What is a content marketing platform?

Marketers use a content marketing platform (CMP) to centralize content planning, creation, optimization and delivery workflows. A CMP gives organizations the ability to collaborate around types of content, distribute digital assets to customers and streamline the entire content creation and delivery lifecycle for improved engagement. 

Key takeaways:

• Content marketing platforms are an evolution of the previous generation of content management systems

• A content marketing platform enables teams to collaborate across digital silos and optimize the use of content in the organization

• Using a CMP, teams can build content creation, delivery and optimization workflows that support the editorial calendar for all marketing efforts

• CMPs connect to upstream systems like MRM, DAM and PIM as well as downstream content delivery systems

What are the features of a content marketing platform?

Content marketing platforms connect to digital content repositories such as MRM, PIM and DAM systems:

• Marketing Resource Management (MRM)
  When running multiple marketing campaigns across a range of products, an MRM system allows teams to plan, schedule and monitor all tasks in a single system. An MRM manages individual projects by centralizing digital asset creation, storage, review and distribution workflows.

• Digital Asset Management (DAM)
  A DAM system allows you to index corporate content including images, videos, graphs, audio files, documents and more. A DAM system makes corporate content accessible to resources by centralizing the storage of digital assets and standardizing editing workflows. 

• Product Information Management (PIM)
  With (PIM) systems, you can collect and unify product-related content from multiple sources. Product data may include marketing assets, technical specifications and logistical information such as sizes, ordering lead times or shipping details.

Additionally, content marketing platforms also connect to downstream marketing systems. A CMP allows you to track content performance across digital channels and optimize marketing and content delivery strategies. Even further downstream, they offer real-time collaboration, integration functionality, workflow templates, project management capabilities, ideation and content calendars so that you can manage the process from campaign conception to execution.

Why are content marketing platforms necessary?

There is a growing need for marketing content that delivers a consistent message across all digital channels. When you have to manage more digital assets, a CMP helps control the way you set up repositories that enable quicker delivery while maintaining campaign standards. 

Marketing content management platforms help to:

1. Manage all marketing content from a single library using metadata that makes assets easier to locate

2. Design and execute marketing plans within a wider organization with input from multiple stakeholders

3. Deliver content across all digital channels consistently and according to precise schedules including social media, webpages, and streaming services if necessary

How do marketers use a CMP?

Every marketer aims to create quality content that drives engagement and increases conversion rates. With content creation being one of the biggest outsourced tasks in marketing, having a centralized system to manage all workflows, coordinate campaigns and streamline delivery processes becomes essential to maximizing ROI. 

A CMP enables marketers to organize content in a single repository, establish a marketing strategy and schedule content delivery. It also makes it possible to review and approve content for any campaign using a formalized workflow. 

Marketers can use a CMP to maximize the value of digital assets by reusing objects as required and generating analytics about engagement — reducing the content creation effort required across the organization. 

What are the benefits of a CMP?

Content marketing platforms help teams to break down silos that are common in the content creation process. Using a CMP enables teams to speed up the content creation lifecycle, improve the quality of content, develop a dynamic content strategy and quickly scale content curation for omnichannel marketing.

Additionally, marketing teams benefit from a CMP by:

• Establish an effective content marketing strategy that shows content gaps in your process and proactively allocate the required resources to ensure content is ready for any campaign

• Giving teams a unified environment to coordinate all content creation and delivery tasks, allowing them to scale content delivery through collaboration

• Optimizing the use of content across different campaigns and channels for improved personalization at scale

• Tracking content creation timelines and coordinating the content delivery workflows using content production calendars

• Improving governance with standardized marketing policies and practices, ensuring teams comply with the organization’s content requirements

• Measuring content and campaign performance across the organization with key performance indicators, analytics and metrics including SEO boosts, increased lead generation, streamlined content assets, improved marketing automation, and best content practices

What's the difference between a CMS, CMP and DXP?

Today’s marketing teams have many tools that help them experiment, manage and deliver content to customers across all digital channels. The three main types are:

A digital experience platform (DXP) is an evolution of a traditional CMS and often has a CMP component included. This kind of component optimizes the entire content creation and delivery process according to a predefined customer journey. It also provides personalization and segmentation capabilities to deliver optimized user journeys across social media, web and mobile applications. 

Do you need a CMP if you have a DXP?

With a platform like Optimizely CMS, you get all of the benefits of a CMP built into the DXP. Optimizely makes it possible to deliver rich and engaging digital experiences with optimized content according to your analytics and experimentation data. 

For any campaign, a DXP allows you to design experiences based on research, create new content quickly and deliver these experiences to every digital platform. 

As digital experiences are now the primary differentiator when it comes to brands, you need the ability to react quickly to any changes in consumer behavior. You’ll also need a platform that makes it easy to collaborate, create, review, approve and publish content to all your channels for increased engagement and conversions.