How can you guarantee your new content marketing tool will benefit your company?
Choosing the best content marketing tool for your company can be difficult but if you follow these easy steps, you are sure to choose the best content marketing tool for your company needs.
To produce the best content for your company, it is essential to have the proper tools in place to achieve this but how you decide which are the best content marketing tools for your company’s needs?
Steps for Choosing Content Marketing Tools
With over 100 vendors selling content marketing software, it can seem daunting to begin the task of finding the best tool to suit your marketing efforts. If you ensure that any tool you choose offers the ability to strategize to achieve your goals and helps you produce effective content, distribute it, and analyze the results it produces, you will be able to produce the best content marketing your company has ever seen.
What is a CMP?
The first step before you choose your content marketing tool is to understand what a content marketing platform is. A content marketing platform includes content that can be distributed to leads that will generate revenue. A CMP combines sales force automation software and marketing automation software, and enables marketers to drive awareness, leads, and revenue from the content they create. A content marketing platform makes it easier and more efficient to supply content that will capture and nurture leads that will generate revenue. A CMP achieves this by enabling a data-driven, scalable, multi-channel approach across the strategy, production, distribution, and analytics of a content marketing approach. While a content marketing platform isn’t the best solution for every business, you should decide if it is right for your business needs. If you are unsure about implementing a CMP into your marketing efforts, try making a pros and cons list to help you decide.
What’re Your Specific Needs?
The next step to help you choose the best content marketing tools for your business is to understand what your specific needs are. Before you begin to research any content marketing system, determine what your budget is, understand any gaps in your team’s workflow, and know what capabilities will be most important to your team’s success. Knowing these things will make the decision process smoother and you’ll know what to look for in your new content marketing tool.
Research
The next step to choose the best content marketing tool is to research vendors. When performing this step, ask yourself:
- Will my team use this software?
- Will this software be useful to other departments?
- Is the vendor flexible? Is this software flexible?
- Will this tool help scale my company?
- Does this software allow for easy external/internal communication?
Also, try checking out the content a vendor has on their website. This will be a great indicator of how you could use their software and the content you could create. It is also a good idea to check out reviews others have written about the vendor and the software, any testimonials customers have written, and any case studies done on the software. Also, try finding existing customers who use the software and get their first-hand opinion about the tool before you decide to purchase it.
Talk to the Sales Team
After you have done your research on any content marketing tools you are looking to buy, pick your top options and schedule a demo to see the software in action. Experiencing the software first-hand will allow you to see what the interface looks like and how your team could benefit from it. Make sure you ask many questions during the demo to fully understand how the software can benefit your company.
Implement Your New Software
The final step when choosing the best content marketing tool for your company is to implement your new software and start working on creating more effective content. Before you implement your new software though, create KPIs and goals you’d like to achieve with the help of the software. This will help you understand how effective the software is and if it is worth the annual cost to your company.
