Marketing.ai Content Marketing Software Report

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Marketing.AI Content Marketing Software Report

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  • What does it take to be successful at content marketing?How do these needs translate into software requirements?

    CONTENT MARKETINGSoftware Report

  • Content Marketing Software Report

    Introduction

    If youre evaluating content marketing software, this eBook will interpret your needs into software requirements.

    But, before evaluating software to help you achieve success with content marketing, its important to establish what it takes to be successful.

    In short, successful content marketing is predicated upon first having a well-defined and well-understood vision and strategy for how your content aligns and will align across a customer, buyer or audience journey.

    But strategy and vision is only successful if your team can execute the content in alignment with that strategy and vision. Therefore any software that wants to use the content marketing tag should have at minimum a way to centrally store strategic objects such as Themes, Personas, and Customer Journey or Buyer Cycle Stages, as well as planning and execution tools such as Collaborative Editorial Calendars, Assignment, Drafting, Approval and Publishing Workflows.

    Once your team gets to this point, however, you quickly start pushing up against new walls and will want an even more integrated system to accomplish content marketing--this is where end-to-end content marketing software comes in. It is these kinds of software suites that are the focus of this comparison. While other tools and channels are important connectors to these systems, they cannot on their own help your team be successful with content marketing.

    Keep track of strategic objects.

    Planning and execution tools.

    End-to-end workflow.

    Define vision and strategy.

    We will examine over 60 different features and how you can use them.

    Outline the customer journey.

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  • Content Marketing Software Report

    In this Report...

    How can content marketing software help you achieve success?In this report, well examine the following key areas:

    Lets look deeper at each...

    1. De ne and document strategy; centrally, in a framework.

    2. Collect content requests and ideas; easily collaborate on ideation.

    3. Editorial calendar views: ideation, production and publishing views with the ability to fi lter.

    4. Role-based workfl ows: assign, draft and approve content.

    5. Asset library: central storage and tagging for quick search and retrieval of assets.

    6. Publishing and promotion: distribute approved content to online channels such as websites, blogs or social media.

    7. Content-centric analytics: insights specifi c to content marketing showing aggregate strategy performance in addition to the results driven by individual items, content types and channels.

    8. Flexible integrations: access to other key tools and ecosystems that are ancilliary or connect to content marketing eff orts such as CMS or blog platforms, social media channel accounts, web analytics, marketing automation tools and more.

    Comparative checklist of content marketing software ven-dors: Based on the criteria we outline, who off ers what and how much does it cost?

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    1. Define & Document Strategy

    Understanding the customer:Content marketing puts your audience at the center of your strategy. Your content will not only have to speak to specific personas but will also have to cater to their changing needs throughout their individual customer journeys.

    Content Marketing Challenge How Software Can Help

    Represent personas and make that information available so your team understands who they are writing for and why.

    Outline and share the buyer cycle with your team.

    Keep track of how much content is being produced for each persona and buyer cycle stage

    Help you identify if there are any content gaps in this journey.

    Configured representations of your themes.

    A way to link themes to planning, creation, tracking and measurement of content.

    Organizing content strategy:Content marketing is often organized around various themes. Themes are logical groupings of content such as blog categories, campaigns, or high level company objectives. Identifying themes helps you break down your overall marketing strategy into a content strategy.

    Communicating strategy:Since every organization is unique, you may have your own way of thinking about strategic objects like personas, themes, the buyer cycle and more. Its critical to find a software that lets you add strategic objects to a flexible framework rather than a rigid platform.

    Flexible configuration of strategic objects such as names you use, variable values, descriptions.

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    Define & Document StrategyKey Software Features

    Persona Journeys

    Buyer Cycle

    Personas Creation

    Themes & Subtheme Creation

    Once you know who youre tar-geting and the stages they go through, you can connect how personas interact with content across the buyer cycle.

    Who are you targeting your content to? Build out your personas and share them with team members. As content is created, keep track of how it targets different audiences.

    Its important to define your buyer cycle--how many stages will you use and what will you call them? The system should let you label, describe and map content to buyer cycle stages.

    As you plan your content strat-egy, you will identify themes (and potentially subthemes) to group your content. The system should let you label, describe and map content to themes.

    Theme-Cycle Grid

    To identify content gaps, youll want to visually see how your content for each theme speaks to the different stages in your buyer cycle. Does your system help you identify these gaps?

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    2. Collect Content Requests and Ideas

    Ongoing ideation:Content marketing requires content to be produced on an ongoing basis, which can make ideation an exercise in creativity. Since you never know when inspiration might strike, youll need different strategies and tools for capturing all your great ideas. The benefit of having all your ideas in one place, is being able to easily assess them when you plan out your editorial calendar.

    Content Marketing Challenge How Software Can Help

    Capture and store your ideas in a bank.

    Attach strategic metadata to your ideas for easy search and retrieval as well as reporting purposes during editorial planning.

    Easily push ideas from the bank to your editorial calendar when needed.

    Easy ways to submit ideas from both inside and outside the system.

    Ways to request and gather ideas from your team.

    Ways for your team to request content they need produced.

    Team participationContent marketing is a team effort, with expertise and insights coming from all sides of the organization. Youll need a way to involve team members and perhaps even your greater organization in ideation and brainstorming. If you truly want to keep your team motivated and contributing, youll also need a way to keep track of whos contributed what.

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  • Content Marketing Software Report

    A central place to collect, store and curate ideas before push-ing to them to your editorial cal-endar for execution. Tag ideas with strategic metadata for easy search, retrieval and reporting.

    Requests are from members of the wider team who need con-tent produced. A request track-er should have easy ways to ingest new requests and track them througout their lifecycles.

    Ideas can strike anywhere, espe-cially while surfing the web. An extension should be provided to quickly add web page links, text and images to your idea bank directly from your browser.

    Systems should provide easy to configure request web pages to be shared with the team. These pages should be secure and also ingest those requests into the system directly.

    Ideas and Requests strike at any time, like right after that sales meeting with a customer! An app to add ideas and re-quests from your mobile phone or tablet is therefore a must.

    There are many other systems you might want to directly add ideas and requests from as thoughts occur. Therefore the system should provide an in-bound API for this purpose.

    Collect Content Requests & IdeasKey Features

    Idea Bank

    Chrome Extension

    Request Tracker

    Request Page

    APIMobile App

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    3. Editorial Calendar Views

    Creating a central editorial calendar:Your editorial calendar is the center of all of your content marketing work, so your tool should be calendar-centric as well.

    Content Marketing Challenge How Software Can Help

    Everything that flows through the editorial calendar should be only 1-2 clicks away in a directed flow.

    Easy ways to get ideas from your idea bank to the editorial calendar.

    Easy way to add brand new content items directly to the editorial calendar.

    Ability to add unlimited content types.

    Ability to tag new calendar items with strategic metadata.

    Maintaining the editorial calendar:Since populating your editorial calendar will be an ongoing process, streamlining this activity can save you hundreds of hours in the long run.

    Strategic editorial decisions:Your editorial calendar isnt just a production schedule--it helps you visualize your content plan at a high level. Your editorial calendar should provide you with strategic insights at a glance and easy ways to act on them.

    Ways to differentiate/color code content so that you can see how the different content types are distributed at a glance.

    Advanced filters that allow you to view content on your calendar through the lens of various strategic metadata.

    Drag and drop functionality to reposition content items as required to improve strategy or scheduling.

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    The ability to push ideas from the Idea Bank directly to the Editorial Calendar streamlines editorial planning.

    Calendar items should be clearly marked by color key and icons to visually identify key information, such as content type, at a glance.

    Content marketing is about a lot more than web and social content. The system must have the ability to add any number of content types.

    After adding new content types, you must be able to easily create custom names for your content types to match how your team works.

    Editorial Calendar Views Key Features

    Push to Calendar

    Unlimited Content Types

    Visual Identification

    CustomContent Types

    Drag and Drop

    Custom ColorSchemes

    To quickly identify content types in the calendar, you should be able to choose cus-tom colours in a fine-grained way, using color-pickers and hexadecimal codes.

    It should be easy to move items around in the calendar, includ-ing the ability to dates adjust automatically as items are moved around.

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    There should be a way to add new items just by clicking on your desired calendar day directly, as well as a new item button on every screen within the system.

    When creating items there must be a feature for tagging those items with the elements created in strategy, such as themes, personas and buyer cycle stages.

    Your calendar should be able to filter on many dimensions si-multaneously, such as assigned author, workflow stage, content type, theme, persona, buyer cycle stage and more.

    The Editorial Calendar should have more than just the clas-sic grid calendar view, it should also have List, MyCalendar, Pro-duction, and Upcoming Assign-ment Views, among others.

    Editorial Calendar Views Key Features

    Ease of Creating New Items

    Advanced Filters

    Tag with Strategic Elements

    Multiple View Types

    Global & Sub-Calendars

    As your needs grow, your cal-endar should flex to provide sub-calendars with unique organizations, roles and per-missions while also providing a global roll-up calendar.

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    4. Role-Based Workflows

    Managing production workflows:After planning content items in the editorial calendar, it is important to be able to connect them directly to an execution workflow so you can easily manage production. Its important to ensure that the final produced content items end up in the correct place, at the correct time.

    Content Marketing Challenge How Software Can Help

    Create assignments and specify content item details.

    Automatic notifications sent to your team upon assigning work.

    Casading workflow that guides your team members through the next steps.

    Configurable workflow stages for different content types and projects.

    Tag assignments with strategy elements to refer back to.

    Draft editor that matches the content type.

    Option to add content as file attachments.

    Store comments in the workflow.

    My Calendar feature to help your team members keep track of their due dates.

    Permissions: With many people at work in your calendar, youll want the ability to control who has access to your strategy and content as well as who can make changes to it.

    Supporting your teams work:Once your team members receive their assignments, they need a way to do the work. Then, once the work is complete, theyll need a way to communicate with their team members and to trigger the next step in the workflow, whether thats an approval, a request for revisions or a request to publish the content. The completed draft should be accessible to the team so that they can see the whole content picture, perhaps even

    Assign roles and permissions to team members

    Lock certain features for certain types of roles.

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    .

    To provide details about the content that is being assigned, the connected workflow system should have space for adding synopses, summary and de-scriptive information.

    There needs to be a simple and easy way to assign work to us-ers with the click of a button.

    As work is assigned or complet-ed, the system should automat-ically notify users by email and via system inbox. There should also be a way to specify notifi-cation type and frequencies.

    For each content type, create different workflows and config-ure their unique stages, includ-ing who is involved and what happens. Choose to lock work-flows down or leave them open.

    Role-Based Workflows Key Features

    Synopsis & Summaries

    Notification System

    AssignmentCreation

    Configurable Workflow Stages

    DraftingMulti-Step Stages

    Complex scenarios may require that sub-steps within a stage are met before it can move onto the next stage. Function-ality needs to be provided to facilitate this use case.

    A robust draft editor should have full CMS-like functionality: add images in-line, embed me-dia, edit html souce, WYSIWYG formatting and styling, previews and other advanced features.

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    Ability to attach files to calendar and workflow items for authors who prefer to use standard word processing programs and for attaching related assets for sourcing and context.

    No one likes to hop between screens while working; it is therefore important to provide workflow details in tabs that are easy to display and hide again from right where you work.

    Team members want to be able to provide comments through-out the workflow. A flexible commenting system that is ac-cessible while working and also as one dedicated feed is key.

    Without a system in place, ap-proval workflows usually hap-pen ad-hoc via email or not at all. A key requirement then, is to make it easy to submit work, approve it or request revisions.

    Role-Based Workflows Key Features

    EnableAttachments

    CommentsIn-Workflow Details

    Approvals Ease of Accessing Strategic Elements

    Locking

    Across the workflow system, there should be the ability to apply locking features based on certain elements and actions such as user role and workflow stage (i.e approved or not).

    Given the work on strategy and the need to align workflow with that effort, it should be easy to tag workflow elements and stages so as to ensure that alignment.

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    5. Asset Library

    A complete view of content picture:Before you start work, you need to collect and audit your existing assets to see where the gaps lie for creating new content. After you create new content, you need a way to store it and make it available to your team to put to use. To collect and store assets, you need some form of an asset library.

    Content Marketing Challenge How Software Can Help

    Store all your content in one place.

    Help find content with strategic metadata and keyword search.

    Quickly preview content or download it.

    Easy access to content while working, to refer to and use.

    Content is everywhere:Content marketers produce a lot of content, of many different types--from blog posts to whitepapers to images, videos and beyond. Your asset library will need to support all the content your team creates.

    Find and retrieve relevant content:After storing content, it should be easy to retrieve it later, whether thats to give it to your customers or to your internal team. Or, you might want to review it yourself as part of a strategic content audit.

    Make it easy to add all your content to the library, as its created.

    Have a way to upload existing content to the library for a complete picture of all available content assets.

    Keep content in the right hands with different permission levels.

    Sharing content and managing access:When it comes to sharing content, its important to be able to manage access. Some content might be confidential and needs to be walled off; other content you may eagerly want to share publicly.

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    It should be easy to add new assets by creating new content items, tagging them with strate-gic elements, uploading related files, and even the option of adding items in bulk.

    There should be options for both viewing assets in the browser or downloading them to a local drive.

    The system should be able to handle different file types such as images, links and document formats.

    Asset Library Key Features

    Easy to Add New Assets

    View in Browser or Download to Drive

    Multiple Asset Types

    Access Throughout System

    Color Coding

    Assets should be color coded following the same conventions as editorial calendar content. This ensures quick identification and reinforces visual under-standing across the system.

    Once you have collected your assets in the library youll want to put them to use. Assets in the system should therefore be easy to find and retrieve as they are needed.

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    6. Publishing & Promotion

    Content distribution to audiences:When a content item is completed and approved, content marketers need a way to distribute the content to their audiences. Distribution may involve publishing to a website or blog first and then promoting it through social or paid promotion channels such as sponsored content and native advertising.

    Different content, different schedules:Content marketers center work around their editorial calendars, with various pieces of content scheduled to be completed at different times. Content marketers need a way to easily publish and promote content upon completion or schedule these activities at a time in the future, directly or through an approval workflow.

    Content Marketing Challenge How Software Can Help

    Connect up directly to systems that can publish and promote that work via API. If API is not available, help marketers to pull back data through manual operation and also to enable direct custom integration without the use of a pre-configured API.

    Schedule content distribution for publishing immediately or at a future date.

    Implement approval workflows for publishing content and content promotions.

    Provide an overall view of content that has been published or is scheduled to be published.

    Managing channel specs and data:Different publishing channels have different features and metadata to attached to content. Content marketers need a way to get this information into the correct channels in a streamlined fashion. Channel security is also important.

    Attach images, links and metadata from your system to your publishing channels.

    One central login/point of access to push to multiple end points, keeping channels secure and as part of a workflow.

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    Different channels publish dif-ferent types of content, such as CMS for blog and website, and social media channels. The system should connect and publish to these accounts.

    Sometimes you want to push finished copy to a new system as a draft. Content marketing software should provide for publishing under those differ-ent statuses.

    The system needs to be able to schedule content for publishing at a future date and time. This requires an easy-to-use inter-face for scheduling, factoring in dates, times and time zones.

    Certain channels such as Word-Press, Facebook and Twitter, allow you to add a featured im-age to the published post. The system should have an inter-face for adding these images.

    Publishing & Promotion Key Features

    Multiple Type of Direct Publishing Channels

    SchedulingDifferent Publishing Statuses

    Image Insertion

    Integrations with Paid Promotion Channels

    Integrations with Publishing Channels

    There is a vast array of places where content can be deployed to. The system should have no functional limit to the number of publishing and deployment integrations.

    Sometimes you pay to promote your content which requires a way to get your content into these networks. The system should connect via API or pro-vide another solution.

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    7. Content-Centric Analytics

    A strategy that leads to resultsAfter putting in the work to build a strategy and then executing on it, content marketers need to be able to track the results. Analytics is a big topic with a lot of different ways to collect, store, sort and present data. Therefore, a flexible framework for analytics is needed to help tie data back to strategy. And since this is content marketing software we are talking about, analytics should be content-centric rather than lead- or customer-centric.

    Content Marketing Challenge How Software Can Help

    Track the results of your content.

    Tie results back to your strategy to help you identify gaps and why content is resonating.

    Provide workflow information to help understand how to make production more efficient.

    An efficient production processSince a major part of the content marketing system is the workflow process of executing on content, analytics should not only deliver you the end results of your content, but should provide information about the content development workflow process. This helps the strategy team understand whats working and whats not, but how to more efficiently deliver on the best content.

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    7. Content-Centric Analytics

    Content Marketing Challenge How Software Can Help

    View and compare data in different ways, based on information you are curious about.

    Make data easy for everyone to analyze in new ways, without needing backgrounds in data science.

    Output reports in your preferred format.

    Saved views of data so you can find and compare the same information quickly each time.

    Option to automatically output preferred reports and have them delivered to you on a regular basis.

    Visualize and present informationIn addition to ther own reports, content marketers need to prove the value of what their doing to management. Its therefore important for content marketers to be able to find and discover new insights to present. Information visualization methods are key to creating shared insight. There are many different approaches and styles and may vary by use case. And, its important to be able to present this information in the way management prefers, whether thats a printed report in a particular format or a digital presentation.

    Regular reporting and feedbackOnce content marketers have decided on the data and formatting they want to see in reports, there needs to be an easy way to retrieve this data on a regular basis.

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    Analytics should aggregate the performance of content across strategic elements to show the value and performance of that strategy and also monitor gaps and progress in filling them.

    Analytics should provide in-sights on how efficient work-flows are and how much prog-ress has been made in filling gaps through content produc-tion.

    With new processes comes new data. Content marketing soft-ware should make the data flex-ibly available to configure and structure into something mean-ingful for each unique situation.

    Analytics Key Features

    Tie Backto Strategy

    Insights for Planning & Strategy

    Show Workflow Performance

    Data Play Explorer

    Advanced Filters

    For insight from data visualiza-tions, the same advanced filters available throughout the sys-tem should help you explore multiple dimensions of strategy, execution and performance.

    With all the data being created and pulled in through inte-grations, it should be easy to explore, create views and build reports. This should easiest enough for anyone to use.

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  • Content Marketing Software Report

    When building and filtering re-port views it should be easy to save those views for quick ac-cess in the future. Those saved views should also be available externally through a configured API.

    Reports and views should be easy to share and use outside of the system, with flexible out-put options such as CSV, Excel and PDF.

    Analytics Key Features

    Saved Views

    Different Output/ Export Options

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    8. Flexible Integrations

    Compliment systems in placeNo system operates as an island anymore, it must be flexible in how it connects to other systems and makes those connections easy to set-up and use. Often, software platforms are rigid and force users to do things in a specific way. Content marketers need a flexible framework that can mold itself around their preferred marketing systems and way of working, adapting and acting as the One Source of Truth.

    A bridge to strategyContent marketing software should provide the ability to connect to multiple instances and platforms, operating as a bridge between different instances and vendors, with content and strategy as the unifying elements handled uniquely well by content marketing software. In this way, content marketing software should act as a meta-CMS sitting on top of or at the center of all these other platforms and accounts.

    Content Marketing Challenge How Software Can Help

    A connector between all your different pieces and platforms used as part of your content marketing workflow.

    Manage the workflow for all content development in one place, before delivering it to the appropriate integrated channel.

    Account for how all content, across integrated platforms, plays into strategy and the customer journey.

    Pulls in the data from all integrated platforms so you can derive holistic insights about content marketing.

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    8. Flexible Integrations

    Freedom to try new tacticsMarketing is a quickly evolving area, with new technologies and tactics popping up all the time. To get ahead of the competition, the best marketers are always on the lookout for new ways to experiment and get results. From marketing automation systems, to data visualization to new ways to create and contract production, content marketers need a way to easily pull in the content from these external systems, add it to their production workflows, measure it as part of an overall strategy and mash this information to reporting.

    Content Marketing Challenge How Software Can Help

    Mix and match new tools, allowing you to experiment with tactics, without having to make changes to the way your team works.

    Pipe out your content to any new trendy tool so you can stay ahead of the competition while maintaining your central repository of strategy, content and workflow processes.

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    Connect multiple social media platforms and manage user ac-counts in a secure way. The sys-tem should also have workflow and publishing templates, and unique analytics by platform.

    Integrations Key Features

    CMS Integrations

    Marketing Automation

    SocialIntegrations

    CRMIntegrations

    Analytics Modeling

    Link Shortening

    The system should integrate multiple CMS platforms and provide an easy way to manage domains and user accounts as well as publishing and schedul-ing for each with workflows.

    Content marketing software should connect to multiple instances and platforms, oper-ating as a bridge, with content and strategy as the unifying ele-ments it handles uniquely well.

    Link shorteners help track valu-able data while saving character counts on social media. The sys-tem should conveniently integrate these platforms in the publishing and scheduling workflows.

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  • Content Marketing Software Report

    There are a large number of vendors for building reports and visualizations and com-panies may need to collect content marketing data within them. The system should share data easily.

    Companies have many different places where they keep as-sets that for content marketing creation and deployment. The system should make it easy to link up with those asset stores.

    Integrations Key Features

    Visualization Systems

    Asset Stores

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    About the Comparative Analysis

    ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

    This is the part of the report where we compare solutions against the content marketing challenges and needs weve laid out.

    For the purpose of evaluation weve included:

    4 other Content Marketing Software providers were compared with most frequently (DivvyHQ, Kapost, NewsCred and Percolate).

    Marketing Automation with Calendar, as providers of marketing automation software are now starting to offer bundled calendars.

    Project Management Tools with Calendar, as some of the standard project management software suites are now targeting content marketers with their Swiss-Army knife solutions, including calendars with them. Since there isnt a lot to differentiate between these providers for our purposes, we think its fair to bundle them together for evaluation.

    Since youve requested this download, we assume that you are already familiar with Editorial Calendars. If you are looking for more information on them, we have a wealth of resources on our blog at http://blog.marketing.ai/tag/editorial-calendar/.

    Lets get down to business...

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    Comparative Analysis

    Buyer Cycle

    Themes & Subtheme Creation

    Chrome Extension

    Request Page

    Content Request Tool

    Idea Bank

    Personas Creation

    Persona Journeys

    Theme-Cycle Grid

    Marketing.AI DivvyHQ Kapost Newscred PercolateMarketing

    Automation (with calendar)

    Project Mgmt (with calendar)

    1. DEFINE & DOCUMENT STRATEGY

    2. COLLECT CONTENT REQUESTS & IDEAS

  • Content Marketing Software Report 28

    Editorial Calendar Checklist

    Mobile App

    Visual Identifi cation

    Push to Calendar

    Unlimited Content Types

    Marketing.AI DivvyHQ Kapost Newscred PercolateMarketing

    Automation (with calendar)

    Project Mgmt (with calendar)

    Color-coding

    Custom Content Types

    Custom Color Schemes

    Drag and Drop

    Ease of Creating New Items

    Tag with Strategic Elements

    3. EDITORIALCALENDAR VIEWS

    API

  • Content Marketing Software Report 29

    Editorial Calendar Checklist

    Synopsis & Summaries

    Multiple View Types

    Assignment Creation

    Marketing.AI DivvyHQ Kapost Newscred PercolateMarketing

    Automation (with calendar)

    Project Mgmt (with calendar)

  • Content Marketing Software Report 30

    Editorial Calendar Checklist

    Ease of Accessing Strategic Elements

    Comments

    Search by fi lter

    Marketing.AI DivvyHQ Kapost Newscred PercolateMarketing

    Automation (with calendar)

    Project Mgmt (with calendar)

    INSTANT(ONE-CLICK)

    Easy to Add New Assets

    View in Browser or Download to Drive

    Multiple Asset Types

    Locking

    In-Workfl ow Details

    5. ASSET LIBRARY

    Approvals

    Color Coding

    Access Throughout System

  • Content Marketing Software Report 31

    Scheduling

    Image Insertion

    Marketing.AI DivvyHQ Kapost Newscred PercolateMarketing

    Automation (with calendar)

    Project Mgmt (with calendar)

    Integrations with Publishing Channels

    Integrations withPaid Promotion Channels

    Tie Back to Strategy

    Diff erent Publishing Statuses

    6. PUBLISHING & PROMOTION

    Multiple Type of Direct Publishing Channels

    Show Workfl ow Performance

    Editorial Calendar Checklist

    7. ANALYTICS

    Insights for Planning & Strategy

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    Saved Views

    Diff erent Output/Export Options

    Marketing.AI DivvyHQ Kapost Newscred PercolateMarketing

    Automation (with calendar)

    Project Mgmt (with calendar)

    CMS Integrations

    Social Integrations

    Marketing Automation

    Data Play Explorer

    Advanced Filters

    CRM Integrations

    Editorial Calendar Checklist

    8. INTEGRATIONS

    Analytics Modeling

    Link Shortening

  • Content Marketing Software Report 33

    Marketing.AI DivvyHQ Kapost Newscred PercolateMarketing

    Automation (with calendar)

    Project Mgmt (with calendar)

    Asset Stores

    Visualization Systems

    Editorial Calendar Checklist

  • Content Marketing Software Report

    Final Thoughts

    1. Calendar-Centricity

    We feel this is something very important to stress, particularly as project management tools for a long time had calendars--but always second-class citizens within their systems, which isnt useful for marketing tasks. Plenty of tools are sprouting up claiming to address the content marketing workflow problem with an editorial calendar but we strongly believe that if they dont put the calendar at the center they will lead their customers astray. At Marketing.AI we have put the calendar at the center of the workflow philosophically from the very beginning and that affects not only the solution we have today, but also in the future.

    2. Product Focus

    At Marketing.AI we have a saying: If you need a service to use our product, thats our fault. This means we strive to make a product so easy to use you dont need paid services and training to learn how to use it or get the most out of it. It doesnt mean we dont support our product, though. Ask our customers and theyll tell you we have the most responsive support team around, we just dont charge extra for it. Everything: support, product, configurations, customized and video-recorded training, all of it is included in your monthly price. We believe in software as software instead of software needing a service. To accomplish this requires a maniacal focus on product development, one that cant be distracted by running paid consultancies or bundling various training, content writing, or licensed content offerings.

    Vendors with similar solutions are priced quite a bit higher than Marketing.AI. Why is that? While we cant get into the heads of our competitors, we think it has to do with philosophy, background and market. Our philosophy is simply to deliver the best possible product at a price that makes it easy for our customers to work with us. Content marketing is still quite new, and its hard to get large budgets for new software, yet the need for our solution is acute. Our customers are advanced marketers themselves and dont need us to deliver extra paid services or bundled content, they just need a product that works. Marketing.AI has struck a balance with our easy to use product and our simple pricing, enabling us to grow with our

    customers as their teams grow.

    3. Price

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  • Content Marketing Software Report

    CALL US

    1-855-248-7377EMAIL US

    [email protected]

    VISIT US ONLINE

    Website: www.marketing.aiTwitter: @marketingaiFacebook: /relevancy

    Whats Next?

    We love to discuss features, bene ts and use cases when it comes to content marketing software. If you havent already, get in touch to book a demo at [email protected].

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  • Content Marketing Software Report

    About the Authors

    As CEO of Marketing.AI, Greg is responsible for setting the long-term vision and product roadmap for the company, as well as working with the executive team to build the processes and technology to support the companys growth.

    He has a diverse background, from founding online content companies to working in sales, marketing and strategic planning for companies ranging from startups to a global fortune 100.Greg Marlin

    Founder & CEO, Marketing.AI

    Meghan MahoneyDirector, Customer Experience

    Marketing.AI

    As Director of Customer Experience at Marketing.AI, Meghan ensures a consistent brand and customer experience through assets, channels, promotions and events.

    Meghan has been driving eff ective corporate communications for the past 9 years, helping over 100 companies, from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, plan and implement eff ective digital strategies and initiatives.

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