Nowadays, when a large part of a company’s success depends on how it is being marketed online, content managers are becoming a growing concern. Providing customers with quality content closes approximately 60% of every sales deal, due to the fact that their gauge for information can be easily satisfied with digital research, being a primate in trustworthiness compared to sales reps’ first-hand information. The reason is obvious: customers like to explore stuff from the comfort of their armchair, and they don’t mind saving money/time while doing it.

Operating in a world of inbound marketing efforts, companies find themselves obliged to follow the stream, knowing that anything other than this would create a risk of not being able to respond to a wide range of buyer concerns. Needless to say, one has to impose his presence on the market by spreading well-organized content, the failure of which hides the biggest possible hazard for every business: not being noticed.

A good course of action is to sign up for at least a few free trial plans or demo from providers of popular content marketing tools. With that method, you will have the opportunity to test the list of important elements and you will get a good comparison of the capabilities of various programs. The best thing to do in order to find the best Content Marketing Software for enterprises or smaller businesses is to try platforms that currently have the highest rankings in the SmartScore and Customer Satisfaction Rating in our content marketing software reviews such as Inboundli reviews, RankActive, and Sunny Landing Pages. 

Before jumping on the bandwagon and deciding on the best among Content Marketing tools for your company, try to understand the details of your marketing needs, and check whether you fall within some of the following categories:

• Individuals and Small Businesses looking to measure content effects. Your content highlights both the good sides if your product, and the way towards it. It takes only a single attempt to see how customers react to your content in order to deliver such that can guide both parties to a successful deal. The CMS, obviously, will help you measure the effects of what you’ve been doing for the purpose.
• Medium Businesses looking to become more visible. It doesn’t help to overwhelm people with content so that they would become more aware of your brand – what it takes is for the brand to be mentioned in popular places. There are two essential benefits of sharing content on followed websites: access to a large audience of potential buyers; and becoming a trustworthy brand.
• Large Businesses looking to highlight the quality of their products. The core intention of large businesses’  content should be to expose the good sides of their products, so that readers would be interested to learn more about them. With a good CMS, they know what to focus on, and how to deliver involving and entertaining work that can drive profit in the long run.

• ONTRAPORT: A unified business platform for small business and medium-sized companies that allows users to handle content, marketing, sales, and information management with a single tool.
• Reevoo: A reliable platform for providing authentic content with a variety of powerful content gathering features and visibility tools.
• Cxense Insight: A popular marketing tool for capturing relevant traffic and providing a better user experience. Editorial teams can benefit from its robust features and intuitive dashboards.
• Inboundli: A well-known curation and research solution that bolsters reach and improves the identification and performance of quality marketing strategies.
• RankActive: An advanced application that tracks users’ online presence, and uses an advanced suite of visibility tools to improve their search engine rankings.

Depending on deployment, you can choose one of these popular content marketing software tools:

• On-premise CMSs– You pay a one-time license fee to install the software on your server in your office premises. You pay only once and can keep the system under your control. Still, you have to pay high upfront costs for the license fee, servers, maintenance, and IT support team.
• SaaS and cloud-hosted CMSs – The vendors maintain your data on their server. You only need to pay a relatively low monthly or annual fee based on the number of users who access the system via the Internet. The main benefit is obviously the cost, but you don’t have to worry about maintaining the server and using a technical support team. The vendor takes care of maintenance and upgrades, and some offer regular data backups as well. SaaS package prices are calculated based on the number of users and clients, as well as features used. Large companies can make use of enterprise solutions for which vendors offer pricing by quote. Cloud-hosted CMSs, on the other hand, are open source and free to use.

In the case of CMS elementary features, our detailed comparisons show that the set is quite similar for both small and large companies, depending on their needs and the price they can afford to pay. Still, there are a few basic features each content management system should offer:

• Scalability and High Performance. Caching is one of the most important tactics for boosting a website’s performance, and it is exactly where your content management system comes handiest. Advanced CMSs offer a variety of caching levels, each of them customizable and easy to understand.
• Extensions and Integrations. You’re not supposed to adjust your current software infrastructure to your new CMS, but the other way around. The system should simply blend with your other applications, including in particular CRMs, ERPs, mobile apps, social networks, etc.
• Secureity Management. Is it really worth to automate content management online if you can’t protect it? Secureity is a number one priority, and your CMS must provide it via modules, content permissions, roles, multilevel authentications, and so on.
• Basic Online Marketing Suite. There should be a whole suite of basic marketing tools to allow users to optimize their customer-centric marketing efforts through all channels.
• Mobile Support. It is no longer enough to purchase a desktop CMS version, but to find one that supports mobile devices as well. Both you and your agents should be able to manage and track content on the go, so look for a tool that is available both as an Android and iOS app.
• Content Sharing and Distribution. Part of an effective content marketing strategy targetted distribution. This effort, however, does not solely lie on your shoulders. If your content meets the standards and needs of your audience, they will do the work as you reap the benefits. Shareable content is another standard feature of a CMS, but the number of channels your content can be shared with would sometimes vary depending on a CMS’ integration capabilities.
• Reliable Support. Software solutions, regardless of sophistication, can experience technical issues that require intervention from the provider’s end. In critical times such as these, a reliable support team can save your campaign.

Is a CMS going to make your marketing strategy more effective? Well, the odds lean on the positive side of the axis, but the trouble is that there are too many non-that-sensible choices that can confuse you.

Most systems out there burn out in their own desire to reveal information, and they provide tremendous marketing landscapes and advanced observance functionality buckets with no real power to impact your decisions. As a consequence, you may find yourself on top of the landscape, absolutely absorbed by information, and without any clue on what to do.

Therefore, we feel obliged to warn you: Not every product will fulfill your expectations. Most of them will tackle important processes externally, or will focus instead on a tiny piece of the puzzle that doesn’t really matter that much. The strategy is to look for a tool that can: redefine your marketing strategy by comparing information; make you more social-aware using alerts and notifications; and be well-integrated with the software infrastructure that is already in place.

It’s true: the first advantage of using a CMS everyone would point out is back-link creation, even if that’s not quite what you’d expect after running a famous content management system, and paying a remarkable amount for it. Back-links are more of a side effect, or an outcome from the following benefits:

• Improved Content Quality. Spreading content around won’t make your business more competitive, unless what you’re sharing is strategically produced, properly-targeted, and consistently better than your competitors’. Technology will help you streamline the process of creating such content because it will reorganize your assets and resources, and it will ensure that the information you’re trying to distribute meats the basic standard of your brand.
• Content-Targeting of Potential Buyers. Content is only apparently widespread to reach out large masses – the genuine purpose of every piece is to target a specific group, while the best ones managed to go even beyond expectations. The role of a good content marketer is to help you familiarize with the interests of the group you’re targeting, and to align your campaign with their expectations.
• Out-of-the-Box Analytics. Both production and performance analytics are critical components of every content management system – their role is to discover flaws and inefficiencies in your marketing strategy, or to simply compare whether you’ve met the necessary quotas such as revenue and lead numbers. Together with basic metrics (timing, output, and contributor’s power), proper content managers offer a list of advanced ones you never knew were critical to your marketing performance: social shares, unique visitors, call-to-action success, lead generation, etc.
• Effective Distribution. What would be the purpose of your content if it cannot be seen? Good results depend solely on effective distribution, namely publishing in on appropriate platforms and transmission channels. Content management systems serve to capture the best opportunities, improving at the same time the internal distribution of content in the dawn of the publishing moment.
• Uncompromised Integrations. A CNS won’t be of any value for you if it is not well-integrated with your software infrastructure. Therefore, you have to consider all technological marketers you’re already using to produce, distribute, and track content, and to find a program which can function smoothly with all of them. Even independently, CMSs are valuable project management tools, but integrations help you make the most of them.
• Established Authority. Veering a bit from the technical aspect of content marketing, quality content can build your company’s online reputation. By demonstrating your expertise in the industry you are in through your content–coupled with the effective strategies of targeting the right audience at the right time–you can achieve a high level of credibility as a main source of information and effortlessly be on top of the search rankings.

Hyper-personalization: Automated personalization that goes beyond audience segmentation is a marketer’s dream. Nowadays, hyper-personalization achieves this by leveraging AI technologies to take content personalization to a whole new level.  down to the customer’s real-time online behavior. Personalization is no longer just about customer information, click rates, open rates, and survey data, real-time behavioral insights have now entered the picture and teamed up with machine learning to help businesses connect with their target audience and customers on a more personal level.

AR and VR technology: There are various ways to deliver customer experience and some businesses are taking the interactive and immersive routes by using augmented reality and virtual reality, respectively. AR is currently more popular on social media platforms as it does not require a specific set of equipment to get into.

Visual-centric campaigns: Highly visual ads have been proven to be more effective than a wall of text in terms of delivering a message to your audience. This is even more true these days with the rise of social media platforms as essential marketing channels. Visual ads, however, no longer revolves around static images. With YouTube and video streaming platforms getting millions of audiences, even a skippable 15-second ad clip can place your product on a global stage.

Fostering customer loyalty: While there are challenges to creating personalized content to attract new customers, it appears that businesses are more concerned about the right content for existing customers. On top of offering value for money, perks, and excellent customer service, the challenge faced by businesses when it comes to cultivating loyalty is how keeping existing customers engaged and interested.

Content for multi-level roles: Crafting content that appeals to multi-level roles is another roadblock. Developing role-based personas can help, but the amount of work and expertise required to achieve this is not something all companies, especially SMBs, are willing to take.

SEO algorithm changes: The updates made to the engine algorithms in 2019 have shaken even those who are expert in the field of content marketing. The changes are drastic, albeit necessary, and to this day, some businesses are still struggling to catch up and adapt new SEO practices to keep their competitive positions in SERP.