What is a content marketing platform and how to choose one

Despite content’s popularity, building, distributing, measuring, and optimizing its performance is a struggle for marketers. That’s reflected in the data: Three quarters of blog posts get fewer than 10 social shares and zero backlinks. 

No one wants content that languishes — it’s bad business. Luckly for content marketers of all stripes, content marketing platforms (CMPs) make all the difference when it comes to making sure your content doesn’t rot in the darkest corners of the internet.  

Indeed, if you want to optimize your content marketing processes and consistently create content that resonates with your target audience and performs, the right CMP is your best friend, particularly if you roll it up into a marketing hub that centralizes all marketing activities for collaboration, data analysis, and campaign management.  

These days, together with social, content is the primary way that customers and prospects interact with a brand. By extension, a CMP benefits entire marketing teams facing a host of challenges: 

Teams with complex or multiple websites: Effectively managing content across large or multiple websites can be a headache for even the most advanced content marketing teams. A CMP centralizes assets in one place, which makes it far easier for teams of all sizes to coordinate content production and optimize assets across multiple properties.  

Teams with few resources: Most content teams are small, so anything and everything that makes it easier to do more is a plus. CMPs automate workflows and streamline content processes, which adds up to increased productivity.  

Teams that lack domain knowledge: So much of content marketing demands diverse expertise, from writing and editing to SEO to performance monitoring. Many content marketers do double or even triple duty. A CMP can help already overextended team members bridge their gaps in skills. When they get practical recommendations right within a platform and can automate tasks like accessibility or brand compliance that aren’t in their realm of expertise, they’re primed to be more successful.  

Teams that want to prove content ROI: Measuring ROI on demand gen and content initiatives is always a priority, but it’s also notoriously difficult. A robust CMP will offer advanced, structured performance measurement and campaign tracking capabilities.  

Teams that want to up their content game: Marketers who want to prioritize delivering reader-centric, high-quality content experiences on their website will find the content auditing, analysis, and optimization functions of content marketing platforms invaluable for taking their content to the next level.

Many content teams rely on a mix of marketing technologies to support their content strategy, with different solutions in place for content auditing, editorial calendars, search engine optimization, analytics, ads, reporting, and publishing content. Yet this approach is often inefficient and expensive, and it requires multiple rounds of onboarding and training for users to fully understand and get the most out of each tool.  

Content marketers run the risk of siloing their data across disparate platforms, which can make it next to impossible to connect the dots among content campaigns, track success, and zero in on areas for improvement.  

Frustration with fractured technology isn’t isolated: According to one survey, over half of marketers rely on 50 different platforms and 64 percent think that martech stacks have grown more complicated in recent years.  

Streamlining and simplifying martech stacks with a comprehensive technology solution that combines functionalities is the obvious solution. By opting to use an all-in-one content marketing platform rather than single-purpose solutions, marketers can leverage a host of marketing tools from within a single environment: They can swiftly connect the different components to streamline their content strategy, content creation, distribution, and analysis processes, not to mention tasks related to accessibility compliance.   

Broadly speaking, a streamlined martech stack yields improved brand awareness, engagement, and conversions, with digital accessibility and inclusivity and digital accessibility built right in, but here are the specifics of what you can expect from an all-in-one solution:  

Enhanced executive oversight: Get a consolidated view of all your content assets across your content marketing campaigns in a centralized location. Align your designers, developers, content creators, and other stakeholders and members of your content marketing team with a single content marketing solution to eliminate operational silos. 

Performance monitoring in one place: Gain end-to-end visibility of your content marketing campaigns in one place. Built-in performance-tracking features like shareable dashboards, custom reporting, and progress monitoring are in a single environment, which means no more toggling among platforms and trying to make sense of data from different places. 

Shared standards of excellence: When everyone is working in the same platform, it’s far easier for all website contributors to adhere to the same brand standards and use the same data. It’s also far easier to see at a glance who is accountable for what.  

Data-driven decisions: When all of your campaigns and data are interconnected in one platform, it's much easier to uncover patterns and get a clear view of the bigger picture. The data-driven decision making that's core to content marketing strategy comes far more easily. You can be confident in choosing the right way forward. 

Inclusive digital content: Create an inclusive website experience that’s accessible to all visitors and increases your addressable market and simultaneously tap an accessibility checking feature that will reduce your legal risk. When your content doesn’t violate US anti-discrimination legislation, like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, you’re in a far more secure position from a compliance perspective. 

Practical recommendations for complex processes: Again, content marketers often wear many hats. When they’re working in a platform that offers recommendations and demystifies complex processes such as SEO, PPC, and accessibility compliance, plus actionable insights, plus in-platform support, they’re empowered to do the disparate parts of their jobs better.  

Less wasted time: Increase marketing efficiency with automated checks that are critical to maintaining high website quality and time-saving CMS integrations. Time formerly wasted on switching among tools, carrying out resource-intensive tasks by hand, and sharing data manually can be reallocated to creative strategizing and high-level planning. 

Better integration with social media: Integrating social media with content marketing platforms enhances content reach and engagement by allowing seamless sharing and interaction with target audiences.  

Improved capacity for interactive content: CMPs feature intuitive tools like drag-and-drop builders that simplify creating assets like quizzes, polls, and interactive infographics, but they also enable real-time personalization like content recommendations and facilitate collaboration and workflow automation.  

Improved SEO: When you have SEO tools built right into your CMP, your SEO efforts become far more efficient: You can stay right in your CMP environment and use its integrated SEO tools to plan and execute tasks to improve and drive organic traffic. 

Streamlined content creation tools: CMPs streamline workflows and provide content marketers with a wide array of templates, assets, and collaboration features, so they can produce high-quality content more efficiently. Automation of repetitive tasks and real-time analytics help teams focus more on strategic thinking and less on manual labor. That’s not only a boon to productivity and creativity, but also morale.  

Content ideation: A powerful CMP will have built-in tools that help you explore and generate innovative content ideas that align with your brand's goals and audience preferences — all of which are key to enhancing engagement and reach.  

Advanced analytics and AI-driven insights derived from CMPs can help identify trending topics and content gaps, so your marketing efforts are both timely and relevant. Additionally, they often provide tools for A/B testing and audience segmentation so refining your content strategy and maximizing your content’s effectiveness becomes a breeze.

Full understanding how to use a tool can make the difference between average and outstanding results. Always look for CMP vendors that provide in-depth, live training and support to help you meet your content marketing goals. Self-service will only get you so far.  

6. Customization 

Look for CMPs that offer custom dashboards and report generation that can be tailored to your team’s reporting needs. Every organization is different, so you need to be able to see and access just what you need quickly, without fishing around in a setting that doesn’t make sense for your team.  

7. Scalability 

You’re planning on your business growing and evolving, right? Then you need a CMP that will support scaling your content marketing operations. You might not be focusing on a certain element of content marketing now, but that could change in the future, so look for CMPs that offer add-on functionalities. Also look for ones that allow you to add users or seats to your subscription.  

Another thing to look for: limits on data crawled and analyzed. Finally, make sure the CMP vendor you commit to continually invests in upgrades to their platform to match updates to search engine algorithms, new technologies, and other progressions in the world of content marketing. 

8. Budget 

When considering which CMP to use, budget is always a critical consideration. While there are free tools available to help content marketers elevate their efforts, they often come with limited support, user allowances, and functions. 

Brand trust is non-negotiable, and flawless content is key to brand trust. Content marketers can build trust and loyalty with their audience by consistently producing high-quality, error-free content that meets their needs. Spelling errors, broken links, and dense, badly written copy can all detract from a brand’s trustworthiness. That’s where making sure that your content marketing platform has a website QA testing feature that spots errors before your visitors do come into play.  

Siteimprove Quality Assurance makes this easier with a range of content-boosting features: 

Content readability: Rid your site of copy that’s hard to comprehend. Match your visitors’ reading level by testing your content against one of seven internationally recognized readability tests. 

Misspelling checker: Scan your web content for embarrassing spelling errors that erode trust. 

Broken links checker: Identify and fix broken links in your content so your visitors don’t encounter dead ends that frustrate users. 

Brand dictionary: Create a custom, brand-specific dictionary to speed up your content checks (and even say goodbye to your brand name constantly being flagged as a typo).  

Every content marketer knows that their content needs to be fresh, well-written, and optimized, but it’s easy to overlook the importance of ensuring it is consistently on-brand.  

The fact is, consistent brand awareness can increase revenue. Yet with the frequency of website rebranding, business acquisitions that incorporate new (and conflicting) content to a site, and differences in style among teams, branding can easily become outdated or diluted, making your brand unrecognizable and potentially unrelatable to your visitors. 

Siteimprove Policy transforms branding compliance and management into a simple, automated process. Utilize pre-built ready-to-go policies, or customize your own, to detect and resolve branding and style inconsistencies across the breadth of your website. You can even set standards for commonly misspelled terms, to fix common content issues like missing alt text and overly long page titles, and to locate old content that should have been scrubbed from a site. 

You might be creating excellent content, but unless it’s optimized for search engines, it won’t help you meet your broader business objectives. 

Clearing these findability roadblocks is easy with an enterprise SEO platform such as Siteimprove SEO. Your content marketing platform should also be able to automatically audit your website’s technical SEO to find issues that are impacting your site’s search visibility; Siteimprove's prioritized SEO recommendations tackle the most business-critical problems first.  

Once you’ve removed any technical issues, you can focus on auditing your on-page SEO and using those learnings to make your content more friendly to search engines. Siteimprove SEO flags common issues with on-page elements like page titles, meta titles and descriptions, images, and headers. 

The Duplicate Content Finder feature helps you identify and purge duplicate content, so you don’t have to spend time manually combing through your content assets to prevent a ranking penalty. 

For the best results, incorporate keyword research into your content planning and creation process. Siteimprove SEO and MarketMuse’s AI-powered content strategy tools take the guesswork out of this step: It demystifies organic search by helping content marketers better understand their search audience and generate more high-quality organic traffic, better matching their search intent and zeroing in on untapped keyword opportunities. 

Expose unexplored content marketing opportunities by discovering new keywords to target with Siteimprove SEO’s keyword research capabilities. Keyword discovery and keyword suggestion features help you understand the areas for opportunity for current keywords and learn how to reach prospects with new ones. From there, bringing structure to your content with these keywords insights is a straightforward process. 

Knowing your SEO competition is the best way to get a leg up. Use Siteimprove SEO’s competitor analysis capabilities and MarketMuse to track the competitive landscape, identify new search competitors, and reveal the best-performing websites in your niche for your target keywords. You can then use this information to bolter your own SEO strategy.

Your content marketing assets might pass all the quality assurance, branding, and SEO checks available, but if they’re not accessible, they’re not inclusive, and you risk alienating a large business demographic given that worldwide, 1.4 billion people live with some form of disability.  

Making your content accessible isn’t just the smart, business-minded, and ethical thing to do; web accessibility is also a serious legal matter. Removing accessibility barriers not only provides an inclusive content experience; it also helps you comply with legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. 

Use Siteimprove Accessibility to locate and fix accessibility issues in your content with on-page highlighting and actionable guidelines for making your content more accessible for all readers, with fixes like descriptive alt text and anchor text, transcripts for media content, and formatting content with a logical heading system. 

While SEO is a great way to create evergreen content with no upfront expenditure, there are some occasions where PPC, particularly Google Ads, is the most effective way to enhance your content marketing strategy by targeting specific audiences and increasing visibility.  

But optimizing paid ads campaigns is often a time-consuming and thankless task. Fortunately, marketers can reclaim wasted time and get more out of their paid search campaigns by using a content marketing platform coupled with a PPC management software such as Siteimprove Ads. Use this tool to automatically audit your Google Ads campaigns and maximize your ads, landing pages, and budgets with clear recommendations. 

Landing pages are where the magic happens for most content teams, so use this tool to automatically check them for more than 40 different conversion blockers. From here, you can jump straight into your CMS with one of Siteimprove’s popular CMS plugin to fix the issues and achieve better results.

Marketing teams all have their own preferred martech stack. No matter how your team works, Siteimprove’s range of integrations, plugins, and even an API integrate with your workflow for greater efficiency, enhanced insights, and silo-busting.  

Creating content with a content marketing platform is just one part of your content strategy. Without measuring and analyzing its performance using key metrics like visits, downloads, SEO rankings, and conversions, you can’t take your content to the next level and grow your business. 

Learn how visitors find your content, where they come from, and which content they’re engaging with most with Siteimprove Analytics. Use these insights to tailor your content to meet their needs and prioritize underperforming content for improvement. 

Use Siteimprove Analytics visitor insights features to see first-hand how your readers interact with your web content. Look at data from heat, click, and scroll maps to find areas for optimization and remove conversion blockers from your web pages. 

Discover and examine your best and worst-performing pages to learn where your content is hitting or missing the mark. Audit those pages to glean insights for crafting better-performing content.

Set custom content KPIs and monitor your content's performance over time

Data is presented in a simple, user-friendly way that is easily understood by everyone, meaning content marketers don’t have to rely on data analysts to make sense of their content performance. You can even tap into one of Siteimprove’s martech integrations to see your web analytics data where it makes most sense. 
Every content marketing tool you choose, including your CMP, is essential for streamlining your content strategy, enhancing productivity, and ensuring consistent brand messaging.