

involve

manual operation and also to enable

publishing to a website or blog first and

direct custom integration without the

then promoting it through social or paid

use of a pre-configured API.

Distribution

may

promotion channels such as sponsored content and native advertising. Different content, different schedules:

• Schedule content distribution for

Content marketers center work around

publishing immediately or at a future

their editorial calendars, with various

date.

pieces of content scheduled to be completed at different times. Content marketers need a way to easily publish and promote content upon completion or schedule these activities at a time in the future, directly or through an approval workflow. Managing channel specs and data: Different

publishing

channels

have

different features and metadata to attached to content. Content marketers need a way to get this information into the correct channels in a streamlined fashion. important.

Channel

security

is

also

• Implement approval workflows for publishing

content

and

content

promotions. • Provide an overall view of content that has been published or is scheduled to be published. • Attach images, links and metadata from your system to your publishing channels. • One central login/point of access to push to multiple end points, keeping channels secure and as part of a workflow.

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Publishing & Promotion Key Features

Multiple Type of Direct Publishing Channels

Different Publishing Statuses

Different channels publish different types of content, such as CMS for blog and website, and social media channels. The system should connect and publish to these accounts.

Sometimes you want to push finished copy to a new system as a draft. Content marketing software should provide for publishing under those different statuses.

Image Insertion

Integrations with Publishing Channels

Certain channels such as WordPress, Facebook and Twitter, allow you to add a featured image to the published post. The system should have an interface for adding these images.

There is a vast array of places where content can be deployed to. The system should have no functional limit to the number of publishing and deployment integrations.

Scheduling The system needs to be able to schedule content for publishing at a future date and time. This requires an easy-to-use interface for scheduling, factoring in dates, times and time zones.

Integrations with Paid Promotion Channels Sometimes you pay to promote your content which requires a way to get your content into these networks. The system should connect via API or provide another solution.

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7. Content-Centric Analytics Content Marketing Challenge

How Software Can Help

A strategy that leads to results After putting in the work to build a strategy and then executing on it, content marketers need to be able to track the results. Analytics is a big topic with a lot of different ways to collect, store, sort and present data. Therefore, a flexible framework for analytics is needed to help tie data back to strategy. And since this is content marketing software we are talking about, analytics should be content-centric rather than lead- or customer-centric.

• Track the results of your content.

An efficient production process Since a major part of the content marketing system is the workflow process of executing on content, analytics should not only deliver you the end results of your content, but should provide information about the content development workflow process. This helps the strategy team understand what’s working and what’s not, but how to more efficiently deliver on the best content.

• Provide workflow information to help

• Tie results back to your strategy to help you identify gaps and why content is resonating.

understand how to make production more efficient.

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7. Content-Centric Analytics Content Marketing Challenge

How Software Can Help

Visualize and present information In addition to ther own reports, content marketers need to prove the value of what their doing to management. It’s therefore important for content marketers to be able to find and discover new insights to present. Information visualization methods are key to creating shared insight. There are many different approaches and styles and may vary by use case. And, it’s important to be able to present this information in the way management prefers, whether that’s a printed report in a particular format or a digital presentation.

• View and compare data in different

Regular reporting and feedback Once content marketers have decided on the data and formatting they want to see in reports, there needs to be an easy way to retrieve this data on a regular basis.

• Saved views of data so you can find

ways, based on information you are curious about. • Make data easy for everyone to analyze in new ways, without needing backgrounds in data science. • Output reports in your preferred format.

and compare the same information quickly each time. • Option to automatically output preferred reports and have them delivered to you on a regular basis.

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Analytics Key Features

Tie Back to Strategy Analytics should aggregate the performance of content across strategic elements to show the value and performance of that strategy and also monitor gaps and progress in filling them.

Advanced Filters For insight from data visualizations, the same advanced filters available throughout the system should help you explore multiple dimensions of strategy, execution and performance.

Show Workflow Performance Analytics should provide insights on how efficient workflows are and how much progress has been made in filling gaps through content production.

Insights for Planning & Strategy With new processes comes new data. Content marketing software should make the data flexibly available to configure and structure into something meaningful for each unique situation.

Data Play Explorer With all the data being created and pulled in through integrations, it should be easy to explore, create views and build reports. This should easiest enough for anyone to use.

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Analytics Key Features

Saved Views When building and filtering report views it should be easy to save those views for quick access in the future. Those saved views should also be available externally through a configured API.

Different Output/ Export Options Reports and views should be easy to share and use outside of the system, with flexible output options such as CSV, Excel and PDF.

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8. Flexible Integrations Content Marketing Challenge

How Software Can Help

Compliment systems in place

• A connector between all your different

No

system

operates

as

an

island

anymore, it must be flexible in how it connects to other systems and makes those connections easy to set-up and use. Often, software platforms are rigid and force users to do things in a specific way. Content marketers need a flexible

pieces and platforms used as part of your content marketing workflow. • Manage the workflow for all content development in one place, before delivering

it

to

the

appropriate

integrated channel.

framework that can mold itself around their preferred marketing systems and way of working, adapting and acting as the “One Source of Truth”.

A bridge to strategy Content

marketing

• Account for how all content, across software

should

provide the ability to connect to multiple instances and platforms, operating as a bridge between different instances and vendors, with content and strategy as the unifying elements handled uniquely well

integrated

platforms,

plays

into

strategy and the customer journey. • Pulls in the data from all integrated platforms so you can derive holistic insights about content marketing.

by content marketing software. In this way, content marketing software should act as a meta-CMS sitting on top of or at the center of all these other platforms and accounts.

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8. Flexible Integrations Content Marketing Challenge

How Software Can Help

Freedom to try new tactics

• Mix and match new tools, allowing you

Marketing is a quickly evolving area,

to experiment with tactics, without

with

having to make changes to the way

new

technologies

and

tactics

popping up all the time. To get ahead of the competition, the best marketers are always on the lookout for new ways to experiment and get results. From marketing automation systems, to data visualization to new ways to create and contract production, content marketers

your team works. • Pipe out your content to any new trendy tool so you can stay ahead of the competition while maintaining your central repository of strategy, content and workflow processes.

need a way to easily pull in the content from these external systems, add it to their production workflows, measure it as part of an overall strategy and mash this information to reporting.

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Integrations Key Features

CMS Integrations The system should integrate multiple CMS platforms and provide an easy way to manage domains and user accounts as well as publishing and scheduling for each with workflows.

CRM Integrations

Social Integrations Connect multiple social media platforms and manage user accounts in a secure way. The system should also have workflow and publishing templates, and unique analytics by platform.

Link Shortening

Marketing Automation Content marketing software should connect to multiple instances and platforms, operating as a bridge, with content and strategy as the unifying elements it handles uniquely well.

Analytics Modeling

Link shorteners help track valuable data while saving character counts on social media. The system should conveniently integrate these platforms in the publishing and scheduling workflows.

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Integrations Key Features

Visualization Systems There are a large number of vendors for building reports and visualizations and companies may need to collect content marketing data within them. The system should share data easily.

Asset Stores Companies have many different places where they keep assets that for content marketing creation and deployment. The system should make it easy to link up with those asset stores.

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About the Comparative Analysis Let’s get down to business... This is the part of the report where we compare solutions against the content marketing challenges and needs we’ve laid out. For the purpose of evaluation we’ve included: • 4 other Content Marketing Software providers we’re compared with most frequently (DivvyHQ, Kapost, NewsCred and Percolate). • Marketing Automation with Calendar, as providers of marketing automation software are now starting to offer bundled calendars. • Project Management Tools with Calendar, as some of the standard project management software suites are now targeting content marketers with their Swiss-Army knife solutions, including calendars with them. Since there isn’t a lot to differentiate between these providers for our purposes, we think it’s fair to bundle them together for evaluation.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES Since you’ve requested this download, we assume that you are already familiar with Editorial Calendars. If you are looking for more information on them, we have a wealth of resources on our blog at http://blog.marketing.ai/tag/editorial-calendar/.

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Comparative Analysis Marketing.AI

DivvyHQ

Kapost

Newscred

Percolate

Marketing Automation

(with calendar)

Project Mgmt (with calendar)

1. DEFINE & DOCUMENT STRATEGY Personas Creation Buyer Cycle Persona Journeys Themes & Subtheme Creation Theme-Cycle Grid 2. COLLECT CONTENT REQUESTS & IDEAS

Idea Bank Content Request Tool Chrome Extension Request Page

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Editorial Calendar Checklist Marketing.AI

DivvyHQ

Kapost

Newscred

Percolate

Marketing Automation

(with calendar)

Project Mgmt (with calendar)

Mobile App API 3.Color-coding EDITORIALCALENDAR VIEWS Push to Calendar Visual Identification Unlimited Content Types Custom Content Types Custom Color Schemes Drag and Drop Ease of Creating New Items Tag with Strategic Elements

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Editorial Calendar Checklist Marketing.AI

DivvyHQ

Kapost

Newscred

Percolate

Marketing Automation

(with calendar)

Project Mgmt (with calendar)

Advanced Filters Multiple View Types Global & Sub-Calendars 4. ROLE-BASED WORKFLOWS