Content marketing is one of the most genuine and impactful ways to connect your messaging and expertise with the right customer base. According to Nielsen, 58% of consumers trust editorial content. This helps further stress how important it is for your business to invest in content marketing and begin to build the trust of the right customers overtime.

There are many tools and platforms available today to help build, optimize and manage your content marketing strategy for the future. However, it’s hard to know when and why to take the plunge and invest in this technology or wait until the time is right to move forward.

Why Content Marketing Technology?

Content marketing technology is valuable to your company, marketing team and most importantly, your readers because it can help improve the quality of your content, measure how your content is performing, impact the organization of your efforts and offer a wide range of distribution channels for your content.

• Quality Content: Content marketing focused technology can boost the quality of your content efforts by giving you the ability to add compelling visuals and video, map out specific content personas and buying stages, having a review or quality control process in place, ability to optimize for the search engines, ease the process of curating content and more to help elevate the content you’re delivering to your audience. Overall, quality is what will make your content resonate better online and some of the tools available on the market today can help bolster this process.

• Actionable Analytics: Understanding if your content is working to drive value to the right audience is important for the continued success of your marketing. Content technology can help your organization accurately analyze if your content is driving traffic, subscribers, increased social reach, buzz and value in the search engines. These tools can help an organization keep track of their goals and focus their time and effort on the type of content that is working online and less time on what isn’t.

• Organized Workflow: The process of strategizing, developing, optimizing, publishing and finally, distributing your content can be executed without the use of content specific technology but it won’t be as quick, efficient or effective as it could be. The amount of time, money and effort that can be saved by the right content tools can help to scale your strategy to the next level.

• Increased Distribution: Sharing your company’s content across email, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, SlideShare, other social channels, your blog and elsewhere is crucial for getting the right messaging in front of the right audience. This can be a time consuming process that content technology can help automate and streamline to ensure your content is shared across each channel effectively, while keeping each channels unique features in mind.

When is Using Content Marketing Technology the Right Approach? 

The time for a company to invest in technology to boost their content strategy differs for every business and vertical. To understand if the time is right for your business, take a deep look at what your content strategy currently looks like and where you plan for it to be in three, six and twelve months from today.

Although the decision to take on content marketing technology varies for each business, there are a few similar areas that any company can analyze to understand if the time is right to use a content tool, platform or network.

• Type of Content Needed: The type of content needed to connect with your customers varies across industries and evolves over time since some vertical’s audiences change more quickly than others, which may require a deeper focus on your content strategy. For instance, the types of content an industrial based business would require are different and far slower moving then the content needed to fuel a consumer facing retailer. Ask yourself, do the complexities of my industry require a robust approach to content using tools and platforms designed to improve the process?

• Amount of Content Needed: The amount of quality content your business needs to succeed could change based on your industry, if your company has decided upon making a bigger impact with content or if your company has had some recent growth. These changes may require the addition of content marketing technology to ensure that the production of quality content can continue to grow at scale. Is your need for content growing faster than the ability of your organization to sustain it?

• Size of Your Team Internally and Externally: Depending on the existing size of your team internally and externally handling content, it may be time to upgrade your efforts to ensure the workflow between teammates remains efficient and on task. If your team is continuing to grow past three people then it could quickly become difficult to adhere to a concise strategy without the proper content platform in place. Has the size of your team outgrown informal processes like email and spreadsheets when it comes to managing content?

What stage is your company at when it comes to creating and marketing quality content to your customers? Share your thoughts in the comments below!