What is a Content Marketing Platform?

More than 60% of B2B marketers who reported a low level of success in their content marketing during the height of 2020 attributed it to challenges with content creation. And in a Demand Gen Report conducted during the same timeframe, 67% of respondents said they rely even more on content than they did a year ago.

At Sitecore, we call this success gap the Content Crisis that many brands face as they work to deliver the level of valuable content required to power personalized digital experiences today’s consumers expect.

One of the main challenges brands come up against is the ability (or the lack of) to quickly create content at scale because of outdated or inflexible systems and processes. Brands struggle at an organizational level to locate, manage, share, and repurpose the assets they do have to optimize their resources. The end result? A slow and inefficient end-to-end content lifecycle, inadequate personalization, and a content-starved omnichannel marketing strategy.

Drilling down further, a common denominator in this Content Crisis is the proliferation of multiple content sources and content repositories, including, but not limited to:

• A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system with data about existing customers or potential leads
• An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or a Product Information Management (PIM) system with product descriptions, catalogs, and inventories
• Content created in-house across various platforms
• Multiple cloud and on-premises storage solutions
• Creative agencies, freelancers, or employees who produce content or digital assets
• Imagery sources, both in-house and stock

Marketers need technology that is going to connect and simplify collaboration across these various systems, create a single environment for teams to align and eliminate silos, and enable further digital transformation as it evolves for the organization. This is where a Content Marketing Platform comes in.

A Content Marketing Platform is a centralized system that enables your marketing organization to plan, author, collaborate, and distribute different content types from one place, empowering your brand to streamline the execution of a content marketing strategy and go to market faster.

The CMP provides you with a single, collaborative environment in which local and global teams can align content efforts and resources. It enables better visibility into production calendars and campaign scheduling. And with your creative workflows "under one roof," your marketing teams can leverage tools to measure content effectiveness and maintain a clear campaign overview to track success and areas to improve.

As a software solution, a CMP is designed to connect with your content repositories, such as DAM, PIM, MRM, plus your downstream marketing systems to optimize distribution and power personalization at scale across all channels.

A Content Management System (CMS) is an organization’s system that powers their website. Its main function is to operate as an environment for creating and publishing web-specific content. In context of a brand’s digital experience, a website is the main channel but not the only channel that requires content.

A Content Marketing Platform enables marketers to create the content required to power their entire digital experience. As a unified platform for strategic content creation, management, and analysis, a CMP interacts within an ecosystem of marketing automation systems and technologies, including a CMS, digital experience platform (DXP), digital asset management (DAM) system, and other downstream distribution channels.

From a functionality standpoint, a CMP also supports editorial workflow — from a project-based point of view rather than a page-based one — as well as other complementary services, such as ideation and planning, editorial calendars, and content-specific analytics.

Content Marketing Platforms eliminate silos in the content production process and maximize the business value of content by accelerating the speed, scale, and quality of content production. CMPs empower marketing organizations to:

• Effectively plan, manage, and collaborate on content strategy – By allowing you to visualize gaps in availability and proactively prioritize content production, you can ensure content is always ready when and where needed.
• Streamline content production – Ensure on-time content delivery at scale with your teams collaborating through a unified environment.
• Quickly determine and resolve production bottlenecks – Maintain visibility across the entire content workflow through the centralized platform.
• Optimize content usage and distribution to target audiences across channels – Easily meet and exceed the demand for high-volume content production required for personalization at scale, across all channels and devices.
• Enrich content – Optimize content using content types, tags, metadata, and taxonomy to make it easy to deliver the right content to the right audience on the right channel.
• Stay on track across content creation teams – Keep track of timelines with collaborative production calendars.
• Measure performance using key metrics and KPIs – Utilize content-specific metrics to identify content effectiveness.
• Ensure policy compliance – Enforce security and permissions by having your content workflows "under one roof."

Better content collaboration across the marketing organization

Organizations can eliminate silos, content creation bottlenecks, and version control issues with the CMP’s unified environment. By merging organizational workflows and marketing operations, organizations can foster collaboration with multiple stakeholders and departments. A CMP supports both the project managers and the creative teams through collaborative dashboards, calendars, task lists, asset management, and more. It enables organizations to maximize their content resources and efforts.

Creating content to power personalization

A personalization content strategy requires the ability to serve up tailored content to the right audience on the right channel. This means organizations need to have the ability to easily customize content assets, such as persona-specific messaging, languages, size variations, and more. A CMP works with an organization’s Digital Asset Management (DAM) to enable marketers to utilize their existing or approved content without reinventing the wheel every time.

Deliver content that supports your DX, faster

With the CMP’s centralized environment, collaboration tools, and connectability, organizations are able to streamline the content creation in their end-to-end content lifecycle. Time spent on locating assets in multiple systems, back-and-forth emails, versioning mistakes, manually carrying over content from system to system, and overlapping content efforts can be focused on more value-added tasks.

Sitecore offers its CMP as part of the Sitecore Content Hub™. It fully integrates with Digital Asset Management, Marketing Resource Management, Product Content Management and Web to Print capabilities. The Sitecore Content Marketing Platform has a marketer-friendly editor for content creation and real-time collaboration across content creators, reviewers, and approvers. This makes it easy to create and approve microcontent that can then be assembled and reassembled for publishing across multiple channels.

Learn more about Sitecore CMP and Content Hub.