This excerpt was written and researched as part of a CMP technology assessment for Gartner.
CMOs must balance content supply constraints with expanding demand for tailored and dynamic experiences. Content marketing platforms help create and manage this content volume effectively and efficiently. This research helps CMOs evaluate CMP capabilities.
- Generative AI (GenAI) impacts content creation and optimization more than any other marketing use case. As a result, new operating models and governance capabilities are being infused into content marketing platforms (CMPs) to support structured content at scale, including modular content to support personalization.
- Chief marketing officers (CMOs) allocated more of their 2023 budget toward content and messaging than other owned/earned media capabilities. This arguably represents a renewed focus on quality content that resonates with target audiences and supports brand differentiation.
- With the need to create and distribute content across an increasing number of internal teams and channels, many CMP capabilities are now commonplace across other marketing technology (martech) stack components. As a result, CMPs continue to focus on their ability to connect diverse systems.
To identify, evaluate and select content marketing platform technologies:
- Ensure that you have the martech data connectivity, strategic direction, people, and processes in place to leverage the sophisticated features and capabilities that both stand-alone CMPs and connected ecosystems of digital asset management (DAM)and digital experience platforms (DXP) environments provide.
- Target vendors that are focused on the impact of content on customer decisions and business outcomes, not just increased productivity, as demands and capabilities of content marketing surge at an unprecedented rate due to applications of AI/machine learning (ML), including GenAI.
- Identify relevant enterprise IT centralization and standardization initiatives that might impact vendor preferences as more technology decisions shift to IT and account for integrations to ensure utilization of your CMP’s full capabilities.
Strategic Planning Assumptions
- By 2025, 30% of outbound marketing messages from large organizations will be synthetically generated.
- By 2025, organizations that use AI across the marketing function will shift 75% of their staff’s operations from production to more strategic activities.
- By 2026, 80% of advanced creative roles will be tasked with harnessing GenAI to achieve differentiated results, requiring CMOs to spend more on this talent.
What You Need to Know
Gartner defines content marketing platforms (CMPs) as software solutions that support the practice of content marketing. These solutions facilitate creating and curating text, video, images, graphics, audio, e-books, white papers and interactive content assets distributed through paid, owned and earned channels. These assets are used to tell stories that help brands engage with and nurture customers, prospects and other audiences. Content marketing aims to drive awareness, demand, purchases and loyalty through deeper engagement with customers.
CMPs enable the fundamentals of content marketing — specifically, ideation insight, editorial planning, creative workflow and performance analytics to drive a unified strategy and production at scale.
CMPs collect and analyze data to inform content creation and reuse, streamline operations and iterate on content to improve marketing effectiveness. These platforms can also generate branded iterations of content for different audiences and enable internal teams, contributors and agencies involved in content creation to coordinate efforts.
As a result, CMPs help connect content marketing efforts to business objectives across channels, ensuring organizational alignment and broad scope for managing content. CMPs drive iterative content improvements, including capabilities to evaluate and test operating models and governance to drive collaboration across siloed teams. This supports faster time to market at scale.
Many CMPs complement their software with optional services like content strategy development, creative marketplaces, and training to drive adoption and utilization.
…