Planning for Content at Scale with Optimizely CMP
It's content chaos out there!
Some 4.6 billion pieces of content are produced online daily. Despite investment, marketers are struggling to keep up.
The challenge for marketers today is that we are living in a world of more. More content. More campaigns. More data. It’s hard to keep up and we have resorted back to a “spray and pray” method of content distribution.
When we create content for content’s sake, this is what our consumers feel like. They are bombarded with marketing messages constantly and it's hard to break through the noise. We can’t throw our content calendars to the wind. Organizations need to have a plan of how to strategically engage target audiences with effective content. We need to work smarter, not harder, for our content.
Enter the Content Marketing Platform
It's a multi-step process to create content which involves planning, budgeting, content generation, publishing, and measuring your ROI. Marketers often use different tools for each stage of the process. A CMP helps you make more effective marketing content with less stress by bringing the team together in a single collaborative workspace.
- Optimizely’s Content Marketing Platform (CMP) allows teams to share plans, collaborate on assets, and execute campaigns.
- CMP lets you see the work your marketing team is doing throughout the entire workflow and content lifecycle.
- CMP helps marketers understand the business impact of their work.
What is the difference between a CMP and a CMS?
It's important to also understand what a CMP is not, especially in relation to a Content Management System.
Content Marketing Platforms (CMP)
- Handles entire marketing process, from start to finish.
- Includes all marketing tools out-of-the-box.
- Useful from the very beginning of the content marketing process for idea generation, research, planning and collaboration.
- CMPs are more project management tools than design tools.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
- Focused on final content creation and publishing.
- Additional marketing features must be added using 3rd-party integrations.
- Useful at the tail-end of the content marketing process for publishing and managing content.
- CMSs are more content creation/design tools than project management tools.
4 signs that you need a CMP
If the answer to any one of these questions is "yes", you may want to consider a Content Marketing Platform.
1. Omnichannel content delivery
Are you trying to produce consistent content for a variety of endpoints - site content, campaigns, kiosks, apps, emails, social media posts, etc?
2. Mish-mash of tools in play for content lifecycle
Do you find yourself juggling a collection of tools to manage different parts of the process?
3. Multiple teams and/or 3rd party agencies
Does your marketing workflow require collaboration with 2 or more teams - both internal or external?
4. Peaks of content: seasonal, personalization, etc.
Do you have natural, predictable peaks of content work that requires a flurry of activity?
The core benefits of a CMP
There are four primary value drivers.
1. Operational Efficiency
A CMP boosts operational efficiency because it simplifies collaboration. It saves time by automating workflows, cuts down on unnecessary meetings, reduces content waste, and enhances content availability.
2. Risk Mitigation
A CMP reduces risk of approval process failure since your workflows will provide safeguards that ensure only approved content makes it to production.
3. Cost Savings
It saves cost because you don’t have to pay for a bunch of different tools.
4. Revenue Growth
Increases speed to market for campaigns and improves performance
Optimizely CMP Feature Highlights
Here is a cross-section of tools that can help your team better plan, collaborate, and execute.
Plan
Get data-driven insights fast and centralize your campaign planning.
Idea Lab
Use data-driven insights to find gaps and opportunities in your content by taking into account real-time keyword data, such as search volume, seasonality, and cost-per-click. Get automated suggestions for related keywords that may be more effective at driving traffic and improving ranking. Better understand your competitive landscape via "Share-of-voice" insights that show how you rank vs. key competition and which domains are owning your targeted keywords.
Campaign Planning
Maintain visibility into what is happening, when through campaign-level task management, enabling marketers to keep track of all the content related to a specific task or campaign or create sub-campaigns that ladder up to larger initiatives with milestone tracking.
Briefs
Create brief templates for specific marketing asks to provide ongoing context to the team and help outline all necessary information for a campaign or task.
Visual Calendars
Visualize what your team is working on and what's on the horizon at all times. View and filter campaign tasks in a variety of formats including list view, timeline, calendar, and kanban board with the ability to save custom views.
Collaborate
Collaborate seamlessly across teams.
Workflows
Create flexible workflows that satisfy your team’s unique approval and publishing process and export notifications to Slack or email to keep everybody informed and on point.
Content Authoring
Concurrently edit and leave feedback on content directly within the CMP via modern, easy-to-use rich text editor and use live web proofing to browse and annotate live websites.
Integrated DAM
Leverage fully-integrated DAM to store, manage, organize your assets - enabling brand governance and encouraging content reuse. Keep an eye on content lineage and asset expirations. Leverage out-of-the-box AI tools to auto tag and crop assets.
AI Content and Optimization
Leverage generative AI capability to accelerate content creation (body text, summaries, metadata, etc.) and optimize existing content.
Execute
Intake, track, and publish omnichannel content.
Omnichannel Publishing
A core feature of a CMP is to integrate with downstream channels (CMS, social media, email, sales enablement tools, etc.) to make publishing process seamless and ensure consistency of brand/message.
Content Analytics
Use the content analytics dashboard to measure visitor engagement and attribute content directly to conversions/revenue.
Marketing Work Requests
Tame the chaos of internal marketing requests by creating custom intake forms that can be routed to specific teams and provide progress visibility to the stakeholders who requested the work.
Things to Keep in Mind When Implementing a CMP
Are you doing this for the right reasons?
A CMP is a major value add when business needs and team readiness align. Ask yourself...
- Do we have the team size to necessitate a consolidated collaboration tool?
- Do we need to standardize or repurpose content across different channels or areas of our site?
- Are our content authors savvy enough to navigate our CMS directly?
- Are trying to gain insight on what content is and isn't performing?
TIP: Create a checklist of conditions in your evaluation of content marketing solutions to confirm requirements and staff readiness.
Make sure you know who does what
Defining ownership and roles early on is critical to making sure you drive CMP adoption. Not everyone needs full access within the CMP. Clearly defining ownership, roles and responsibilities will remove risks introduced when working across internal and external teams.
TIP: Review defined roles and permissions on a regular basis to accommodate new users & use cases.
Consider your integrations early
A CMP works best when it is paired with your Digital Asset Management (DAM) and Content Management System (CMS)
Did you know...?
- Optimizely CMP offers out-of-the-box integration with its DAM. This will enhance your ROI since both the CMP and CMS will reference the same material.
- You can create CMS pages from the CMP interface and directly add them to a task in CMP for approval. For structured data such as a blog posts, content created in CMP can be pushed to CMS. Other integrations are possible with Figma, social media, marketing automation platforms, and more.
When it comes to workflows, the more the merrier
Take into considerations the types of content and the teams creating that content: campaigns, creative assets, sales enablement, client presentations, legal documents, etc. Different types of content have different lifecycles. When implementing your CMP start by mapping out a common content / project archetype from ideation to archive. Rinse and repeat across multiple types of content.
TIP: As you onboard different or new teams to your CMP, validate that existing workflows work. Modify or create as needed.
Unify your taxonomy across tools
Content created in the CMP should be aligned with content created in your CMS. Consider a shared taxonomy and tagging strategy that enables you to sync your core, page-level business taxonomies with structured content models created in CMP. By using the same taxonomy axes to tag content in both places we ensure that those who understand the meaning of content best are the ones to categorize it and establish relationships with similar content.
TIP: Evaluate the effectiveness of these classifications as you monitor the success of content output.
How to Unlock Growth and Mature CMP Use
Now the common misconception with a CMP (or a lot of technologies) is that once the tech is implemented, you are all set. WRONG! The implementation of your CMP is just the start, but there is an activation phase where there is ongoing care and feeding to the tool. And let’s be honest, after the implementation is when the fun begins.
The implementation phase is all about getting set up and is focused heavily on gathering business requirements and taking a handful of use cases and building out all the appropriate workflows, roles and permissions, integrations and getting the CMP live and working,
In order to mature use of a CMP, it is important to have clear ownership of the tool and progress through the various activation activities. Training is a critical component to maturity and developing a regular cadence of activities to both review the setup, onboard new teams and use cases to make your CMP the true heart of your content programs.
When it comes to Optimizely CMP, there is no doubt that it can help break down silos between your teams and increase content efficiencies, speeding up time to market. Interested in learning more about how Optimizely CMP can help your organization wrangle the content chaos? Reach out to [email protected] and we can talk about your content journey together!