Content marketing teams require both talent and technology. By leveraging tools, your organization can consistently produce content for your audience and thrive. But what’s the perfect tech stack for your team? In this post, we’ll be recommending the most indispensable tools for in-house content marketing teams.
Content Tools Are More Important Than Ever
Enterprise teams were already fully aware of the need for software to manage content workflows, gather content analytics, and manage the operational side of content marketing. The pandemic made having the right technology even more urgent, as teams began to work remotely. The most recent CMI (Content Marketing Institute) content marketing survey reflects the increased need to have processes backed by technology. The survey found that 58 percent of organizations use content technologies, up from 48 percent the year before.
What technologies do they use? In the chart below, you can see the most common technologies. From this list, we’ll break down what each is and how the tools benefit in-house content marketing teams.
Image: CMI
The Top Tools for In-House Content Marketing Teams
An in-house enterprise content team has unique needs and requirements. In many cases, teams are distributed (especially now), work across multiple brands, and leverage various resources who need to collaborate.
When teams get “big,” it’s easy for silos to form, miscommunication to occur, transparency to fade, and even internal politics to emerge. In-house content teams can use technology tools that keep everyone on the same page.
An Analytics Hub
Content marketing has become a very data-driven discipline. Creativity and ingenuity are critical here, but performance analytics deliver key insights. When you are able to have a central source of truth on content analytics, it brings visibility to what’s working and what’s not.
The biggest analytics challenge enterprises face is aggregating data from multiple sources. This can be timely and require manual effort. That slows down the impact of the data. Ideally, you should have an analytics engine that lives within a content marketing software platform that combines data from every source—website, social media, etc.
With this ability, you have a clear picture that’s shareable with your team. When content team members see the fruits of their labor, it can inspire them and inform what they produce in the future.
Social Media Publishing
Social media is a critical distribution channel for brands. It would be impossible to manage all the aspects of social media (listening, publishing, community building, etc.) manually. This is especially true when using multiple social media sites. A platform for automating and scheduling posts is likely something your team is already using.
There’s a wide variety, including standalone platforms or integrated ones with social media publishing modules. Regardless of which type you use, it should, at a minimum, allow for scheduling of posts on profiles and pulling performance reports. Other features, like listening for brand or industry terms and responding to comments, also allow for greater productivity.
Email Marketing
Email marketing software has high usage and adoption in business, with 87 percent of marketers using it. This channel for distribution and conversation has evolved significantly from its infancy.
Email marketing platforms offer so many options. You can create workflows that move prospects into nurture or drip campaigns. You can segment by attributes to ensure the messages they receive are personalized. On the backend, you can analyze performance based on opens and clicks. You can also try out A/B testing on subject lines or other elements.
There is no shortage of options for email marketing. It can be a standalone platform or part of a marketing automation hub. If you’re considering switching because of costs, functionality, or other reasons, check out PC Mag’s list of the best email software in 2021.
Content Collaboration and Workflows
The next type of tool relates to managing the operational needs of content marketing. These tools allow for content planning, collaboration and the development of repeatable content workflows. They typically include a dynamic content calendar as well. All those features are available on the DivvyHQ platform. Here’s a quick overview so you can see what’s possible.
So, why do you need this functionality? It comes down to transparency, organization, accountability, and removing barriers. Collaboration is often a sticking point in content marketing. In-house content teams don’t just collaborate with their immediate peers. They also have to work with SMEs (subject matter experts) and approval roles like legal and compliance. If you can develop workflows that make the process transparent and trackable, everyone benefits.
There are no more ineffective status meetings, email chains, or projects falling through the cracks with a dynamic content calendar. Users can outline, assign, and give due dates for each task associated with the project.
Content Management System
A CMS is another tool that in-house content marketing teams can’t live without. In most cases, your CMS is the backend of your website. The most used and well-known of these is WordPress. It’s easy to navigate and has numerous plug-ins to manage things like SEO and analytics. But WordPress doesn’t suit every company.
There are many other options out there that suit different use cases, and some companies, especially in the tech field, are moving toward a headless CMS. The benefits of this are that one platform can feed content to multiple digital content properties. It’s also faster and more flexible. The expectation from experts is that this will become more prominent in the years to come.
Marketing Automation
A marketing automation platform serves a wide variety of marketing use cases and integrates many of the functions mentioned above. The key differentiator here is “automation”. You are able to set up and scale repetitive processes tasks like nurturing prospects via email or developing landing pages for demand generation campaigns. Additionally, some allow you to score leads based on behaviors and support personalization efforts.
In-House Content Marketing Team Tools: Scaling for the Future
As enterprise teams look to the future of content marketing, scaling is always a critical factor. To scale effectively, you need technology that can help you efficiently deliver great customer experiences to a much larger audience. One of the best ones, voted as such by marketers, is DivvyHQ. Explore its features today with a 14-day FREE trial.