Your marketing engine’s fuel is content. As a result, you need to create, publish, and promote it consistently. To meet these objectives, you’ll need a content strategy and technology to streamline content operations. The ideal platform is content marketing management software. With this in place, you can scale and mature your content marketing.
So, what features should a platform provide your enterprise content team? Let’s find out.
What Is Content Marketing Management Software?
Content marketing management software includes tools and features to manage the operational and logistical aspects of your efforts. It should be a turnkey solution covering every content process step, from ideation to analysis.
So, do most content teams use this technology? According to Content Marketing Institute (CMI) research, 73 percent of organizations use content creation, calendaring, collaboration, and workflow technology. Those are core competencies of content marketing management software, but they do even more. They can also become the platform for content distribution, promotion, and analytics.
How Content Marketing Management Software Supports Your Team
Enterprise content teams have many challenges in the content process. Some of these deal with the content itself and understanding audience needs. Others are due to team dynamics. In fact, 38 percent of content marketers stated that internal communication is a challenge. Another 28 percent said technology integration.
These challenges have a remedy with content marketing software. It enables complete visibility into every project, keeps all parties aware of deadlines and tasks, and transforms loose workflows into structured, repeatable ones.
Such a solution supports every part of the content lifecycle and is adjustable to fit your custom workflows and requirements. It’s also easy to scale as you grow. Additionally, it improves collaboration with those inside the content team and other parties. This software becomes the foundation for content operations, and you can even track the performance of this to identify bottlenecks.
Now, on to the must-have features every content marketing management software should include.
Feature #1: Shared and Dynamic Content Calendars
Content calendars are the central hub of content production. It provides a 360-degree view of every asset or project and its timeline. Everyone that needs access has it and can visualize your editorial plans. With this visibility, there’s no confusion about status or responsibilities. It reduces long email chains and status meetings, which could boost your team’s productivity.
Content calendars are an excellent tool for enterprise content marketing, as you may have content teams that work on different products or geographies. As a result, the global team has insight into projects and can remove those communication silos.
Your content calendar should be dynamic and shareable for all stakeholders. Keeping one up to date in a spreadsheet is challenging and creates lots of admin work. A dynamic calendar updates and syncs with any change. Additionally, it sends notifications to collaborators related to those adjustments.
Feature #2: Content Planning Functionality
Content planning is the actions you take from your content strategy. It has a lot of factors that impact it, including ideation, planning, producing, distributing, and analyzing. All these activities need to have functionality within your software. When it comes to agility in content planning, seek out these things:
- Buyer persona creation and adjustments
- Assignment of audience type and buyer stage for projects
- Storage for capturing ideas from many stakeholders
- Creating and changing publishing schedules as needed
- Recalculation of production timelines when dates change
- Notifications to contributors of changes
- Content inventory capabilities
- Robust calendar filtering
- Content metadata management
When you have technology that supports content planning, you’ll have a much cleaner project space that drives efficiency.
Feature #3: Content Collaboration
Content development requires multiple collaborators, both inside and outside your team. Content collaboration is essential for getting insights from SMEs (subject matter experts), working through the logistics, and obtaining approvals.
These features are critical for successful collaboration:
- Central idea repository: Your team and others can deposit topic ideas here, then flesh them out to determine if they should make it onto your content calendar.
- Shared content calendars: All stakeholders have visibility into the schedules and deadlines of every project.
- Task management: Every person will be aware of their responsibilities.
- Custom workflows: Each type of content you create will have a different workflow and involve various parties.
- Real-time notifications: When a user updates a project, everyone involved receives automated notifications.
- Project management tools: You can manage projects on the dashboard to resolve questions and concerns.
- Commenting: Mention specific collaborators in projects where you need their assistance.
Feature #4: Content Automation Capabilities
Screenshot of Writer integration within DivvyHQ
Automation is necessary in the 21st century. You don’t have the bandwidth or resources to waste time on repetitive processes. Automating your content marketing process enables you to avoid this. Content marketing software automation capabilities include:
- Production and content workflows: Develop templates to automate task generation, team assignments, and production schedule calculations.
- Re-scheduling and notifications: Plans can change on a dime, and having automated re-scheduling of workflows and notifications that keeps teams in the loop is a game changer.
- Content creation and editing suggestions: New artificial intelligence (AI) tools are being integrated directly into content marketing management tools to speed up content creation, editing, and style guide analysis.
- Content and social publishing: When content is ready, you can automate its publishing on your website and distribution on social media platforms.
Feature #5: Content Analytics
Content analytics is critical to understanding the ROI of content marketing. It also tells you which topics, channels, and formats have the most engagement. The problem is that, too often, all these data points live in disparate systems. For a complete view of performance, you have to spend time on manual aggregation. Content marketing software removes these burdens! You can enjoy:
- Automatic aggregation of multiple sources
- Quick reporting with set parameters that are shareable with leadership
- A clearer understanding of what type of content performs the best and where
You’ll be able to turn raw data into actionable insights.
Ready to Explore Content Marketing Management Software?
All these features and more await you with DivvyHQ’s solution. You can review all of its capabilities and how it stacks up to others by checking out our comparison matrix. Then, go ahead and try us out with a free 14-day trial.