Altimeter's guide to navigating the content software field helps you choose the best tools for your organization's content strategy.

1. CHOOSING THE TOOLS
FOR A UNIFIED
CONTENT STRATEGY
by Omar Akhtar, Analyst and Managing Editor at
Altimeter, a Prophet Company
August 2, 2016
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Content marketing is no longer just the playground for the PR and marketing departments
within an organization. Now it solves customer needs and delivers more value than just
awareness and brand support. Sales and service staff use it to support strategic goals. This
changes both the types of content brands are deploying and the technology they use to
produce and deliver it.
Hundreds of tools now claim to be the best-in-breed enterprise solutions for content creation,
curation, management, delivery, and measurement. As a result, choosing the right software
becomes an arduous and contentious process. Any team that’s in-charge of procuring
software has to consider the demands of multiple departments, limited budgets, and proving
a rapid return on investment. And after all those considerations, they still have to evaluate an
exhausting number of vendor options and risk being blamed for picking the wrong one.
To select the right software, concentrate on strategy first. This report will help you navigate
the intimidating landscape of content tools by creating clarity around your strategy, identifying
gaps and requirements in your content operations, and providing a framework for rating tools
that make the final cut.
Follow these steps to eliminate vendor options at every stage, making the final selection
process far easier. Then you’ll ensure that you are picking only the software that will
successfully execute your chosen content strategy and help your company stay relevant by
attaining the highest levels of digital maturity.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Executive Summary 2
Introduction 3
Choosing the Right Content Strategy 5
Evaluating the Content Technology Stack 9
Rate the Software 14
Conclusion 16
Methodology 16
Ecosystem Input 17
Acknowledgements 17
Author Bio 18
About Us 18
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INTRODUCTION
In today’s digital marketing speak, “content” refers to anything published by brands that isn’t
paid advertising. This includes thought leadership, whitepapers, blogs, and social media posts.
Marketing and communications departments used to be responsible for producing this material.
However, as its effectiveness at engaging audiences and communicating a brand’s message
becomes more apparent, sales, service, product, and even HR teams are starting to leverage
content as a strategic asset.
This is the future of branded content. It is no longer just a marketing tactic, but a strategic tool that
aids all departments in delivering a great customer experience. Content can now do more than
just promote a brand. It can convey crucial information, build trust, promote transparency, serve
a community, and start a conversation. Hence, it is in the interest of digitally savvy brands to buy
content management software that serves the requirements of multiple departments and functions.
However, this complicates the already difficult process of vetting and selecting the right content
management tools. The most recent edition of Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology Landscape
listed more than 3,500 different marketing technology platforms (see Figure 1).1
At least half of
the platforms listed are solutions for either creating, curating, distributing, or measuring content
across paid, earned, and owned channels. The sheer number of content-related tools available
can paralyze companies that don’t have the time or resources to evaluate the merits of every
platform. Even then, there’s no guarantee that the platform they choose today will be relevant to
what they want to achieve next year.
FIGURE 1 THE MARKETING TECHNOLOGY LANDSCAPE
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Despite the overabundance of tools, most
marketing technology stacks still remain
woefully underutilized. 51% of companies say
they are using more than 21 different marketing
tech tools.2
B ut only 9% of marketers say they
have all the marketing technology they need
and fully utilize the tools they have.3
Whittling down the number of options
makes it easier to choose the right software,
methodically eliminating tools that are not
relevant to the brand’s content strategy. This
is a problem when only 32% of B2B marketers
say they have a documented content strategy,
while only 28% have a documented editorial
mission statement for how they will serve their audience through content.4
This lack of clarity around
what the organization wants to achieve through the use of content (and how it plans to achieve it),
makes tool selection even more difficult and confusing.
This report will help you find the right software by guiding you through three major steps (Figure 2)
that systematically narrow your options, providing clarity and ensuring that you choose the best, and
most relevant software.
51% of companies say
they are using more than
21 different marketing
tech tools, but only 9% of
marketers say they have all
the marketing technology
they need and fully utilize the
tools they have.
FIGURE 2
CHOOSE THE RIGHT SOFTWARE BY ELIMINATING CHOICES AT EACH STAGE
All Content Software
After you choose a
content strategy
After you evaluate
your content stack
After you use the
comparison tool
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CHOOSING THE RIGHT
CONTENT STRATEGY
Strategy enables multiple parts of the organization to produce content on their own while
still following a common set of criteria and goals. Create a strategy first and you’ll reduce
the production of ineffective and irrelevant content. Finally, a well-defined content strategy
shortens the software-selection process, enabling you to choose only the tools that fit your
specific strategy.
But before embarking on a plan for building a modern, digitally mature content strategy, it’s
important to first know what that looks like. There are four defining characteristics of mature
content-producing organizations:
Unified Vision: A digitally mature organization has a content strategy that gives multiple
departments (such as sales, service, and marketing) a clear vision for what the organization wants
to achieve and how it wants to achieve it through the use of content. Companies that are less
mature will have a content strategy that only applies to the marketing department or, in some
cases, have no content strategy at all.
Integration Between Departments: There is a lot of talk of “breaking down silos” between
departments and getting the entire organization to work together. It’s not so much about
breaking down silos as it is about building windows between them. Mature content organizations
share strategies, content goals, and customer data across all the stakeholder departments. This
ensures a coordinated internal approach that is vital for delivering a unified customer experience
externally. Inter-departmental communication also helps identify overlapping points of software
use for different departments, which can lead to consolidation of software and greater efficiency
in workflows.
Data-Driven Engagement: Modern customer engagement is driven by both Mad Men and
“Math Men;” that is to say, data is just as important as creativity in producing engaging content.
Companies today can’t afford to waste resources on creating irrelevant content. The way forward
is the creation of highly personalized material that serves a real, data-proven customer need.
This data doesn’t just tell us what the customer looks like; it should tell us their behaviors and be
gathered from a variety of touchpoints, both digital and analog, to create a holistic picture.
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