What Is Content Marketing Software? Analysis of Features, Benefits & Pricing

Assigned with the company’s content strategy, you shudder at the thought of managing an editorial and creative team. Most marketers and business owners do, but thanks to content marketing software, they are far and fewer in between today. They have modern technologies to help them roll out a content strategy.

Content marketing platforms or CMP helps you implement a content plan with task management tools, a publishing platform, marketing features and SEO tools. It helps you lay down a content pipeline to track content tasks, publish content from one place—the system’s interface—and push the right content to the right audience and at the right time.

Just to be clear, content marketing software is not a CMS, the latter being a publishing or blogging platform. While the former also features a publishing platform, content marketing software, as its name implies, helps you push content to the right audience, too.

In this guide, you will learn the basics of content marketing software, including its types, key features and benefits. You will come across the factors to consider and issues to anticipate and other key details beyond simply answering the obvious question behind the content marketing meaning–what is content marketing? We seek to help you subscribe to a plan that matches your needs.

Types of Content Marketing Software

Content marketing software comes in different shapes and sizes. A review of dozens of content marketing software solutions reveals that they tend to be classified by three categories: deployment, business size and core features.

Deployment

• On-premise. These are solutions installed in your local server. They usually involve a one-time license fee. Pricing may be exorbitant for small and midsized businesses, and it requires an in-house IT team to manage the setup, maintenance, troubleshooting and upgrades. Because of its complexity, you hardly see an on-premise content marketing system, except perhaps in large enterprises that develop their own systems and one where the content marketing system is part of a bigger enterprise-wide infrastructure.
• SaaS or cloud-hosted. The software is hosted by the vendor while you rent out the system on a monthly subscription. The vendor takes care of the setup, maintenance, upgrades and troubleshooting; these are all included in the subscription. In most cases, you just sign up for an account and you’re good to go. Since it is cloud-hosted, you can access the system and your data from any internet-connected PC, laptop, tablet or smartphone.

Business size

• Small and midsized businesses. Most top content marketing software solutions offer a plan targeted at small and medium-sized businesses. They may have 2-3 plans that let you scale from simple blogging to rolling out a full-scale content strategy. These plans are good enough to launch a content campaign for a few websites, manage and measure their performance. Some of the common features in these plans are a WYISWYG editor, email marketing and basic SEO tools. You also get reports on traffic volume, content performance and other basic content metrics.
• Enterprise solutions. These are solutions aimed at organizations with multiple business units, websites and product lines, requiring them to have several and simultaneous content marketing campaigns. Typically, the plans are offered by quote only to help the vendor tailor the right feature set and terms. In this plan, the core features are bumped up plus, advanced features are added such as AI-powered analytics, dedicated support and a fulls-cale CMS.

Solution

Content marketing software products can also be classified by solution or the focus of the core feature set.

• Content publishing. The software focuses on the editorial aspect of content marketing. It is usually packaged as a blogging software or CMS with an intuitive editor that integrates with your different websites, allowing you to publish content from one system. This core module comes with tools to help you distribute or promote content. Media organizations and content teams usually go for these solutions.
• Marketing software. The software focuses on the marketing side of content marketing, that is, it is designed for email marketing, ad campaigns, landing pages and social marketing. The software may also feature a publishing platform, but as a support to your marketing campaigns. The users of this content marketing software type are often brands and marketing teams.
• SEO. Because content marketing is also about your content being found online, a number of solutions are geared towards helping you rank on organic searches. These are usually SEO software products with integrated content publishing tools. If your primary goal is to rank on search results, this type of content marketing software fits your need.

HubSpot Marketing is one type of a marketing-first CMP.

Features of Content Marketing Software

Content marketing software may come in various forms but they share common features. Essentially, a software solution should have the following core features to help you manage a successful content strategy, from pre-planning to performance analysis.

Content Creation

This is the module that helps you create content from a single location and keep content-related files in an easy-to-retrieve place. A content marketing system may have all or some of, or even more than, these features:

• Draft editor. A content marketing software or platform either integrates with a CMS or has a built-in CMS-like or blogging software that allows you to create content from inside the platform. Typically, a WYSIWYG editor is included for formatting and styling. The editor also lets you embed images or videos, edit HMTL codes and preview the frontend look.
• Asset library. This contains images, videos and other files used in content. You can expect a filter and search tool to help you find an asset, and an upload/download feature. The library can manage a range of file formats, such as PNG, PDF, JPG, DOC and CSV files.
• Content templates. A content marketing system may also provide templates for a variety of content types such as articles, sales pages, ads and graphics.
• Talent marketplace. A handful of vendors integrate their platform with a marketplace for content contractors such as writers, SEO specialists and graphic designers. This is convenient for companies without an HR team to assemble a content team.

Contently is an example of a talent marketplace with a CMP thrown in.

Content Distribution and Promotion

Creating content is just one step to implementing a content strategy. You will also need a way to distribute and promote content.

• SEO tools. Some content marketing platforms have an integrated SEO feature set or vice-versa, allowing you to optimize content to rank on search results or appeal to your social media audience. SEO tools like metatagging, keyword optimization, and potential traffic analysis help you align content with what people are searching online or mentioning on social media channels. An SEO feature may also help you get topic ideas based on keyword popularity or gaps, or ride on viral social topics for higher engagement. Likewise, SEO-oriented content marketing systems may also feature a way to analyze  your content for originality, readability and, of course, SEO.
• Content display. Some content marketing software solutions feature a way to supply your websites, emails, PPC ads and social channels with display marketing content on a scheduled basis. More advanced content marketing software may also let you personalize the display by demographics, engagement level, and other online profiling using cookies.

Lead Generation and Tracking

Some content marketing platforms include lead generation features to help you track and log lead activities. Using built-in analytics, a separate feature discussed below, some software allow you to chart lead activities in a timeline, which helps you plot audience interest over a period. You can gauge which pages, ads, deals or traffic sources are most effective, and least.

A no-code web form and ad builder may also be included to help you collect leads in your website, email and other digital assets.

Marketing Automation

It is a set of features that automate repetitive marketing actions like social media postings, sending emails and funneling leads from web forms. With automation, your team can focus on higher-level tasks such as content brainstorming, content performance measurement, and market analyses.

Using rule-based triggers, marketing automation moves the activity forward, avoiding bottlenecks in your lead pipeline and ensuring a smooth content workflow.

Marketing automation in content marketing systems vary widely. Some of the tools to expect here include real-time alerts, custom templates, rule-based triggers and autoresponder.

Project Management

Creating content being a project-based intiative, many content marketing systems integrate or are designed around a project management module that allows the project leader to assign, monitor and close content-related tasks in one place.

• Task management. It lets you create projects, invite team members by permission, assign roles, divide tasks into subtasks, assign their due dates and owners, and track their status. Conversation threads inside this module help you backtrack and audit issues or best practices for posterity.
• Editorial calendar. It allows you to view tasks in calendar-style to track due dates, milestones and the project’s overall progress.
• Ideation/Collaboration space. It is where team members can collaborate, collect and finalize ideas prior to creating content. Standard features may include document versioning, a cloud whiteboard, file attachment and a chat app to help the team work together and in real time.
• Approval workflow. This feature lets you create projects divided into stages based on your approval process. The module is closely integrated with task management.
• Tags and labels. They allow you to create tags or labels and assign them to tasks, so you can sort them in any meaningful way.

Data Analytics

Content marketing software allows you to measure your content marketing KPIs by processing aggregated data collected by the system and processing them into insights. The top content marketing software products may even be powered by AI to leverage big data and predictive analytics.

Here are the standard data analytics features:

• Dashboards. Dashboards display insights consolidated by content marketing software. The KPIs may include traffic volume, content performance, lead source and status, audience segments and more. Go for software that lets you display dashboards in desktop and mobile devices for flexibility.

• Reports. Meanwhile, reports can be generated, shared digitally or printed, featuring sorted KPIs to help you make smarter decisions. Some of the standard features here include reports on lead acquisition, search and social traffic, PPC click rate, and email marketing metrics.

• Content auditing. Some solutions feature a tool to help you take stock of your content inventory, which ones are performing, not performing and underperforming. This module may be an add-on SEO feature but a good-to-have tool to help you establish your baseline and, from which, draw up a content action plan.

monday.com’s centralized dashboard makes it easy to keep every remote team member on the same page.

Benefits of Content Marketing Software

What is content marketing but pushing relevant topical content to your audience to generate leads. To do that with acceptable results, using content marketing software helps you manage your content plan with ease, accuracy and in an organized fashion.

Here are the benefits when you utilize technology for your content marketing:

Streamlines Editorial Workflow

Managing an editorial workflow is made easier with content marketing software. Even professionals without prior editorial background like marketers, business owners and admin can create a clear-cut approval process to standardize and move content-related tasks.

They can divide tasks into subtasks and assign them by dependency, hierarchy or in other meaningful ways.

Furthermore, an integrated task management feature gives them greater visibility throughout the editorial workflow, from creating task to assigning and completing them. In that way, they get to anticipate bottlenecks and manage a more distributed workload.

Modern content marketing software solutions also feature automation that allows you to create rule-based triggers to perform the next step. For example, a task can be assigned automatically to an editor for proofing once a writer submits a draft.

Distributes Content Across Multiple Channels

This module helps you publish content across your online channels from one place, right inside the content marketing platform. It is a must-have for companies and agencies managing multiple websites.

Content marketing platforms with this module typically have a built-in WYSIWYG editor, too. All you need to do is integrate the software with your websites’ CMS; then a click of a “publish” button sends the content straight to where you want it posted.

Some solutions may also integrate with your social media management tool directly or via Zapier. In this way, you can also push social posts from the same place where you publish content, a convenient setup for the busy marketer.

Simplifies Collaboration

Using content marketing software helps nurture a culture of collaboration across the organization, making content creation an organization-wide shared initiative.

Many platforms have a shared workspace where the content team can brainstorm ideas, share files, annotate drafts in real time, and simply work together remotely.

That means you can involve outsourced teams, people from different department, branches or business units, executives away on a business trip, and even clients.

As an added flexibility, remote teams can use their mobile device to participate.

Wrike’s 3-pane view makes it easier to collaborate on projects.

Measures KPIs and ROI

At the end of it, you create content for profits. Hence, it is important to know how much your content plan is providing leads to the sales funnel.

Content marketing software collects, consolidates and churns out data on lead acquisition, conversions and other revenue-related metrics, which help you gain insights on your KPIs, and, overall, your content strategy’s business value. That means you can measure with accuracy if your content plan is profitable—or not.

Likewise, through integration, content marketing software furnishes your other key business apps—for instance, CRM, SEO, and business intelligence—with critical data relevant to measuring ROI.

Manages Tasks with Greater Visibility

Using an integrated task management feature, you get an overview of all content-related tasks from a single interface. Typically, you can create a hierarchical structure to manage all your content tasks, from the project level down to the tasks and subtasks. This structure allows you to monitor the project’s progress, or drill down into tasks and subtasks and check for potential issues or delays.

With tasks clearly assigned to their task owners, it is also easy to assign accountability, even retrace task activities and conversations to sort the best practices or recurring issues.

Organizes Files, Access Them Quickly

A side benefit of using content marketing software is having your content-related files organized in one place and retrieved with a few clicks. A common setup lets you upload your files to a centralized location shared with the team so everyone can access the relevant document as needed and wherever.

While software solutions vary, usually, files you attach to a task are automatically stored in the cloud (the vendor’s server location), while a search filter with keyword auto-suggest tool helps you find a document fast. Some software solutions may also provide a dedicated file upload space.

Content marketing systems built on a project management architecture like monday.com and Wrike have solid, secure file management systems.

Boosts SEO

SEO-based content marketing platforms naturally help to boost your content’s search ranking potential. They feature tools that help you optimize URLs and content structure, customize meta descriptions, header tags and title tags, and index content internally.

Some may even have advanced features for onsite and offsite optimization, link building and tracking.

Even if a content marketing system lacks SEO capabilities, it is likely able to integrate with popular SEO tools, thus making it convenient to optimize content even for the non-expert.

Helps Sustain Your Content Strategy

With a powerful tool to help you implement a content plan, you are likely to keep to a strategy that’s consistent with your brand messaging, and meets your content goals in the long run. You can expect to drive more top-of-the-funnel leads, increase conversions, close gaps in the middle-of-the-funnel and bottom-of-the-funnel and, essentially, nurture engagement on your social channels, websites, emails and customer base for potential repeat sales, and widen your audience reach as more people consume and share your content.

Semrush is an example of an SEO-first CMP.

Examples of Content Marketing Software

HubspotVISIT WEBSITE

HubSpot Marketing features marketing tools and a blogging software to help you create a content pipeline that ties together your blogs, PPC ad, landing pages, and emails. Integrated with its free CRM, this software helps you drive top-of-the-funnel leads to conversions. HubSpot Marketing has a free plan to get you started with content marketing.

monday.comVISIT WEBSITE

monday.com is a task management software that adapts to different project types, including creatives and marketing. You can customize a project pipeline to help you manage content-related tasks and visualize them via Kanban or Gantt charts to track your content plan’s progress. A collaboration workspace enables office and remote teams and individuals to work closely.

SEMrush

Semrush is an SEO-first content marketing platform. It helps you optimize content for search results, paid search and display advertising. Its key features include tools for link-building, content analysis, ad displays, and on-site SEO tracking.

WrikeVISIT WEBSITE

Wrike is a collaboration software that can be adapted for implementing and managing a content plan. It features project management tools to help you get a big picture of your content plan milestones or drill down into task-level activities. Its reporting and analytics generate actionable insights to help you make smarter decisions.

ContentlyVISIT WEBSITE

Contently provides content services, a content management platform and a talent marketplace of marketers and creatives. It targets companies looking to outsource their content plan.

Cost of Content Marketing Software

Cloud-hosted content marketing software plans are priced variedly, from free to custom pricing that runs in the thousands of dollars. For example, HubSpot and monday.com offer freemium plans, where you can use the app forever at no cost. However, expect limited features with a free plan.

Meantime, basic plans usually start from under $10 per month to as high as over $100 per month, while enterprise plans are often priced on a custom quote basis to help the vendor match a large company’s specific needs.

Factors Affecting Pricing

The stark pricing disparity reflects the fluidity in how vendors position their content marketing software. Some products are focused on high-level SEO and marketing while others only provide a basic blogging platform with lightweight distribution tools thrown in.

Other factors affecting price include the number of users, add-ons and SLA (service level agreement). Some vendors also price their plans by tiers, for instance, by 1,000 contacts or users, as a way to manage server load cost.

Subscribing to an annual plan versus paying for month-to-month can fetch you a discount with some vendors giving away 10% to 30% off the ticket price.

An Operating, Not Capital, Expenditure

Subscribing to a cloud-hosted plan is an operating expenditure (OpEx) similar to maintaining a facility. You will be paying a monthly fee for as long as you use the product. When viewed as an OpEx, you will realize that the cost can easily fit into the budget, leaving your cash flow protected and factoring in the costs that you would have otherwise spent on maintaining a system.

Content Marketing Software Buying Factors

Budget is not the only, or even the first, consideration when purchasing a content marketing platform. To ensure you are getting the right solution, think about these factors, as they will impact user adoption and, eventually, your content strategy’s success.

Priority Feature

The first thing to consider when getting content marketing software is to ask yourself why. Of course, you want content marketing to drive traffic and revenues. But that is too broad. Think of the specific focus of the features you’ll need to implement your content plan.

As discussed above, different content marketing software solutions focus on different missions. Put simply, some are content-driven while others are marketing-driven. Some highlight excellent SEO tools and lead management while others push publishing and content collaboration.

You may already have some of the built-in features, for example, you have an SEO software and a task management software in place. So, check your tech stack first and identify the gaps content marketing software can fill in.

In general, you can focus on the value propositions of most content marketing systems: marketing and promotion, SEO, task management, collaborative workspace, and publishing.

Ease of Use

Test the software for ease of use to ensure user adoption. The software should have an intuitive interface that can easily be learned by non-technical users with minimum assistance. Most vendors offer a free trial or freemium plan; use it to check the app’s usability.

Here are some characteristics to check for ease of use:

• The features are easy to access.
• The use of “Favorites” to group often-used tools is a plus.
• Files are easy to locate.
• Search tool anticipates what you’re looking for.
• The UI is easy to navigate.
• Design & layout is easy on the eye, uncluttered.
• A help tool is accessible wherever on the UI.
• Knowledge base topics are indexed meaningfully.
• Video tutorials and screen walk-throughs for first-time users and feature updates.
• Smooth integration with popular apps like Google Apps and Microsoft.
• Plenty of single-click tools.
• Templates for recurring projects or tasks.
• Users can communicate and collaborate easily inside the app.

Scalability

You need to future-proof your content strategy by ensuring the content marketing software scales to your growing requirements. These can be managing more content assets, onboarding more writers and artists, thus more users and, for agencies, collaborating with more clients.

Here are some of the things to look for to assess if the software is for keeps. It should scale to:

• more users
• more features
• more storage, bandwidth
• new content formats like AR and VR
• advanced features like AI or machine learning
• deep customizations via an open API
• advanced analytics and reports

With scalability, you avoid disruptions such as migrating to another system or prolonged download downtime, which impact the bottom line.

Pricing

Pricing is a major buying factor, but do not go for the cheapest plan. Rather, get the best value off your budget. A $30 price difference may look huge when taken at cost. But if that gets you more features that can double your leads, that’s value for every dollar spent.

Similarly, consider a budget that’s proportionate to your content marketing’s importance to the bottom line. If content marketing is providing you with the most leads and conversions, you might want to allocate more budget to it than in your other underperforming revenue streams.

Integrations

Content marketing software is not siloed; it should integrate with key business apps that can reinforce your content marketing strategy.

Here are some of the app categories your content marketing software may be worth integrating with:

• CMS – ex. Wordpress, Joomla
• CRM – ex. Salesforce, Hubspot, Netsuite
• Email marketing – MailChimp, Constant Contact
• Social media management –  ex. Hootsuite, Sprout Social
• Project management – Wrike, monday.com
• Collaboration – Microsoft Teams, Asana
• Document management – Dropbox, Google Drive
• Creative tools – Adobe Creative Cloud
• Time tracking – ex. Time Doctor, Harvest
• Communication – ex. Slack, Zoom
• Productivity – ex. Google Apps, Microsoft
• Email client – ex. Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo!
• Zapier – for third-party apps

Analytics

You should also consider the types of reports and insights the software churns out. Generally, the more detailed the reports, the better. But factoring in price, you may want to focus on just the metrics that matter to you.

Consider also that some of the reports may already be performed—better performed—by your other business apps like SEO software, a CMS or marketing software.

In general, look for this reporting capabilities:

• Web analytics – number of visits, unique visitors, traffic volume, demographics, average session duration, bounce rate, click-through rate, scroll depth, etc.
• SEO metrics – backlinks, keyword ranking, SERP analysis, etc.
• Marketing metrics – landing page performance, lead scores, conversion rate, ROI, returning visitors, signup attributions
• Project metrics – completion rate, productivity rate, time utilization, etc.

Support

Generally, the top content marketing software solutions are intuitive enough not to warrant a dedicated support, which comes for a fee. Just make sure you’re getting a handy knowledge base or self-service portal designed to walk non-technical users through troubleshooting.

A community of users sharing tips or ready to address your question is also helpful.

If your content marketing needs are complex and you lack an in-house IT team, you might want to consider getting an SLA, if available.

Content Marketing Software Trends

Video marketing

Short videos are particularly popular today and in the coming years for marketing. Around 68% preferred video for product demos over articles (15%), ebook or manual (4%) and other channels.

Your content marketing plan shouldn’t only include videos, but it should adopt a video-first strategy to ride on this trend. Short videos like TikTok are proving effective for lead funnels, product overviews, vlogging and other marketing uses.

Other video marketing trends to leverage for content marketing include live videos for real-time selling, 360-degree video experiences, VR videos and soundless social videos.

Artificial Intelligence

AI continues to impact all aspects of business, from making work efficient (79%) and opening new venture opportunities (75%) to fool-proofing the business (72%) and leveraging big data (59%), based on recent AI research statistics.

Specifically, AI is making grammar and plagiarism checkers more accurate and optimizing blog posts for SEO. AI also helps process pattern recognition to predict individual content preferences or generate topics with high search traction. Likewise, AI is being used for content scoring to spot weaknesses and resolve them the better to increase engagement.

While at its infancy stage, AI is being programmed to write copy for ads and short text and create content templates.

Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality

AR and VR present a potential disruptive content for marketers, one that can bridge the gap between experience (“using” the virtual product) and action (signup, booking or purchase). Imagine, too, how VR can upend customers’ aversion to product content (think of ad blockers) and, instead, driven by curiosity, they are drawn to the product itself by clicking its VR content.

AR/VR’s content application is wide and varied, be it in tourism, tech gadgets, entertainment, and more.

Hyper-personalization

The use of AI makes hyperpersonalization possible, especially in email marketing and social media. Beyond names, individual interests, wants, needs and public online profiles and activities, hyper-personalization uses AI and big data to predict and anticipate—even influence—individual preferences.

Hyperpersonalization is also leading to the microsegmentation of your buyer personas. Using data from browsing history, past purchases, social media profiles, likes and interests, you can split your traditional market segments into narrower audiences based on personal data and serve them hyperpersonalized content.

Potential Issues with Content Marketing Software

Much of the issues below point to content marketing problems in general and not as a direct consequence of software. You need to watch out for these harbinger of headaches if you want to realize the full ROI of content marketing software.

Wrong feature set

As we pointed out above, content marketing software solutions have different focuses, such as publishing, marketing and SEO. Getting the wrong feature set results in unnecessary cost. For example, subscribing to an SEO-first content marketing software (ex. Semrush) while you already have an SEO app results in duplicate features. You might also subscribe to nice-to-have premium features (ex. AI analytics) prior to gaining enough data traction, thus rendering these tools unusable.

Lack of content creators

Even the top content marketing software won’t give do any good if you lack content creators. Before subscribing to a plan, make sure a designated content team is in place. And not just an ad hoc team, as implementing a content plan requires long term commitment to realize an ROI. An option is to have someone from marketing head a team of contractors.

Measuring ROI is difficult

To this day, there isn’t a clear cut ROI metric to measure a content marketing plan’s success. What are being measured though are indicators of performance, that is, just parts of the whole content strategy. For instance, traffic volume, no. of leads and engagement (likes, shares, comments, etc.) only paint partial success. Ultimately, what matters is the number of conversions. But ascribing conversions to content marketing is difficult, as content is often a part of your digital marketing mix. The marketer often relies on broad stroke performance, for example, comparing lead volume before and after implementing a content plan.

No clear buyer personas

Content is best served personalized, and with hyper-personalization, it can generate product interest in people who otherwise don’t realize they want the product. But without a clear picture of your audience segments, you won’t be able to optimize this content marketing software feature.

Focusing only on one content type

People consume content in different formats. Even as videos are the most popular content type, other types help you expand reach. In some industries like in B2B, long-form guides and whitepapers may be more effective. Focusing on only one content type under-utilizes your content marketing software.

Leveraging Content Marketing Software

By understanding the benefits, core features, potential issues and trends of content marketing software, you get to appreciate its value in growing the business.  Choosing the right software should be well thought out, minding the features that you only need. We recommend that you start with HubSpot Marketing free plan, and see the core functions for yourself at no cost. Then, compare it with the other top products in this category.

Now that you have a fairly good idea of content marketing definition and how CMP can help, you can further your research by keeping up to date with these key content marketing statistics.

By Nestor Gilbert

Nestor Gilbert is a senior B2B and SaaS analyst and a core contributor at FinancesOnline for over 5 years. With his experience in software development and extensive knowledge of SaaS management, he writes mostly about emerging B2B technologies and their impact on the current business landscape. However, he also provides in-depth reviews on a wide range of software solutions to help businesses find suitable options for them. Through his work, he aims to help companies develop a more tech-forward approach to their operations and overcome their SaaS-related challenges.