Marketing content management helps you create, manage, and distribute your content effectively without risking quality. Some MCM tools, like GatherContent, allow you to implement style guides and templates directly into your production process to streamline your efforts. Many also include built-in collaboration features so you can quickly get approvals from stakeholders and compliance.

Let’s take a look at what marketing content management is, how it works, and some of the top tools you can use to manage your content more efficiently.

What is marketing content management (MCM)?

Marketing content management involves the creation, management, and distribution of the content you create as part of your marketing efforts. It focuses on content organization to give you a leg up in all these processes.

Marketing content management can also refer to software that handles this process for you. Using MCM software, also called content management software, gives you more control by helping you create, organize, and distribute digital marketing content across multiple channels while maintaining a consistent level of quality.

Benefits of marketing content management

Marketing content management helps you create content that resonates with your audience and track engagement and metrics, which help improve your marketing campaigns over time. And some parts of your content creation process can be automated, further improving your efficiency as you scale your efforts.

Another advantage of MCM is that it keeps all your content management tools under one roof. This means you spend less time juggling multiple platforms and interfaces just to keep all your marketing campaigns under control. Some software also integrates with social media, so you can easily post, like, and retweet content.

Speaking of keeping everything under one roof, your marketing content management system likely has collaboration features as well. In GatherContent, these collaboration tools allow you to assign different tasks or steps in the content creation process to different team members, plus get feedback and sign-offs from stakeholders—all within the platform.

This means no more back-and-forth emails and potential confusion about who’s working on what or who needs to sign off on a certain task.

How marketing content management works

Marketing content management involves several processes, including content creation, organization, distribution, and analysis. A good MCM provides tools and workflows to help teams streamline each of these processes as well as juggle digital asset management for items like stock photos, videos, articles, and infographics.

For content creation, MCMs like GatherContent allow you to build content templates and workflows right into the platform. These help speed up your production process while maintaining a high level of quality. Additionally, GatherContent lets you embed your company’s style guides within the templates so your team knows exactly how to keep content on-brand.

But if you’re creating loads of content, you also need a way to organize it. Marketing content management also helps marketers organize their content in a central library so they can easily find it and reuse it for future campaigns or optimize it for better performance.

MCM can also help you organize content that’s distributed across multiple channels, such as social media, email newsletters, and the company blog.

And last but certainly not least, MCM analytics tools give you an in-depth look at performance metrics such as conversions and lead acquisition. These are critical for tracking your content’s engagement and effectiveness so you can pinpoint what’s working and what’s not, then decide on a course of action.

Want to engage your audience? Build a style guide. Here’s why:

• Keeps you in tune with audience interests and behaviors
• Builds loyalty and trust thru consistency
• Pushes you to create higher-quality content

Differences between content management vs. content marketing

You may see content management and content marketing used interchangeably, but don’t get confused. These two terms refer to two different approaches.

• Content management focuses on organizing and storing content.
• Content marketing focuses on creating and distributing content.

Meanwhile, marketing content management combines both of these approaches to build effective marketing campaigns.

5 Top marketing content management tools

1. GatherContent

GatherContent includes content workflow customization and collaboration with teammates.

GatherContent streamlines creating, organizing, and managing your marketing content. It allows marketing team members to collaborate on content, and you can create workflows, assign tasks, and track project progress.

Pros:

• All-in-one: By streamlining your content creation process through templates, workflows, and embedded style guides, GatherContent saves your team hours of effort without having to switch platforms.
• Collaboration: Your team and stakeholders can easily collaborate in real-time while creating content—say goodbye to endless email chains. You can assign projects, edit, and leave comments in real-time.
• Quickly publish web content: GatherContent is also a headless content management system (CMS) that integrates with other platforms like WordPress and Drupal thanks to API integrations. And no need to learn HTML since GatherContent includes a drag-and-drop CMS.

Cons:

• No social media: While GatherContent offers multiple integrations to popular technology like Microsoft Word, Slack, and WordPress, it doesn’t currently integrate with social media platforms.
• Cost: While GatherContent offers a free trial, its monthly and yearly cost may be too steep for small businesses.

Pricing: GatherContent starts at $99 a month and there’s also a 14-day free trial.

2. HubSpot

A well-known software-as-a-service (SaaS) brand, HubSpot also helps you manage your marketing campaigns. Its multiple features, like Blog Maker, integrated customer relationship management (CRM) tools, and a website builder, help you quickly create, publish, and distribute your content while analyzing performance metrics.

Pros:

• All-in-one toolkit: You can easily pair HubSpot’s MCM tools with its other marketing software for email marketing, social media marketing, and more.
• Auto-share posts: HubSpot lets you publish your blog posts while simultaneously sharing it to your connected social media accounts.

Cons:

• High price: HubSpot’s Marketing Hub starts at $800 a month, which likely puts it out of reach for small- to medium-sized businesses and teams.

Pricing: HubSpot Marketing Hub starts at $800 a month for 2,000 marketing contacts, or you can opt for a more limited individual and small teams plan that starts at $30 a month.

3. CoSchedule

If you need help planning, organizing, and executing your marketing campaigns, check out CoSchedule. It comes with social media and project management tools as well as a content calendar, analytics, and task automation.

Pros:

• Social media tools: CoSchedule includes a large social media marketing toolkit that includes a bulk post scheduler, analytics, campaign templates, and automation features.
• Robust free plan: If you’re a team of one (or maybe two), CoSchedule’s free Marketing Calendar plan offers multiple features to speed up your content creation, including—you guessed it—an editorial calendar.

Cons:

• Limited collaboration: While the paid Pro plan offers collaboration with up to nine other team members, the free plan doesn’t offer any collaboration tools at all.

Pricing: CoSchedule offers a free plan as well as a paid Pro plan. The Pro plan starts at $29 per user per month.

4. ClearVoice

ClearVoice is a combination content management and marketing platform that also gives you access to a network of freelance writers, editors, and content strategists. Additionally, you’ll get a suite of collaboration, workflow, and analytics tools.

Pros:

• Source freelancers: With easy access to ClearVoice’s freelancer network, you can quickly fill gaps in your team—whether you need writers, editors, or strategists.
• Full pipeline support: ClearVoice’s marketers take your content creation pipeline from start to finish, including search engine optimization (SEO) research, creation, publishing, and distribution.

Cons:

• Potentially limited: While using freelancers can be a boon, some teams may prefer to rely on a team of their own who’s been trained according to company needs and standards.

Pricing: You’ll need to contact ClearVoice to learn more about pricing.

5. Contently

Contently is built to help you create, distribute, and measure the impact of your content. Along with content planning and project management tools, it offers access to a network of 160,000+ freelance writers, editors, filmmakers, and graphic designers.

Pros:

• SEO-optimized ideas: Contently’s SEO Story Ideas feature generates search-optimized article topics based on keywords that fit within your content strategy.
• Analytics dashboard: Dig into your performance metrics with the Content Value dashboard. It shows the ROI of your organic traffic — no integrations required.
• Collaboration: You can create content or hire freelancers to create content for you, then easily share feedback and sign-off on tasks with the comment function.

Cons:

• Learning curve: While the platform is user-friendly, it takes time to get up to speed with all of Contently’s features.
• Confusing analytics: Some users report issues with analytics reports and support may be required to generate the reports you need.

Pricing: You’ll need to contact Contently to learn more about pricing.

Save hours of time with marketing content management

As you can tell, effective content marketing management is essential, especially as teams start to scale their content production and target multiple distribution channels. A good marketing content management tool like GatherContent can help you stay on top of your content library, workflow, and processes as well as assign content out, collaborate, and publish completed articles and landing pages.

Look at marketing content management software not as another tool, but as a teammate helping you stay on top of your content marketing game. Find out what GatherContent can do to streamline your content production and sign up for a 14-day free trial.