This is one of those tricky situations where you have to call a spade a spade. There are a number of established software vendors (think Newscred or Kapost) that are considered to be “content marketing platforms.” The similarity among all these vendors is their strength in the first pillar: creation.

While they all tackle a portion of the first pillar, they certainly don’t handle all of content marketing. They certainly don’t also include marketing automation functionality, social media management, SEO software, experience management, deep analytics and insights, and so on and so on… it’s simply impossible for one solution or platform to do it all.

Modern marketers like you will want to choose vendors and solutions that are best-in-class for their respective function, rather than buying into false hopes of all-in-one suites. With integration solutions like Zapier and Cloud Elements, the connectivity of marketing software vendors just keeps getting tighter, and in a sense commoditizing the notion of “a suite.” Tightly integrating solutions is the only way marketers will meet the demands and best practices of an effective content marketing strategy.

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Intermediate/ Digest...

If these five signs hit home, you’re ready for content marketing software.

Sign #1. Complex Workflows

Process is one of those potentially frustrating, but insanely important things that enterprise marketers deal with on a daily basis. You might hate it. You might geek out over it. But either way, process makes for more effective—meaning higher conversion rates and saving $12,000 per acquisition—content marketing.

Sign #2. Extensive Brand Guidelines

If you’re working in a regulated industry, you probably have a lot of legal guidelines you need to follow for each piece of content you produce. And regardless of industry, you should have a style guide to ensure consistency across content assets.

Sign #3. Vast Network of Contributors

If you have a lot of people involved in the content creation and approval process, then it’s worth looking into software to help manage these contributors and their individual tasks or deadlines. Usually, there’s someone who “owns” content in an organization.

Sign #4. Content Drives Critical Objectives

You know that marketing teams are responsible for meeting lead, opportunity, and revenue goals. Well, your content marketing team should be held accountable for those exact same goals. If they’re not, then how will you truly know that content is doing it’s job—driving revenue for your organization?

Sign #5. Content Variety and Scale

So if your organization is focused on producing some combination of videos, blogs, webinars, presentations, eBooks, interactive content, infographics, emails, social updates, etc., then you should take a look at software. Not only does it help you manage multiple content types and campaigns, but it also publishes content to your distribution channels (blog, CRM, marketing automation, Facebook, Twitter, SlideShare, YouTube, etc.) and pulls metrics from each.

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