Competitive Analysis Methodology

For the sake of transparency, this was not a third-party independent analysis of all content marketing platforms. Several members of the DivvyHQ team were tasked with digging into the websites, free trials, knowledge bases, and review sites of the typical companies we compete with. This was a very manual and incredibly time-consuming process (to say the least).

We structured this analysis based on the typical (and critical) features that content, communications, and marketing teams need to manage their day-to-day content operations. These same features are mirrored in analyst reports like Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms and Forrester’s Content Marketing Platform Wave report. We made sure not to include subjective criteria like “Beautiful user interface”, which we’ve seen when our own competitors do comparisons like these. Shame. Shame. Shame.

There may be errors and we may have missed things. There are probably features that we simply couldn’t find within each platform due to a lack of public documentation. If we couldn’t find something, we often gave them the benefit of the doubt. If you are a staff member of one of the platforms included in the analysis, and you see something that we got wrong, don’t hesitate to leave us a comment. We’ll fix it.

Hopefully, this competitive analysis is a helpful resource to find the tool that best fits your needs. If you need more help choosing the right solution, feel free to continue reading.

How to Choose the Best Content Marketing Platform

If there’s one arena of the marketing industry where businesses are spoiled with choices, then it’s content creation and promotion software. SaaS tools abound that let you do every little thing from scraping others’ content to converting speech to text, from enabling collaboration between writers and graphic designers to estimating how many sales a particular blog post enabled.

This paradox of choice leaves marketing teams disorganized and perplexed, instead of enabling consistency in the execution of their overall strategy. That said, a certain level of automation is both beneficial and unavoidable today if you want to consistently come up with unique content ideas, create helpful, targeted blog posts, and make sure your audience sees them when they need to.

In this post, we will discuss strategies and tactics that help your organization — whether you’re a 5-person tech startup or a enterprise with thousands of employees — develop and implement a content marketing strategy that actually delivers for your organization. More importantly, we’ll give you some pointers on how to choose the right content marketing software and tools that allow you to expedite different parts of your strategy at different stages.

Yes, that sounds like a big ask. How do you eat an elephant?

One bite at a time, of course. Let’s see how we can break the whole process down to its components in our quest for the perfect content marketing platform, or at least a content marketing tech stack that works for you!

1. Content Planning

We want to share here our own (so far, top secret) madness — er, method — of planning the content we put out there.

There is an important distinction to make here: content planning is not the same as content strategy. A content plan is a set of actions that keep your strategy moving.

It involves several steps that are executed in a continuous cycle:

Source: A Content Strategy That Works for You

As with every other plan, it helps to begin with the end in mind. Respondents to a survey we conducted a couple of years ago directly attributed the following successes to content planning:

• 23% said it helped them create better, more impactful content
• 15% said it lent more consistency to their content publishing schedule
• 14% said it improved their audience targeting capabilities

With that, go take your place at the drawing board…

Set Goals

Producing and marketing content for the sake of content is like running a marathon on a treadmill. Even if the feeling is terrific, you’re going nowhere.

All your content — blog posts, emails, social media posts, ebooks — needs to serve your business objectives, whether tangible or intangible.

And what could these objectives be?

• Find what your audience’s pain points are. What annoys them? Where are they getting stuck? Do you have the solution? How do you articulate it lucidly and persuasively?
• Get traffic to your website. If you build it, they might come. If they come, they might purchase. For that, your content needs to do well on search results and be compelling enough to attract links, clicks, and social shares. Blog posts are by far the best format for this goal.
• Build trust and brand credibility. This comes only through consistently sharing valuable and useful content. Ever heard about “educating” your customers? That’s your brand’s job. And content is your tool. Ebooks, slide decks, videos, and webinars are ideal for this goal.
• Show the benefits of your product and overcome objections. A blog post such as X Ways to Fix This Huge, Scary Problem is ideal for this. You can subtly show how your product helps in solving the scary problem (and compare it to your competitors) in the process. You also have the opportunity to explain its high price (or other niggles) to reassure potential buyers.
• Increase customer loyalty. Content that keeps speaking to existing customers never stops selling. How can they use your product to the fullest? How can they have a richer experience while doing it? If you don’t know either, find out and let them know. You might just upsell a few products meanwhile.
• Tell a story. Not just that of your brand, but of your customer. How will your product make them a hero of the story? How will they associate their experience with your brand? Case studies are ideal to get them thinking.
• Expand your business. Content stirs up conversations with your customers. And these conversations are a breeding ground for new business ideas. The right content can also attract strategic brand partners and vendors, helping you explore new markets.

Does your content marketing software keep your goals flashing in front of you like neon signs? Does it make it easy to tie them to every piece of content you create?

Run a Content Audit

A detailed content audit involves several steps:

1. Take an inventory of your content. What content do you have on your website and blog? Start by building a simple list of all URLs in the section you’re auditing. Screaming Frog SEO Spider helps you do this with a simple crawl of your site:

   

   Source: Screaming Frog

2. Categorize the content. You can do this by metadata, formats, topics, themes, or campaigns.
3. Analyze each piece and sort or order them by critical metrics such as traffic, time on page, backlinks, and specific micro-conversions. Where does each piece fit in the larger scheme of things? Google Analytics and Semrush Content Audit are a couple of tools that can tell you what exactly is working for you and what isn’t — especially from the organic search point of view. Remember, search engines bring in two-thirds of all web traffic for nearly every site there is out there.

   
   Source: Semrush Content Analyzer

4. Take action on prioritized items. Rewrite, update, republish, syndicate, and promote the articles and videos that are working well (or can potentially work well) for you. Delete the ones that are outdated and diluting your brand authority — they’re probably just sitting there occupying space on your web server. DivvyHQ lets you assign a status to your content, based on which you can decide to review, republish or archive them.

Check how many of these actions your content platform can help you with. Or, if you need different tools to analyze engagement and edit the content, find out which ones will work best with each other.

Identify Buyer Personas

This is a necessary part of the content planning process that will save you a lot of time down the line. Buyer personas are basically the output of audience segmentation. Persona building involves creating profiles of your typical customers or target audience. You list the critical demographic and psychographic attributes, characteristics, goals, motivations, pain points, and interests that influence their buying behavior.

The very act of creating personas gives you new insights into your customers — something that deeply (and rightly) influences content creation.

There are tons of online tools and templates that help you create buyer personas in a jiffy. Once you decide the attributes you want to track/map to your content and finish your research, you can use these tools to build your own personas:

• HubSpot Make My Persona
• User Forge
• Xtensio User Persona Template

Source: Make My Persona

DivvyHQ enables you to assign one or more personas to each piece of content you create, but we call it Target Audiences for easier understanding in both Sales and Marketing teams.

Decide Content Formats

There are primarily four forms of content: text, images, video, and audio. However, you need to distinguish between forms and formats. Formats are types of content that can be in a single form or combine more than one for effectiveness.

These include various types of blog posts (like listicles, how-tos, and opinion pieces), videos, webinars, infographics, podcasts, case studies, white papers, reports and research articles, slide decks, ebooks, quizzes, polls, and newsletters. Out of the box, DivvyHQ comes equipped with 10 different formats (for appropriate processing and publishing) and also gives you the ability to define your own custom content types:

Always consider the pros and cons of each content format keeping in mind the target audience that you’re going to reach with it. What are they looking for at this very moment? Would this format be relevant to them? Will it expedite or simplify the process of answering their questions and solving their problem?

Picking Your Content Channels

Choosing the right platforms and channels is all about knowing your audience — and more importantly, knowing where they hang out.

And most importantly, what kind of messaging makes them buy your product.

There are umpteen marketing channels where you can ply your wares. These double up as platforms where your content resides and is accessed or shown to visitors. Some digital examples are:

• Websites and blogs
• Social media platforms
• Email
• Mobile Apps
• OTT TV

We call these publishing channels in DivvyHQ. You build out a list of all your publishing channels and tag where each piece of content will go.

Then there are digital channels that bring visitors to the places where your content resides. These are what we call promotional channels. The major ones are:

• SEO and organic search: There are tools and plugins that integrate with your content management system and help fine tune your content for search engine visibility. A great example is the Yoast SEO plugin, which integrates with WordPress to help optimize each page and post to ensure proper on-page optimization.
• Pay Per Click (PPC) and advertising for views/impressions: While platform-specific advertising options exist for each web-based platform or social network, content tools and ad exchanges offer additional options for setting up and configuring native ads in text, image, and video formats.
• Affiliate marketing and influencer marketing: This uses subject matter experts who have influence as well as an audience in their fields to market niche products via content that they create. You give them the tools and techniques and they direct traffic to your website and digital brand outlets.

There are tons of tools that enable content distribution across all these channels. Your primary content management software needs to directly enable promotion on these channels, integrate with or work well with them.

Understand Content Asset Management

Once you’ve done a content audit and fine tuned your content publishing and promotion processes, you need to define a strategy and process for content asset management.

Content asset management is the content-specific version of digital asset management — storing, accessing, operating, transferring, publishing, distributing and managing content assets without the risk of unauthorized changes or deletion of content.

The asset management feature of your content marketing software should:

• Organize your digital assets in a centralized location
• Automate your workflows transparently
• Offer sophisticated search capabilities
• Conform to metadata and schema protocols for effective document management
• Provide user access controls on a per-content basis
• Facilitate speech to text conversion, video and audio transcription, image tagging, document signing, watermarking, facial recognition, augmented reality, and other advanced options for content operations and interactivity

DivvyHQ asset management capabilities enable users to upload all associated assets for each content project in any file format. There are no limits on the number of files that can be attached to projects and any user assigned to the project can preview or download the assets and make edits if needed. Finding assets is also simple with Divvy’s robust search feature, which will return matching content records that can be filtered by content type.

Choose a Content Management System (CMS)

Content management lies at the heart of content marketing. It defines processes and technologies that you use to execute your content strategy. The core elements of content management are:

• Content planning and scheduling
• Workflow for content production and optimization
• Storage, publishing, and delivery of content
• Content governance (maintenance)

On the publishing and delivery side, many content marketing experts swear by WordPress and have proclaimed it as the only CMS you’ll ever need. While that is true in most cases, as your business grows (and with it, the size of your content team, your online brand presence, and digital footprint), you’ll find that there are subtle inadequacies in WordPress. These include headless content management, cross-domain and cross-technology publishing, security and compliance, and performance analytics for content pieces and team members alike.

There are a lot of DivvyHQ features that make it a crucial, upstream accessory to your CMS. For instance, you can draft content natively within Divvy’s content editor, which can speed up your creation process due to not having to mess with uploading and downloading different versions of Word docs. You can also add key metadata to your content pieces by way of Content Strategy Fields (such as campaigns, audiences, topics, keywords, and channels), which allow you to categorize, tag, filter, feed, and track content in various ways.

DivvyHQ also makes it simple to track version history during the drafting phase so reviewers can see past edits as the piece evolves.

All of this is made easier by a robust user roles and permissions system (similar to that of WordPress with the addition of internal and external reviewers and billing admins), which achieves an ideal balance between security and functionality with features such as two-factor authentication and single sign-on.

Deploy a Content Calendar

A content calendar (sometimes synonymous with and at other times confused with an editorial calendar) is a schedule that helps you plan when and where to publish content according to pre-decided themes. Content calendars show (and remind you) of dates to publish and promote content pieces in various formats, on different channels.

Your content calendar drives the execution of your content strategy and therefore, it is the core component of any content marketing software. DivvyHQ too is equipped with a dynamic calendar that is central to our content marketing platform.

The content calendar facilitates some key functions of content production, publishing, and marketing:

• Team members are accountable for publishing content, leading to consistency
• Individuals from cross-functional teams can collaborate on creating content
• A content calendar ensures you stick to your brand and editorial themes
• You always have a 50,000 foot view of your content strategy. As a result, you can plan key pieces of content around important dates
• It’s easy to spot gaps in your messaging and be consistent across different publishing and promotional channels.

Creating a content calendar involves 5 key steps:

1. Align different departments such as Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service. Establish rules for collaboration between them
2. List your content topics and ideas
3. Determine the channels on which you’ll publish and promote this content. Decide on the formats of individual pieces accordingly
4. Fix a publication frequency in line with your budgets and capabilities
5. Allocate tasks and deadlines to team members accordingly.

Some key features that every content calendar needs (and DivvyHQ has) for effective, future-ready, and crisis-proof content planning are:

• Easy scheduling and rescheduling: The basic function of a content calendar is scheduling. Your content management platform should enable you to edit or reschedule a calendar event with a couple of clicks, taps, or drag and drops. Oh, and you could do that via email or other integrations too!
• Color coding of calendar events: Color coding is one of the oldest and simplest tricks in the book to instantly (visually) differentiate your calendar entries by themes, campaigns, channels, progress, or even the team members assigned to it. All you have to do is make everyone aware of the color coding scheme you use.
• Multi-level calendar architecture: Sometimes, you need the ability to create multiple content calendars (for different brands, for instance). But more often, you need to be able to create multi-level calendars for different teams, campaigns, or geographies within your organization.

• Multiple, shareable views: When you create multi-level calendars, you can assign appropriate file, editing, and sharing permissions for users at each level. Some advanced features are hidden for read-only reviewers, such as clients or outside freelancers. You also need to be able to create views — such as list or grid — according to your own filtering preferences.

• Filters: Filters are key to easy viewability, tracking, and monitoring of your content publishing schedule. DivvyHQ offers the widest and deepest range of filtering options — by every conceivable category, including content types, campaign types, user roles, priorities, and progress.

You’ve planned for content production (what topics to write and what formats to create content on). You’ve built your buyer personas and have done your research on what kind of content will resonate with them. You’ve chosen your channels for publishing and promoting this content. Finally, you have a shared content calendar in place that outlines when and how your content will be distributed. That’s content marketing planning for you!

Hire the Right Team Members and Assign Clear Roles

Looking for content marketers to take your brand messaging to the next level is like looking for unicorns. A content marketer needs to know and do a lot of things, including (but not limited to):

• Understand the customer
• Know your market
• Be good at research
• Find out what resonates with your audience
• Come up with topics and ideas relentlessly
• Produce articles and other content on time
• Drive traffic to your publishing channels
• Strike up conversations on social media and keep them going
• Understand SEO
• Work with WordPress and a host of other marketing automation and content collaboration tools
• Look at analytics and figure out how to optimize content for engagement and conversions

The list doesn’t end there. (But don’t give up yet.)

Once you hire them, you need to make them very clear on what their roles and responsibilities will be, according to each campaign or customer they work for. Creatives, marketers, and support staff, all need to work together towards company objectives and customer success.

That means, they need to be in on your content planning process, not just its execution. DivvyHQ’s own study reported the following distribution among teams involved in content planning:

If you choose your content management tools right, you can empower your team to produce content that delivers value to your audience every time. Most importantly, every individual needs to know exactly what is expected of them and where they stand at the moment in the larger scheme of things.

A simple, no-nonsense dashboard such as DivvyHQ’s tells them just that:

You can also see what others in your team are working on, filter content pieces by deadlines, campaigns, or users, and quickly set a priority (such as low/medium/high) for specific projects or tasks.

Have a Process for Tracking & Measurement

Just like the dashboard of your car shows the speedometer and other gauges to monitor the performance of your engine, you need a content performance dashboard to keep track of the key parameters of your content marketing efforts.

You began by setting goals for content marketing as a business function. To see how well you’re doing in pursuit of these goals, you need to define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) — and set up a system to track the metrics involved.

What metrics, you ask? While we discuss them in detail in the Content Analytics section below, the planning phase is where you decide the high-level KPIs you want to keep an eye on (depending on the goals you set earlier) as well as the method or tool you’ll use for this. These metrics fall into three main categories:

• Reach or Consumption metrics
• Engagement metrics
• Conversion metrics

The most important thing is to set up an easy-to-access dashboard that visualizes these key metrics or performance indicators clearly in a way that you can easily spot trends and glean insights from them.

While there are umpteen tools, platforms, and native analytics reports built into many of the platforms you already use, a separate content analytics platform or one that integrates with your centralized content marketing software gives both a bird’s eye view and the details on each campaign or piece of content where and when you need it.

Plan Separately for Social Media

Content planning is not an island — it’s an archipelago. While we already discussed the need for targeting different publishing and promotion channels, there are two channels that stand above the rest: one is your website/blog and the other is social media.

Creating a social media strategy requires you to go through all of the above steps separately. The sheer number of platforms and complexity of major social networks make them separate channels in themselves.

You might even need a separate content calendar and a separate set of collaboration and scheduling tools to manage your social media presence. In a nutshell, your social media plan is a complete content strategy on its own, sharing only the same brand guidelines.

To quickly go through the essentials of social media planning,

• Social channels: Most audiences — whether they’re B2B or B2C — expect a brand to be on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube these days.
• Brand tone and voice: Brands usually adopt a more casual and conversational brand voice on social media. Analyze your competitors and see what’s working for them and what kind of posts get them more engagement. A good brand presence also includes optimizing your business profile as well as getting employees to interact individually with your audience. Experiment a bit to determine the voice and style that resonates with your customers and then run with it.

  

Source: Content Marketing Institute

• Social media calendar: All the major social media management tools such as SproutSocial, Hootsuite, and Buffer offer scheduling capabilities for all the major social networks. However, enterprise content teams might need to see a copy of the schedule in the main content calendar.
• Content library (graphics and quotes): Since brands are expected to express their opinion on current affairs as well as wish the audience the numerous “days” that are celebrated on social media, It helps to build your own library of images, video clips and quotes over time for use on social media. This ensures you’re never at a loss on what to post even as others are struggling to keep up the posting and differentiate themselves on a day-to-day basis.
• Brand mentions: Social media listening tools — such as Mention and Brandwatch — let you monitor conversations on social media that involve your brand or industry, as well as keywords or topics of your interest. Tracking these terms gives you real-time opportunity to jump into and steer discussions in your favor. You can also use these tools to keep an eye on your competitors and what their customers are saying about them!

    
Source: Awario

Documented Processes

Your content strategy document (you have one, don’t you?) should clearly outline what your automated as well as manual processes look like for content creation as well as marketing.

Documenting your content strategy is necessary for the simple reason that it makes sure you stick to the plan. It never lets you stray from your “why” and keeps turning your head back to the content goals you defined at the outset.

Our own content planning study found that nearly two-third of the organizations we surveyed do follow a documented process when it comes to content marketing:

But just in case your peers’ actions aren’t convincing enough for you, get this… Research from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) found the simplest, most obvious reason you should document your content plan or strategy:

• 60% of the companies that were most successful in content marketing have a documented content strategy.
• 21% of the companies that were least successful in content marketing have a documented content strategy.

So, just go and put your content plan on paper. Now!

2. Content Ideation

What comes first — the idea or the plan? Some marketers like to start with a general idea of their company or client’s market and run with a few seed ideas. Others prefer to do their keyword research, competitive analysis, and consumer surveys first before coming up with a list of topics to write on.

You can pick your order in this chicken-or-egg situation. It doesn’t hurt to go back and forth between both either, if that works for you. Our point is that you do both and do them well.

So how do you go about creating your black book of content ideas? Fantastic ideas don’t come just like that to the best content marketers. Some people tend to think that you can put five creative people in a room and tell them to — well, create! It doesn’t happen like that. A content campaign idea that is obviously relevant to the target audience and the brand message doesn’t appear out of thin air. Rather, it is based on tried-and-true processes, accurate customer data, and a step-by-step search for inspiration.

Here are the best techniques that will help you generate content ideas, whether for blog articles, video advertisements, or social media posts.

Brainstorming

When it comes to brainstorming for content ideas, the more the merrier holds true. It helps to have more team members joining in, from different departments as well as up and down the hierarchy. People with expertise in different areas — such as designers or helpdesk staff — will add to your range of ideas.

To lead a brainstorming session, start with a few loose parameters, such as a time limit for the session, nature of the target audience, and guidelines on name calling other participants. Then, get the creativity flowing by throwing in an icebreaker or two.

The most important part of brainstorming is to record all the ideas on which you have consensus. Take pictures of whiteboards, record a discussion or debate, or take notes. There are tools such as bubbl.us, Scapple, and Stormboard, which you can use to create online mind maps, turn them into slide decks, collaborate on editing your notes, share your files, and export them into your content management software for further processing.

They say that there are no bad ideas in the brainstorming process. DivvyHQ has a simple, quick-and-easy way to store all your ideas (we call it the “Parking Lot”) for later use, including unscheduled, impromptu publications and postings.

Ultimately, all the ideas in your Parking Lot are stored in an easily accessible view that you can centrally manage, filter (by content type or format, owner of the idea, the calendar on which it goes, campaign, or channel), and assign to a team member as and when required:

Questions, Surveys, and Interviews

Questions. Who doesn’t have them? Your audience, your leads, your customers, your coworkers, your boss, your suppliers, everyone has a few — about your product or service or company or brand.

All these people use a lot of channels to pose these questions — social media, comments, Q-A platforms, and much more. Find a way to assimilate these questions into a repository where you can use them later to create fresh content or add to your existing content (including the recently introduced FAQ snippets).

Questions are not one way: You can also direct your questions at them. (Surveys, anyone?) It’s just that you have much more control over the questions you ask. But it is easy to go wrong or spray instead of shooting your questions at the wrong audience or at the wrong times. Here are a few things you can keep in mind when forming your questions:

• Form each question correctly. Determine whether you want to ask a Why, What, Where, Who, When, or How question.
• Don’t overwhelm your audience by asking too many questions. Surveys and interviews frequently make this error. Don’t stray from the core of the topic.
• A corollary is to give the right amount of options if it’s a multiple choice question. Too many choices can confuse or paralyze the reader. At the same time, you need to make sure you list out all possible options where necessary.
• Achieve a balance between open-ended and closed questions. Customers might not be very good at accurately describing their problem. On the other hand, a Yes/No question might lead them on or put them in an awkward position, and certainly won’t give you the real reason behind the answer.
• Don’t ask questions that make a certain section of the responders uncomfortable. A question such as “How fast can you run?” raises a self-expectation in the person at the other end (that they need to run faster).
• Offer the right incentive. Or don’t. Make sure they aren’t answering questions about cell membranes of polythene-eating bacteria to win an iPad.

And who do you ask these questions to? It’s not just your potential users or customers. You’ll get the most useful answers from your employees — especially sales, marketing, and helpdesk/customer service staff — who are at the frontlines interacting with customers everyday. These are the people who know of both the customers’ problems and your ability to solve them (read, the benefits of using your product).

Some questions to ask your customer service champions:

• What do customers love about our product? What are our best customer success stories?
• What are the common woes (both product and non-product related) that customers talk about?
• What are the most common reasons customers leave us?
• What are the most frequently asked questions?
• What content would be most helpful to send new customers?

Some others to ask your sales staff:

• What are the most common challenges prospects bring up again and again?
• What features of our product excite prospects the moment they hear them?
• What are the biggest objections to closing that you face?
• Are you happy with the current sales materials?
• Which questions do you struggle to answer the most?
• What content do you recommend sending to Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)?

Search Behavior / Keyword Research

Generating topic ideas from keyword research is central to present-day content ideation and creation. It is often the starting point for any digital content strategy.

Search is the only channel that gives you a clear idea of the intent of your customers — in their words! There are a whole lot of tools that help you do keyword research as well as pull key phrases that your audience might type into the Google search box.

The major SEO tool suites Ahrefs (Keywords Explorer) and Semrush (Keyword Magic) offer their own comprehensive versions of keyword research tools. These aim to replicate the Google Keyword Planner (the oldest and most popular keyword research tool, part of Google Ads) and show you search volume, cost per click, competition, and keyword difficulty, which are key metrics in deciding which keywords to target first.

Semrush goes a level further with its Topic Research tool, which directly gives you content ideas, sorted and organized in the form of index cards and mind maps, along with questions (from searches) and headline (from competitors) suggestions.

Another tool of note is Keyword.io, which gives you suggestions from searches across major websites such as Amazon, YouTube, Wikipedia, Bing, and Yandex.

Google Search Console offers some great data on the search queries that are leading visitors to your site, along with first-hand information on the number of impressions, clicks, and average position of each keyword.

Bottom line, you should use all this keyword data to create topic ideas around the intent of searchers — ultimately this will lead you to your customers’ pain points, needs and wants, and help you map your content to each stage of the buyer’s journey.

Competitive Research

Competitive analysis comes from a mix of keyword research and social listening (which we discussed earlier in the social media planning section). Again, the usual suspects like Ahrefs and Semrush show you the keywords that your competitors are ranking for, along with the “top pages” that are getting them the most visits. Go on, steal with both hands (and a few spreadsheets)!

Source: Ahrefs

Just as in keyword research, you can learn from competitive research tools in the PPC space such as Spyfu, which shows you the keywords your competitors are running Google ads for (so you know how important they are).

You also have Buzzsumo, which shows you the performance of the best performing articles on the web for your keyword — or the top pages of a competitor — in terms of social shares. Hey, if people are liking and sharing the content on social, more often than not, it’s got to be great! Or, even more likely, the title or headline is worth rehashing for a topic idea of your own.

Source: Buzzsumo

Lastly, don’t forget to check your social media monitoring tools everyday at different times. Look at the topics your competitors are being mentioned for and analyze the conversations around these terms. You’ll find tons of in-the-moment content ideas from this activity.

Online Platforms

The web spawns new and expanding sources of content everyday. There are some common platforms where people engage in different ways, and a little piece of information here and a discussion there can give you great ideas about what your audience is really interested in. Let’s examine a few of them here.

Quora

Quora is arguably the biggest Q&A platform on the web. This is where people go when they need serious answers to their questions. There’s a huge pool of ideas here if you’re looking to create in-depth content. Not only can you improvise on the existing answers and create skyscraper content, you can also go wider by answering related questions — great for doing a series of blog posts around a topic.

Source: Quora

Reddit

Reddit is where niche audiences gather to form inner circles. “Subreddits” on just about anything abound where people post questions, answers, and opinions on every conceivable and inconceivable thing. Reddit also gives you an indication of which topics are “hot” by the number of people that are answering, upvoting, and downvoting the posts.

Source: Reddit

Facebook and LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn and Facebook both have Public Groups, where like-minded people come together and discuss things of interest to them — professional on LinkedIn and not-so-professional on Facebook, although that is subject to vary wildly.

Industry Forums

Forums used to be a big deal in the earlier days of the web, but they’ve now been replaced by discussions and groups on social media. However, for some niches, there are industry-specific forums that still attract more questions, conversations, influencers and experts than social media.

A couple of great examples are Hacker News for tech startups and Stack Overflow for developers. And oh, do try answering a few questions on all of these platforms if you want to build brand authority or thought leadership!

Topic Generator Tools

Almost everyday, content strategists and creators are in a situation where they know exactly what to write about, but get stuck on what would be the perfect title for it. That’s not a problem anymore. There are some great idea generator tools that help you craft Buzzfeed-quality headlines that would rival your favorite tabloid. HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator and Portent’s Content Idea Generator are a couple of good ones.

Source: Portent

User Generated Content (UGC)

Many B2C companies use UGC as a primary source of content, especially on their social media pages. Customers, users, and audiences engage with brands all the time, including for service issues, reviews and ratings, responses to a marketing campaign, or simply to show how they’re using the product.

Each of these use cases gives a small insight into the brand experience of the user and is potentially an idea you could expand on.

Also, if you’re one of the few companies that does more than just lip service to customer/employee feedback and actually incorporates users’ ideas into your production process, see if your content marketing platform gives you a Content Request form like DivvyHQ’s to submit fresh ideas to your topic idea database. Ideas submitted through this form notify moderators or managers of a request and also keep users updated on the status of their proposals via email.

3. Content Production, Workflow and Collaboration

What is a content workflow? It’s a sequential set of tasks that go from planning to ideation to creation to publishing to marketing of your content, as part of an ongoing or time-limited campaign.

Marketing automation is a key part of a successful workflow and your content marketing platform plays a central role in bringing the necessary tools and techniques together. Let’s examine the essentials that help speed up and simplify your content workflow.

The Role of the Content Team

As with anything driven by technology, workflows can only go so far without people. So before you choose the right combination of content automation tools and software that keep your workflow churning, you need the right people in place who can put these to optimum use.

Assuming that you’ve hired individuals with multiple capabilities in your content team, as discussed earlier, you need to make sure that everyone knows their role and place in the content creation and marketing conveyor. The effectiveness of a workflow depends on every person doing their part — the whole cycle could grind to a halt because of one weak link.

Inter-departmental conflicts are common across small and big organizations, especially in marketing — 98% of marketers report experiencing conflict at work. (We think the other 2% didn’t take the survey.) However, the Salesforce State of the Marketing found that high performing marketing teams are about 12x more likely than underperforming ones to coordinate and collaborate on content marketing efforts.

The content planning study we conducted here at DivvyHQ revealed that “being too busy” was the biggest barrier to collaboration in content marketing.

Thus, during the onboarding and training phase, make sure every employee — be it brand strategists, campaign planners, or C-suite executives — knows the importance of collaboration in keeping the quality and consistency of publishing up to the mark.

Process and Key Tasks

Essentially, a content workflow is just a step-by-step process, much like project management, that you go through day in and day out in an ongoing endeavor to get your brand messaging across to your audience.

It normally involves the following steps:

• Outline
• Write / Create
• Review
• Edit
• Approve
• Publish
• Promote
• Optimize / Update
• Archive

DivvyHQ is the ultimate mix of a project management and content workflow system. A task management layer is built underneath each content item, letting you perform cross-sectional actions on individual pieces of content.

The Workflow Builder feature lets you build custom workflows for each calendar, with any number of the steps we listed above. You can then use this workflow as a template for different types and instances of content across the calendar.

The next step is to automate scheduling of these workflows. Whenever you create a new task in your calendar, the start and end dates for subsequent tasks in the same workflow are automatically added to the calendar. Further, all task completion dates are automatically recalculated and moved in sync with the others in the workflow, if you happen to change any one of them.

Everyone in the team is notified in real-time via browser notifications and email whenever tasks are added or modified, milestones completed, or deadlines moved.

Have a checklist at the end of each milestone in the process so that managers or editors can verify if everything is good up to that point. This could be something as simple as making sure all the metadata has been added after an article has been written, as you’d do in WordPress:

• URL convention
• Featured image
• Alt text for all images
• Focus keyword
• Secondary keywords
• Page title
• Meta description
• Category
• Publish date
• Author
• Tweetables
• Readability level
• Summary for newsletter

Do this for as many major tasks as possible.

Collaboration Tools and Features

Many organizations use collaboration tools such as Slack, Skype or MS Teams for internal messaging and communication. Most people who work in tech and marketing are already familiar with these interfaces and you can bet that there’s a good chance they’ve used them before. Even if they haven’t, the learning curve is as flat as it can get. More often than not, many employees have also used a simple project management tool such as Trello or Asana.

However, it helps if your primary content marketing platform does away with the need for these tools, at least for your content creation and marketing ops. DivvyHQ allows cross-functional teams to keep your workflow moving with quick commenting (and replies with @mentions) — on tasks or items — as well as file sharing features across the calendar, individual content, and campaign views.

4. Publishing and Integrations

No content marketing system or process is an island. A single tool can never have all the capabilities needed to implement a dynamic content strategy. Plus, your tactics and channels need very specific customizations at various stages.

What this means is that you need to run with a central content marketing platform that meets most of your needs and make it work with popular tools that each perform a special function related to content production, publishing or distribution.

In the world of software, this is termed “integration”, or an “integrated stack”. Let’s take a quick look at the categories of software that keep your content machine whirring and how you can make them work together for you.

Content Management System (CMS)

Popular CMS platforms are the first thing your content marketing platform should connect to. Now, WordPress is by far the most popular CMS out there. DivvyHQ integrates with WordPress like a charm — here’s a complete walkthrough of DivvyHQ WordPress integration in video format:

Further, DivvyHQ also integrates with CMS providers like Optimizely (formerly Episerver), Kentico, and others.

Alongside these CMS providers, Divvy integrates with SharePoint, Microsoft’s team collaboration toolsuite that features multiple workflows, databases, file sharing, and other content management tools. SharePoint is a CMS in itself. You can access all your SharePoint files from DivvyHQ by creating a simple connection.

Cloud File Storage Tools

Cloud-based file sharing tools have become the norm for both individual and group usage. Hardly anyone saves files on their laptops’ hard disks and there are no “file servers” in companies like there used to be. Most content files are now stored in the cloud, with the availability of scalable, pay-as-you-go drive space.

The popular tools in this space are Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. And hey… DivvyHQ is friends with all of them!

DivvyHQ lets you attach documents, images, sound recordings, videos or other files from across multiple cloud storage platforms to the piece of content or campaign that you’re working on.

Image and Video Editing Tools

Not so long ago, images and videos were valuable additions to blog posts, landing pages, and text-based content, but they are now serious content formats in themselves, with infographics and webinars being a regular part of many companies’ content marketing campaigns.

Full-fledged content marketing platforms and calendars need not reinvent the wheel and just integrate with a popular image/graphics creation tools like Adobe Creative Cloud Express or Canva, or video editing tools like WeVideo or Camtasia.

Messaging Apps

While most content marketing platforms have their own internal messaging systems, in some situations, you might need to integrate a regular messaging platform such as Slack, which you use to communicate with team members, vendors or partners. Does the content platform you’re considering enable you to send notifications and direct messages to Slack, Skype, Facebook Messenger, or so on? How important is that to you?

Social Media Tools

As mentioned previously, social media is a separate animal that needs it’s own strategy, planning, and tools for execution. Most of the tools, however, only revolve around two main areas: listening/monitoring and publishing. It’s no surprise then that most Social Media Management (SMM) platforms focus on these aspects.

However, there are big gaps in between the listening and publishing phases of the process. Namely, the planning and initial post drafting steps. Divvy fills these gaps by providing a Social Post Editor that you can use to draft and schedule messages directly from within the DivvyHQ interface. This is useful, especially as part of your efforts to promote other piece of content like blog posts.

With your social posts drafted, approved and planned, now you can leverage your existing SMM platform to handle the rest (publishing, monitoring, etc.).

Workflow Automation Software

Marketing today is driven by automation in content production, emails, social media, chatbots, and almost every other area.

DivvyHQ works seamlessly with Zapier, which is the big daddy of integrations and workflow automation. Zapier lets you integrate multiple web apps with a few clicks, pass information between them, and take actions based on time- or action-based triggers.

Analytics and API

Every major content marketing channel has its own platform-specific native analytics solution that comes with an insightful, visual dashboard — because data tells the best stories. No surprise then, that most content marketing tools feature a push and pull of data from various web-based sources such as Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, as well as internal CRM tools such as Salesforce.

DivvyHQ Analytics is a heavy lifter in this area — it can gather data from 100+ digital sources that you can mix and match in a customized dashboard to help you make decisions quicker.

All this data extraction is done using Application Programming Interfaces or APIs — think of them as continuous streams of data formatted in a way that any software can understand.

DivvyHQ also provides an open API that any other software you use (for messaging, workflows, publishing, etc.) can use to access your DivvyHQ data and files and present it to you in a form native to that application. Or, you can build customizations for these apps, letting you modify your DivvyHQ data and import it into spreadsheets or other database structures for further analysis.

5. Distribution & Promotion

The actual process of content distribution and promotion on different channels is where there’s a huge surplus of cloud-based tools and “tool suites” available. In the early days of digital marketing, marketers had to put forth much more effort with only a handful of tools that often required some programming knowledge. Today, SMBs and solopreneurs can easily build out extensive martech stacks with tools to deal with every facet of marketing, including content creation, UX, SEO, social media, advertising, and customer service.

Ideally you should plan, create, and publish content that talks to prospects and customers all along your sales funnel. Without proper content mapping, even a fully equipped content marketing tool stack will fall flat on its face — some tools might not be used to their full potential while the successes of others might go in vain for lack of adequate follow-up actions.

Therefore, this section is kind of an extension to the previous one on integration — as in we list out the major martech and automation tools that make publishing and promoting content on different channels easier.

• SEO: Organic search is easily and by far the most effective channel for content marketing. And this is what you’ll find the biggest and most powerful tools are built for. Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz, once nifty little tools that aided keyword research and link building, are now full-fledged digital marketing and competitive intelligence tool suites.
• Social Media: Social media has a unique relationship with content marketing, as in it works as both a publishing and promotion channel. Here too, big names such as Buffer, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social dominate the process from scheduling to analytics.
• Then there are social data-driven business intelligence and analysis tools like Buzzsumo, which uses social sharing metrics as a gauge of the effectiveness of content, and Talkwalker and Brand24, which help monitor conversations around brands on various social networks.
• Ads: The best content-based advertising tools are those that are built into the web platforms themselves, such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads. Apart from these, native advertising and syndication tools such as Outbrain and Taboola enable content discovery via recommendations on media publications and blogs.
• Influencer Marketing: With online media platforms amassing more engaged users and building communities by the day, it becomes necessary for brands to team up with influencers and experts on these platforms. Upfluence and AspireIQ are a couple of tools that help you connect with influencers on different social and web platforms whose audience and values align with those of your brand. By building partnerships with these influencers, you can reach a wider audience and generate more sales with targeted content and messaging.
• Email: Tools abound for the oldest and highest ROI-generating marketing channel of them all. Just like the SEO space, tools that started out as bulk emailers have now matured into online marketing tool suites with lead generation, ecommerce marketing, workflow automation, audience profiling, and landing page optimization features. Stellar examples: MailChimp, GetResponse, Campaign Monitor.
• AI-Powered Content Optimization: Today, there isn’t a single digital entity or process that AI hasn’t touched. Content marketing is no exception. Tools like Atomic Reach and MarketMuse are redefining content repurposing and taking content optimization to new levels by using AI to rewrite content in a voice and tone that your audience is receptive to.
• Machine learning algorithms help increase your publication cadence and time it to perfection while mapping your content to your buyer’s journey. Further, they automatically analyze your competitors’ content wins and increase the performance of every piece of content you produce.
• Conversion Rate Optimization: A/B testing is the driving force behind making your visitors do what you want them to on your website. Optimizely and VWO are two workhorses that you can use to run content experiments, improve your customers’ digital experience, and increase your sales with incremental but constant improvements to your UX. These include heat maps to visualize surfer behavior, recordings of visitors navigating through your site and interacting with various elements, and surveys that get quick feedback from users designed to get more context on their actions.

Source: VWO

• Then there are tools such as Unbounce and LeadPages that focus solely on landing page optimization — enhancing the copy and design of a single page to remain laser-focused on improving conversions associated with that page.
• Conversational Marketing: Drift has single-handedly brought revenue acceleration via conversational marketing to the fore by placing a simple live chat box on websites to initiate conversations with visitors. It uses AI-powered chatbots (that replicate the characteristics of high performing sales reps) to determine the intent of the visitor and nudge them along the buyer journey with personalized questions and suggestions.
• Video Marketing: The rise and rise of video marketing never seems to cease. Post pandemic, video communication has hit new heights for marketing, sales, customer service, and pretty much every business function. Webinars are now a core part of marketing and lead generation, with most B2B companies using them to target audiences at the top, middle, and bottom of the sales funnel. Zoom and GoToMeeting lead this space.
• CRM: One name: HubSpot. Perhaps the most comprehensive marketing automation tool ever, with a range of options to process-ify sales, marketing, and customer service. It has advanced Customer Relationship Management (CRM) capabilities to help you figure out how effective your content marketing is for generating engagement and building customer loyalty.

Many content tools and platforms have grown to a size where their use cases span all stages of the buyer journey, enabling customers to go back and forth before they make a purchase or enter at any touchpoint along the way. If you use one or more of these, make sure that your primary content marketing platform acts as a base or conveyor for your entire “content marketing stack.”

6. Content Analytics

Easily one of the biggest challenges in content marketing is measuring its effectiveness. Even more difficult is showing the ROI of content and justifying the business case in dollar terms.

In a way, this is strange because there are literally hundreds of very good tools out there (including free ones) that help you track every conceivable metric that has anything to do with your content. In fact, Google Analytics has a powerful reporting structure for content metrics on your website — you can find out which pages are drawing in visitors and keeping them, how visitors are interacting with these pages and moving through your site, and how effectively your content is contributing towards your conversion goals.

Similarly, all web, app, and digital platforms have their own native analytics that deliver very good insights on your performance on those media.

As discussed earlier in the Content Planning section, there are three kinds of data you need to collect and monitor from each publishing or promotion channel in order to form cohesive KPIs that tell whether you’re on track to meet your content marketing goals or not. These are:

• Reach or Consumption Metrics: For SEO and digital ads, these are the number of impressions your content receives on Google search results or paid media, and the visits you receive as a result. In email marketing, reach represents the number of inboxes your email is delivered to, while in social media, it means the number of views you get on your posts, images or videos. If a social media influencer talks about your brand or a third-party website links to your content, that counts as reach too.
• Engagement Metrics: These metrics tell you how your audience is interacting with your content. Pages visited per session, time on page, and bounce rate are some key metrics for your website. On social media, engagement means likes, shares, and comments on your posts. Click-throughs to your site from emails, social posts, web publications or digital paid platforms also count as engagement with your content.
• Conversion Metrics: These are the metrics that actually tie the effectiveness of your content to your business objectives. Downloads of your product’s whitepaper, sign-ups to your email  newsletter, demo requests, inquiry form fill-ups, and clicks of the Buy Now button are all indicators of leads and sales that are central to your revenue model.

Most marketers today are aware of the importance of this data in measuring the performance of their content. There’s also a plethora of martech tools that make it possible to track all these metrics to a great degree of accuracy. This is how marketers are tracking and benchmarking content performance, according to a study we conducted here at DivvyHQ:

The problem, however, is the lack of a centralized, integrated, bird’s eye view of content performance across every digital channel. Our study revealed that marketers are tired of pulling these numbers from here and those charts from there, clubbing them together, making sense of it all, and creating customized reports to present to their CMOs.

The solution is a flexible, visually intuitive dashboard that not only pulls in data from multiple sources — a sort of Google Data Studio for content marketers — but is also easy to understand and customize.

At DivvyHQ, we’ve built just that into our content marketing platform, with robust, preconfigured content performance analytics for different marketing channels, content formats, campaign types, and platforms — the options being Web, SEO, Social, Email, Paid Media, and Video.

As the DivvyHQ study revealed, there is also a fourth, internal dimension to content analytics: content production metrics.

Tracking your team’s ability to maintain a certain production volume, maintain alignment with your content strategy, and hit deadlines is key to developing a well-oiled content operation. Getting visibility into metrics like this is probably something you’ve never had, so perhaps we should talk, eh?

Finally, we’ve all heard stories (and stats) about X or Y percent of content being produced but never published or posted. Don’t let that happen to you! We’re yet to incorporate a feature that predicts whether your content will be a roaring success, but our Calendar and Content list view can definitely help you keep an eye on unused content.

7. Support and Pricing: Key Vendor Differentiators

Before you buy a content marketing platform, you need to understand:

1. What it is: Content marketing software isn’t synonymous with a marketing automation platform (MAP), CMS, or project management software. And yet it is the ideal mix of all three.
2. What it can do for you: Does a content marketing platform offer the most cost-effective, data-driven, and scalable way of managing your content life cycle? Will it help you better understand the role of content in business growth?

While researching software vendors, you’re expected to do your due diligence and ask questions such as:

• How soon can we set it up and start using it?
• Do we have the in-house capabilities to make full use of this software?
• Can it be used by team members in multiple departments?
• Does this platform give us all the data and reports that we need?
• Does it integrate easily with our existing systems and allow for external communication?
• What are all the use cases for this software that are relevant to us?
• Can this solution scale as high as we can grow?
• How flexible is the vendor in pricing and implementation?
• What are their customers saying about them on third-party review sites?

There are two central characteristics of a great content marketing platform:

1. It offers a consolidated, unified view of the content life cycle, from ideation to publication, to impacting conversions.
2. It gives you top-down visibility on how your content strategy is influencing lead and revenue generation.

Neither of these can be fully accomplished without the full support and expertise of the platform vendor.

Support

At DivvyHQ, we make customer success the biggest yardstick of the usefulness of our content marketing software. That’s why we built in some essential best practices into our customer service function:

Live Onboarding: You can set up and configure DivvyHQ by yourself in less than a couple of hours, with zero coding needed. Even for the biggest enterprises, configuring complex calendars and workflows doesn’t take more than 4 to 5 hours at the most. The most you might need to do is take a few peeps at our Getting Started Guide.

And yet, we don’t want you to leave anything to chance. We offer Enterprise implementation services to help you put your content marketing processes in motion and will continue to support you until your entire team is comfortable using the software for all the reasons you bought it in the first place.

Online Support Chat: Live chat is arguably the fastest and simplest customer service channel. You quickly describe the issues you’re facing or any questions you have and your issues are addressed in real time. Our people (and bots) are always up for a chat with a customer or prospect!

Dedicated Support Team: If live chat is not for you, there’s a dedicated support team available to answer your questions on phone (on US and international numbers) or email.

We back that up with options to raise a support ticket, a comprehensive, searchable knowledge base or help documentation, a YouTube channel with scores of how-to videos, and of course cheery staff manning our Twitter and Facebook pages!

Content Strategy Review & Recommendations: At DivvyHQ, we don’t just make the most versatile content marketing software; we’re qualified to review the content strategy and make recommendations to organizations of various sizes, across verticals.

The whole of our team — right from the Co-Founders to interns — does its best to master content marketing techniques and best practices and improve our knowhow everyday. As a result, the DivvyHQ blog is now a treasure trove of information on content strategy, marketing, automation, and analytics. Apart from that, our thought leadership content is published and acknowledged by top influencers and organizations in the industry, including the Content Marketing Institute.

You can count on us to help out with your content creation and marketing initiatives. We can also dig into your content analytics across digital marketing channels and help you make tactical decisions anytime. We’re invested in your continued content marketing success!

Pricing

As with any business function, the budget you set aside for content marketing software will depend on two things: your current content marketing ROI and the expected increase in ROI after a given period post deployment of the software.

These in turn depend on:

• The size and structure of your content creation and marketing teams
• The amount of content you produce
• Your marketing, branding, and advertising budget
• Effective use of martech and automation tools

Bearing these factors in mind, you need to select a platform with the capabilities (and a pricing plan) that is “just right” for the present level of content marketing you do, allowing for the scaling up that you expect to do in the next couple of years.

DivvyHQ offers price-benefit packages that we’ve tweaked (with experience from a decade of helping customers with content marketing) for businesses ranging from startups to enterprises. When you’re ready to talk numbers, just say the word.

If you’ve reached the end of this page, we trust you’ve got no more questions about what you need to look for in a content marketing platform. Try DivvyHQ for FREE right away and see for yourself how the best marketing teams constantly elevate their content game!