What Is Marketing Content Management (MCM)? Use Cases and Examples
It takes a lot to run successful marketing campaigns today. They involve myriad marketing activities and content that need to be managed. For this, flawless internal coordination is required. Moreover, you need to be in the right place at the right time if you want your campaigns to impact today’s sophisticated consumer market.
As you can see, the creation and execution of marketing campaigns have become more complex. You need an easier way to manage these processes without too much effort. This is where marketing content management (MCM) comes to the rescue. In this article, you will read what MCM is, how MCM helps build a quality customer experience with your product, what the tasks of marketing content management systems are, and what top marketing content management tools are.
What is Marketing Content Management (MCM)?
The eCommerce market has changed significantly in recent years. Shoppers take a long and careful time comparing marketing information about a product in different sales channels and from different devices. And attracting customers is costing retailers more and more. The competitive advantage is providing a quality experience with the product and a brilliant omnichannel strategy. This can be achieved only thanks to marketing content management.
Marketing Content Management is a category of applications that help enterprises respond rapidly to unfolding business circumstances by applying the optimal combination of marketing content across multiple channels. MCM databases provide enterprises with an overview of all available marketing content.
Gartner
This type of software is designed to help companies meet the new challenges of handling more diverse marketing channels in an increasingly digital business world.
MCM system implementation is relevant for large companies that have:
- 100 or more marketing content assets
- 10 or more e-commerce products
- 5 or more sales channels
- 10 or more employees working in marketing
Marketing content management (MCM) software helps track and evaluate all marketing efforts and keep them focused and accurate. Many of the best MCM tools are created as a dashboard with bright, multi-functional windows displaying actual metrics for the marketing campaign’s individual parts. Users can create reports and generally look transparently at how each marketing effort performs on each channel.
Advantages of MCM
MCM is a set of measures that helps you to give your customers the most complete, selling, and relevant information depending on the customer’s point of contact with the product, the device used, personal preferences, geolocation, language, etc. Specifically, utilising an MCM:
- It is easier to support the principles of the omnichannel marketing strategy
- It provides a helicopter view of the process of working with marketing information
- It helps to reduce process costs
- It helps to increase conversion rates
- It helps to reduce returns
- It helps to reduce miscommunication between employees
- It helps to reduce the time for searching and processing marketing content
- It helps to reduce the manual work of employees to manage marketing content
- It helps to reduce the number of errors in the marketing content
As a result, you’ll sell the customer the product and a positive experience. And they directly impact your conversion rates, bounce rates, returns, and motivate the customer to come back to you more than once.
Core Features Of MCM Systems
There are several basic core features that every marketing content management system must have:
- Consolidation of marketing data. An MCM system should collect your marketing content, making it easily accessible.
- Tracking interactions and activity. MCM systems should allow you to track interactions with marketing content.
- Measuring performance and productivity. A sound MCM system should allow you to receive reports with detailed data about the company’s efficiency of interaction with marketing content.
- Automation of routine processes. Marketing content management automation is the foundation of any MCM system.
Utilizing an MCM has greatly assisted our marketing team manage content, distribute it to the appropriate channels, and ultimately grow our business.
Studocu
MCM Use Case
Alex’s company deals with 24 different learning courses and over 50 marketing content assets with a team of 10 marketers. It’s challenging, if not impossible, for Alex to control all marketing content and marketers himself. Alex decided to implement MCM to always keep marketing content at hand, provide potential customers with cohesive marketing content, adhere to deadlines, and execute the marketing strategy adequately.
MCM implementation in Alex`s company brings the following advantages:
- Marketers compiled in the MCM system a detailed checklist of marketing content they have: video ads, targeted ads, long reads, lead magnets, newsletters, infographics, etc. So they do not forget to use anything in their marketing activities. The human factor does not affect anything else.
- Marketing content application has become a streamlined process instead of the chaos there before—now, marketing employees always know what to do next and what content they have for this.
- Marketing employees can change the status of content. Now everyone in the company knows what marketing content is used and in what channels.
- When certain marketing content starts to be used, MCM sends a notification to the marketing manager and the company owner. The company has improved communication between its marketing team members.
- Integrations with other software like customer relationship management (CRM). This helps to automate marketing content with other areas of the company`s functioning. It also affects the effectiveness of other employees not related to marketing.
As a result of implementing an MCM system in the learning company, the conversion of leads into actual customers has increased by 30% because of more effective marketing content use. Marketing content management made it possible to organize marketing information, put it in order, and meet marketing strategy deadlines. Now Alex does not even need to come to supervise marketing content and can pay more attention to marketing strategies.
Marketing Content Management Tools
The marketing content management software (MCMS) market is full of offerings. Many services exist for small, medium, and large companies from different business areas. It’s important to understand that MCM is a category of tools that may include other types of platforms – including ad management, content management, e-commerce, sales enablement, digital asset management, and more. The classification is focused on the ability to centralize and manage content across channels and support internal processes within an organization. A few top marketing content management platform examples include ClearSlide, Bloomfire, and Salesloft.
ClearSlide
ClearSlide is a San Francisco-based company that develops a sales engagement platform (SEP). It came into being in 2009 solely with funding from its founder and early subscribers. The company’s initial success helped it expand dramatically.
ClearSlide combines capabilities to support sales activities with sales fulfillment capabilities. It is an excellent tool for marketing content management, allowing marketing employees to store and share marketing documents and other valuable marketing-related materials. ClearSlide offers many tools for outreach marketing. The platform’s functionality includes email tracking. It also works within Gmail and Outlook. ClearSlide has many options for real-time remote promotion. These include web-based conferences and presentations. ClearSlide’s dashboard is updated in real-time. It displays metrics ranging from content performance to employee team performance. You can also use ClearSlide to train and educate marketers.
Bloomfire
Bloomfire is a service for quick search in the flow of marketing information. Its intuitive interface does not require any special skills. Custom settings will help you transfer your marketing content management structure into the proposed databases and eliminate information gaps.
Office workers spend 20% of their time searching for marketing information to perform their tasks.
The Experience of Work: The Role of Technology in Productivity and Engagement
Bloomfire can help reduce that time to improve the bottom line. Bloomfire can be used as a forum for instant messaging among employees and to automate the work of sales, HR, IT, support, and customer service departments. The program is suitable for large, small, and medium-sized businesses that focus on sales and work with a large amount of marketing data within the company. It’s easy to create a knowledge base for the entire company or individual teams so managers can access only the relevant information.
Bloomfire uses multiple levels of categorization, allowing you to view the content by an established author, group, or category. A patented algorithm finds the information they’re looking for and recommends additional contextual property correlations. Straightforward marketing information sharing eliminates further questions and saves time, increasing productivity. The platform’s analytics options let you see who’s working on marketing content, and search query reports give you a better understanding of which sections are used most often.
SalesLoft
SalesLoft is a tool that for the most part is focused on sales in the corporate segment. But it is great for marketing content management. Its functionality aims to work together with your CRM tools. It can save time for marketers. SalesLoft automates many aspects of the interactions between marketers and marketing content. It also provides many opportunities for more personalized interaction. You can plan marketing content. Saved success guides can be shared with new marketers. Platform users can also customize email templates. The platform includes dashboards with sales pipelines and automatic notifications of those deals that may go awry. SalesLoft allows you to perform in-depth marketing analysis and create reports.
The effectiveness of marketing campaigns depends on how well a company can manage its information while facilitating coordination between marketing teams. Marketing content management tools are a tried and true solution to achieve this goal. It allows you to manage valuable marketing content better. It also improves team collaboration, avoiding workflow interruptions and keeping you focused on the overall plan.
