Content Marketing Software

What is content marketing software?

Content marketing software automates creating, publishing, and tracking campaigns promoting blogs, videos, or infographics. Its goal is to strategize campaign distribution on the website, landing page, or through social media posts and emails for maximum exposure. As a marketing automation tool, it allows scheduling campaigns on various platforms and managing them through a calendar view for any changes.

The analytics abilities of a content marketing tool track engagement, traffic, conversions, clicks, shares, and more on campaigns to measure their effectiveness. This helps a content marketer to refine future strategies based on what works best for the target audience.

What are the core features of content marketing software?

• Content management: Organize all aspects of digital content production, from ideation to publication. The feature allows creating and storing post copies, images, and multimedia files for campaigns while ensuring consistent brand messaging across various platforms. It can schedule posts ahead of time or publish them immediately as needed.

• Multi-channel campaigns: Plan, execute, and measure campaigns across various channels such as social media, email marketing, website, or landing pages. This feature provides a unified view of all campaign-related activities, helping in tracking their performance and coordinating efforts for maximum impact.

What are the benefits of using content marketing software?

• Facilitates content distribution: Content marketing software allows scheduling and automating posts, ensuring consistent engagement with the audience across platforms. Additionally, users can analyze which platforms are most effective for reaching particular audiences based on engagement, which helps optimize future planning for reach while saving time and resources.

• Tracks content performance: Content marketing software monitors the performance of campaigns for views, clicks, shares, and conversions, which can give crucial insights about user engagement levels. This data allows marketers to refine their strategies by understanding what type of content resonates best with their audience, thereby increasing effectiveness.

• Improves search engine ranking: Content marketing software helps optimize content for targeted keywords, checking readability and suggesting improvements. The tool provides insights into keyword performance so marketers can create compelling content strategies. Furthermore, it ensures the website has fresh, relevant content at all times, which search engines favor when determining rankings for results pages to a related user query.

What are the potential issues with content marketing software?

• Content customization: Limited content customization features restrict creativity and uniqueness. Suppose the tool does not allow unique branding, style adjustments, or message personalization based on audience segmentation. In that case, it may not meet specific business needs and could negatively impact the targeted audiences' overall engagement and conversion rates.

• Content duplication: Content duplication happens when similar or identical pieces of content appear across the website and social media, leading to SEO penalties from search engines. It may occur due to the lack of unique content ideas or improper management within the content management system. Duplicate content diminishes the uniqueness and value proposition of the brand voice by presenting repetitive information across various platforms.

• Analytics dashboard: A potential issue with content marketing software is inefficient analytics. If the software doesn't provide accurate or detailed performance data, marketers can struggle to accurately measure campaign effectiveness and ROI. This could lead to misguided strategies and decisions based on inaccurate metrics, resulting in unsuccessful campaigns and negatively impacting the business's bottom line.

How much does content marketing software cost?

Most content marketing software products are priced on a "per month" basis, and their entry-level pricing plan ranges from $7 to $75+*. An enterprise product that’s priced higher may include additional features such as RSS feeds, team member statistics, landing page generator, collaboration, and user management.

*The pricing included is for the entry-level/lowest-priced offerings found on vendor websites as of August 29, 2023.

What is content marketing software used for?

Content marketing software helps plan, execute, and manage campaigns across various platforms. However, this software can have multiple use cases based on the data being fed into the system and the tool's features leveraged. Some of them are:

• SEO content optimization: The SEO features of content marketing software enhance content visibility on search engines. The tool allows including the right keywords, optimizing images, removing duplicate content, adding metadata, and more to increase the chances of appearing in the result pages for a user query. The rank tracking SEO feature monitors the search engine rank and analyzes competition for what’s working and what’s not, helping adjust the content marketing strategy and optimization.

• Keyword research: This functionality supports content strategy development by understanding competitors' SEO strategies and their keyword usage to refine the business's marketing content. Furthermore, this capability facilitates analyzing top-ranking content and deriving actionable suggestions for making content more appealing. Having a robust keyword content management system leads to improved search engine performance, higher website visibility, and increased conversions.

• Content marketing management: Content marketing software provides a platform for managing and tracking customer databases, automating marketing tasks, and creating high-quality marketing copies for social media, website, email, and landing pages. The tool allows generating a large amount of content for marketing campaigns while providing insights into an effective content strategy through the analytics dashboard. This significantly contributes to increased revenue, ROI, and overall business growth.

Which software tools integrate with content marketing software?

Content marketing software integrates with various solutions to simplify content creation, sharing, and storage. We looked across thousands of reviews from content marketing software users to identify the products users frequently mentioned they integrated with their marketing tools:

• WordPress is a content management system (CMS). Its integration with a content marketing platform assists marketers with speedy data sharing. This integration makes managing website content easier and ensures brand consistency across campaigns.

• Instagram social media marketing software integrates with a content marketing platform to cross-promote different content types on social media using videos and images for enhanced reach and engagement. For example, a blog post can be promoted on social media, and a social media post can link back to the blog post, creating a cohesive user experience through social media content. 

• Zapier workflow management software assists marketers in extending the capabilities of content marketing software to other tools used by the business and vice versa through integration and task automation. This includes data migration, CMS, social media sharing, and more.

• Twitter is another social media marketing software that allows marketers to tap into the platform's user community and present content to a larger audience.

• LinkedIn is job board software for markets looking to streamline the business's recruitment process while enhancing employer branding efforts. The integration allows creating posts and job listings describing the role, company, and other relevant details to attract potential talent.

*We identified these integrations mentioned most often in verified reviews of content marketing software published on GetApp within the past two years.

Considerations when purchasing content marketing software

• Analyze the content creation and editing capabilities: It is paramount because it directly impacts the quality of campaigns. Such capabilities determine how easy or difficult it would be to efficiently produce engaging, error-free content. Software with robust content curation and editing tools enhances productivity while maintaining high content quality.

• Evaluate the search engine optimization (SEO) features: SEO features in content marketing software help the content rank higher on search engines by including the right keywords and providing insights on the ranking progress. This drives more organic traffic to the business website. The SEO features to look for in content marketing tools include keyword research, SEO audits, backlink analysis, and rank tracking.

• Check the analytics and reporting functionality: The functionality helps measure the effectiveness of campaigns across multiple platforms. It provides insights into audience engagement, reach, conversion rates, etc., enabling data-driven decisions for future content marketing strategies. Without this functionality, assessing campaign success becomes challenging and less accurate for marketers.

Sources

Products evaluated for the pricing calculation were taken from GetApp's content marketing software directory. The pricing ranges exclude freemium versions of the products. The features highlighted were identified based on their relevance and the percentage of products in GetApp's directory that offer them. 

Disclaimer

This content marketing software buyers guide was authored by GetApp's content team. We develop our guides using the author’s expertise, insights from 2M+ unique user reviews, and our proprietary data science algorithms to identify trends in user sentiment, preferences, and priorities. Some text was generated with assistance from artificial intelligence tools.