What tools do you use in conjunction with your content marketing program?
What tools would you like to use?
Marketers aren’t holistically considering content needs before investing in tools. Far too often, they procure solutions with overlapping capabilities.
To date, there hasn’t been a detailed map of the content vendor landscape (though Curata maintains a good list). More important, the available content solutions haven’t been mapped to actual use cases.
There are tools out there for creation, curation, collaboration, compliance, and plenty of content chores that don’t start with the letter C, such as distribution and syndication, measurement and analytics, optimization, topic discovery, defining and finding an audience, and workflow management (among many others).
Who buys these solutions? How are they sourced? Who uses them inside of enterprises and agencies? Do those end-users actually have a say in the selection? Is there a budget for content technology in the enterprise? If there is, what types of solutions will it be spent on?
This is where I could really use your help. We’re researching the above questions to hopefully bring clarity to what is a somewhat confusing and tangled landscape of vendors and tools. We believe more clarity will emerge around the content vendor landscape, but not without marketers weighing in and making their wants and needs known.
May I ask for less than 10 minutes of your time, if you’re at all involved in content marketing, to respond to our research survey on the topic? The findings will be published and made publicly available.
The purpose of our research is to explore the plethora of content tools available, and map them to marketers’ actual needs and use cases, as well as how content tools are sourced, evaluated, and purchased. Some of the questions we’re trying to answer include:
- How do real world content marketing cases use map to specific content tools?
- What types of content tools are available to the market?
- How do companies select/purchase content tools based on needs and use cases?
Once we have your responses, we’re going back to the vendors (more than 100 of them) with a questionnaire designed around the survey responses. In other words, we don’t want to evaluate content tools from a research analyst perspective or base our evaluations on what the vendors say they do. Rather, we are digging to uncover the needs and the processes in the marketplace.
Thanks very much for taking the time to weigh in on the survey. (And for passing the link along to your colleagues).
This post originally published on iMedia.