What is a content marketing platform?
A content marketing platform (CMP) helps teams plan campaigns, create content, manage approvals, collaborate with agencies, and deliver content across channels from a single workflow.
3 minute read
CHAPTER 1
What is a CMP, and how does it work?
"Content is king, but distribution is queen. And she wears the pants." - Jonathan Perelman, Head, Digital, ICM Partners Inc.
A content marketing platform (CMP) is a centralized system that enables your marketing organization to plan, author, collaborate, and distribute different types of content 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 marketing 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. Many CMPs offer integrations with existing tools, APIs for custom connectivity, and apps to expand functionality.
Chapter 2
Start solving your content crisis
According to Content Marketing Institute’s annual report, a whopping (58%) of B2B marketers rate their content strategy as merely "moderately effective", while 37% say repurposing content is a challenge.
At Sitecore, we call this the content crisis that many brands face as they work to deliver the level of engaging content required to power personalized customer 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main challenges brands come up against is the ability (or the lack of) to quickly create content at scale because of outdated or inflexible systems and processes.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, reuse 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 content 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, with features like onboarding support, content curation, and AI-powered assistance to help accelerate and scale efforts.
Chapter 3
What’s the difference between a CMP and CMS?
A content marketing platform (CMP) and a content management system (CMS) play different but complementary roles in the content lifecycle.
A content management system (CMS) manages and delivers digital content across customer touchpoints. Modern CMS platforms support websites, apps, commerce experiences, and other digital channels through headless and composable architectures, enabling organizations to publish consistent content wherever customers interact with their brand.
A content marketing platform (CMP) is the operational system that helps marketing teams plan, create, govern, and deliver content across the entire content lifecycle. It acts as the operational hub for content strategy, editorial workflows, production management, and collaboration across internal teams, agencies, and stakeholders.
The CMP orchestrates your content operations. The CMS delivers your content experiences. Together, they form a connected content lifecycle, moving from planning and production to publication and optimization. As content demands grow across channels, running a CMP and CMS together gives your teams a single operational framework. Planning, governance, creation, delivery, and optimization all stay connected.
CMP vs CMS at a glance
| CMP | CMS |
|---|---|
| Plans and coordinates content work | Delivers content to digital channels. |
| Manages briefs, workflows, and approvals. | Manages pages, components, and publishing. |
| Supports collaboration across teams and agencies. | Supports customer-facing digital experiences. |
| Focuses on content operations and governance. | Focuses on content delivery and presentation. |
| Helps teams create content efficiently | Helps organizations publish content consistently. |
| Works upstream in the content lifecycle | Works downstream in the content lifecycle. |
Chapter 4
The benefits of implementing a CMP
Content Marketing Platforms eliminate silos in the content production process and maximize the business value of content by accelerating the speed, scale, and high-quality 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 distribution and usage and 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 content 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."
Chapter 5
Use cases for a CMP
Content marketing platforms are tools designed to support a wide range of marketing needs, from strategic planning and creation to cross-channel distribution and performance tracking. Below are some of the most impactful ways organizations are leveraging CMPs to drive results at scale.
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 marketing 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.
Chapter 6
Why Sitecore’s CMP stands out
Bring order to your content operations.
Sitecore’s CMP as part of the Sitecore Content Hub™, goes beyond basic content creation. It fully integrates with Digital Asset Management, Marketing Resource Management, Product Content Management and Web to Print capabilities. With its user-friendly editor for content creation and real-time collaboration features, teams can easily create, review, and approve microcontent. Content can then be dynamically assembled, reassembled, and distributed across multiple channels, accelerating workflows and boosting consistency across the entire digital experience.