Content Marketing Software: Benefits, Recommendations, + 4 Tips To Choose One
Are you stuck trying to figure out what content marketing software is? Or obsessing about the best tools that will help your content marketing strategy?
Having a solid team of content professionals is great, but a content tool stack will also boost your confidence as an entrepreneur in this digital age and help you deliver results.
Now, I understand that there’s no shortcut to running a business or figuring out what you need to do. However, I want you to feel like you can handle getting the most out of content marketing by using the right software.
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That’s why we put together this guide to answer your pressing questions on the subject matter.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- What Is Content Marketing Software?
- What Is Content Marketing Software Used For?
- Benefits Of Content Marketing Software
- Choosing A Content Marketing Software
- Common Features Of Content Marketing Software
- List Of The Best Content Marketing Software
What Is Content Marketing Software?
Content marketing software is a multifunctional tool that allows you to carry out different content marketing operations. This includes creating content strategies, creating content, publishing, distribution (using different media), and management. These tools are mostly cloud based or web apps.
What Is Content Marketing Software Used For?
There are different reasons why teams opt for a content marketing platform. These reasons include:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
This is one of the top content distribution channels, and a major part of many content marketing strategies. But it can get pretty technical. A good content platform will take away the guesswork from this and provide you with accurate data for keyword research, competitor analysis, and creating a backlink strategy.
PS: You can check out our in depth breakdown of the best SEO tools to explore specialized SEO tools.
Content Production
There’s only so much you can achieve by planning and thinking; the hard work starts with production. With content creation, there has to be a healthy balance between quality and quantity, which is where these tools come in. They increase your production rate by:
- Helping you fill up your editorial calendar with more ideas through keyword research (AI tools can generate ideas on their own)
- Analyzing already published works to highlight which ones need to be refreshed or redistributed
Content Promotion & Distribution
The content marketing cycle doesn’t start with content planning and end with production. Your content strategy should have a promotion and distribution plan, and your tools can assist with this as well.
Other Use Cases
Content marketers might also be using content marketing software or various features for the following use cases as well:
- Social media management
- Social media marketing
- Marketing automation
- Influencer marketing
- Creation of brand awareness
- Email marketing
4 Benefits Of Content Marketing Software
1. Helps You Automate Repetitive Parts Of Your Business
Most business owners fall into the trap of wanting to personally handle all the moving parts of each piece of content. This is especially true of low value items that might feel good to tick off a to-do list, but which can be tackled without their presence or input.
Doing this doesn’t allow your business to scale up since you’ll be spreading yourself too thin and slowing down operations.
So, look for ways to channel your brain power and energy to more other parts of your business like community management, high-level content creation, and an optimal customer experience.
To do this, you’ll need to rely on the right content marketing software for repetitive tasks like email marketing (the technical aspects, not email copywriting), uploading content, tracking lead, data analytics, and the like. Low value tasks like these don’t require your personal input, just supervision at best.
2. Boosts Productivity At Work
Efficient marketing teams can reduce burn out and boost productivity by using content marketing software to:
- Cut down time spent on tasks through automations
- Improve the accuracy of output and data generated by using tools to fact check and analyze data
- Leverage proofreading, spell check, and workflow optimization features to deliver better content
- Organize information for future reference through documentation and curation
3. Generate More Leads
Lead generation is all about turning people’s interest into new customers for your business.
For this to happen, you’ll need to set up marketing funnels, which content marketing software can help with. The success of your funnel is dependent on whether each piece of content in the funnel is optimized for a particular stage of the funnel, how well you’re using each marketing channel to build connections with your audience, and how well your overall content operations are running.
For example, you might create a piece of content targeting potential customers in the evaluation stage in the form of a case study, in order to help leads evaluate how you can solve their problem. At the same time, you want to be staying connected with leads through email marketing or social media, as well as to generate a steady stream of content for leads, to keep your solution top of mind.
4. Informs Your Decision Making
What channel works best for your audience? What kind of content resonates with them? The answer to these questions often lies in the data that you can get from content marketing software.
They can also help you choose which marketing tactics to adopt, the demographics of your customers and your audience, their preferred ways to consume content, and more. Using these tools to gather such information is way better than relying on guess work or blindly imitating competitors.
Choosing A Content Marketing Software
Here are four key things to consider when choosing content marketing software.
Prioritize Your Needs & Make Sure They Are Met
Ensure you have a solid understanding of what you need from your content marketing platform in terms of features, number of users, storage space, and your overall budget. Samantha Odo, the Chief Operating Officer at Precondo, a real estate company breaks it down this way:
“There are several options that might work for your business, and it's wise to consider how each option will fit into your company's overall marketing and business plan.
What's your current spending plan? Take the costs associated with implementing and maintaining the programme into account, in addition to the product's initial investment. When deciding on your investment and calculating ROI, take into account additional hardware demands, support, license fees, and training.
How user-friendly is it? A complicated system with sophisticated features could be alluring, but if your staff doesn't utilize it because the learning curve is so high, it won't be of any value. Think carefully about who will use the platform, what knowledge and skills they already have, and how much further training will be required to completely incorporate the platform into your daily routine.”
Check For Integrations
Another thing to consider is how well it will integrate with the other software solutions you use. Danielle Bedford, who heads B2B Marketing at Coople, advises this:
“Look for software that integrates with the tools you already use, such as your CRM, marketing automation software, and social media platforms. This will help you create a seamless experience for your team and make it easy to track the performance of your content across all channels.”
Check The Tool’s Product Roadmap
The demands of professional marketing can change rapidly. If your software isn't changing to meet your needs, it won't be long until you find yourself looking elsewhere. Good content marketing software should be regularly updated with new features, UX improvements, and any bug fixes.
Caleb Uffers, who has worked as a Digital Marketing Specialist, advises:
"In your best interest, ditch any software that has not been updated in several months to years. Before you commit to any content marketing software it's a good idea to check for recent testimonials and the amount of activity on their website and social media. If they aren't updating content or marketing themselves, then you've likely got a dead or dying product on your hands."
Check For Customizability
You’ll want a tool that is customizable to your needs in terms of features, workflows, and how your team members work. You should also make sure the tool has a support team that can help you get to the level of customization you need.
Read more about how to choose content marketing software here.
Common Features Of Content Marketing Software
Most content marketing tools include features for a variety of the different moving parts of content marketing. This includes: content creation, analytics, collaboration, workflows, marketing automations, content distribution, and audience engagement.
Let’s discuss these features in detail:
Analytics And Tracking
Data plays a huge role in decision making for content marketers. Insights from Semrush’s Global Content Report reveal setting and measuring goals is critical for content marketing in 2023.
The tool should have analytics features that ensure data is easily understandable, presentable, and shareable for all team members and any executives. It should lessen the burden of organizing and sorting through multitudes of data, as well as help you prioritize content or marketing campaigns, create custom reports, customize metrics and KPIs, and build reports for sharing internally and externally.
Content Production
Check out the content production workflow in the marketing tool; is it seamless and intuitive? Can you customize it to your own workflows? Many tools also allow you to set up workflow automations to make sure you don’t miss any important steps in your process.
Collaborative Feature
Unless you're a one man content team, the content marketing department of most companies consists of different individuals with unique roles to play. These roles each have their own additions and inputs for each piece of content. The ideal working experience allows different parties to view tasks, share content assets, and bounce ideas off each other.
List Of The Best Content Marketing Software
There are so many content marketing tools you can select from these days. Some of which are free, paid or targeted to certain audiences. But this list comprises some of the best content marketing tools available.
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Get Better At Content Marketing By Exploring These Tools
Like other fields, growth as a content marketer happens when you apply the knowledge you’ve gathered. Get familiar with these tools by signing up for a free trial and creating a mini project for yourself. You can come up with content ideas using SEO tools. Or using the social media tools to grow your personal brand online through content creation.
In the meantime, use the comment section to share the tool you’re most excited to try out, or your experience using a particular tool.
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