The early adopters of CMP’s were pioneers; trailblazers that paved the way for an entire category born out of the need to more efficiently manage the proliferation of digital content.

The truth, however, is that the software options available at the time were limited, and the market’s offerings were under-developed. In most cases, products were created as channel-specific solutions (such as publishing articles to a resource hub, or feeding content across a brand’s social channels). Others took shape from generic Project Management tools, forcing marketers to ‘make due’ with inadequate (and sometimes non- existent) functionality.

It sounds like ancient times, but it was only a few years ago. Fast-forward to 2019, and Marketing Leaders are being asked to do more with less, faced with shrinking budgets and rising expectations. And while those initial investments solved a singular use case, they likely won’t scale — and their teams are beginning to experience the pain. Unfortunately, these symptoms are often leading indicators of larger underlying deficiencies with the current solution, and a direct result of operating with an antiquated CMP (Content Marketing Platform).

Fortunately, most customers are operating on 12-month renewal cycles, and now is an opportune time to self-assess and reset the proper foundation with a next-generation CMP.

Source: NewsCred

Here are the top 6 symptoms we hear out in the field, and NewsCred’s take on how to address them:

1. “We can’t quantify progress or results –  how do we make a business case for the renewal investment?”

Deficiency: Those legacy CMPs were focused on editorial calendaring and publishing workflows, lacking analytics specific to operational efficiency, production, and content/campaign performance.

Solution: Getting measurably better at creating content is good, but quantifying the impact of that content from a business value perspective is what renewal budget approvals require.

The NewsCred CMP provides deep analytic insights that empower Marketing organizations to function as a holistic team and improve operational efficiency to maximize the impact of content and ultimately increase Marketing attributed-revenue. With the ability to monitor team processes, assess campaign progress, and identify potential bottlenecks, teams gain the transparency needed to make informed, effective decisions that will minimize waste, improve operational efficiency, and maximize campaign performance, with the ability to prove it.

2. “Our configuration doesn’t support the way all of my teams, LOBs, and regions want (and need) to work. This one-size-fits-all architecture we’re operating with doesn’t actually fit all.”

Deficiency: Many early CMPs were architected for single-channel teams. This over-simplified configuration resulted in a lack of flexibility for large, complex organizations, forcing work to be done in separate, disconnected instances.

Solution: Evolving into a truly integrated organization across markets, brands, and lines of business require a flexible Parent/Child model that empowers growing teams and organizations to govern globally and work locally.

The architecture behind the NewsCred CMP enables flexible global to local sharing across every platform module, ensuring that child instances are able to operate individually while parent organizations are able to maintain control and visibility. With full sharing and permission capabilities, individuals and teams within and across markets, brands, and lines of business can set up teams, share campaigns, facilitate cross-instance collaboration, add/organize/share approved content, track asset usage, and more. Ultimately, the CMP gives the ability to maintain brand control while gaining holistic, cross-market and cross-team visibility into all global Marketing activity.

3. “Our Solution supports Project Management, but not collaborative Ideation or Execution. This forces work to be done in separate tools and diminishes the quality of our content.”

Deficiency: Legacy Project Management tools (being used as CMP’s) focus on planning work, budgets, and resources, but are void of the content creation capabilities needed to help marketers execute exceptional content at scale. And when work is done in separate tools, it becomes disconnected and inefficient, slowing time-to-market.

Solution: Use a solution that is purpose-built for marketers, with project management and execution features that enable cross-functional collaboration and streamline the end-to-end process — allowing teams to create higher-quality content, faster.

NewsCred’s flexible content workflows make it easy for marketers to create, collaborate, and approve the wide variety of multi-format content needed to fuel their Marketing efforts — from videos and landing pages to social ads, and more — all from one platform. NewsCred’s Idea Lab feature provides built-in keyword search and social trends, transforming content ideation into a data-driven process. And with a centralized content workspace — including multi-format, rich-text editors and our Content Optimizer — teams shorten production and review cycles. As a result, marketers can move through tasks more efficiently, accelerating time-to-publish and ultimately delivering an elevated content experience.

4. “Our capacity for Content Creation can’t always keep up with demand and our CMP doesn’t help.”

Deficiency: The variability of business demands, the timing of campaigns and demand generation initiatives, create unpredictable periods of content requests. Legacy CMP’s that don’t contain licensed and original content do nothing to help supplement the content pipeline.

Solution: Leveraging a modern CMP with built-in content sourcing helps power the organization through fluctuating demand, and eliminates the need to work with short-term, third-party agencies.

NewsCred’s Marketplace brings thousands of world-class publishers together in one centralized location, giving brands immediate access to professional, fully-licensed third-party articles and images from across the globe. Within the NewsCred Content Marketing Platform, marketers are able to quickly discover relevant content and instantly publish it across all brand channels, engaging audiences with compelling content through a completely native, on-brand experience.

5. “Non-Marketing departments can send requests through our CMP, but manually monitoring those intakes is time-consuming.”

Deficiency: While some early CMP’s allow for Marketing teams to deploy intake forms for Non-Marketing requesters, they lack intelligent routing and assignment rules — so managing those requests in the CMP is just as chaotic as receiving them through non-standardized channels.

Solution: A purposeful external request solution must be powered by an intelligent rules engine, ensuring requests are automatically assigned in a timely manner and fielded by the appropriate marketing resources. Without automating the routing process, teams waste time manually triaging intakes and risk dropping the ball on important requests.

NewsCred’s Requests feature allows teams to configure pre-defined logic, so each request is automatically routed and assigned to a specific team or individual based on its attributes. By immediately notifying owners of new work, team members can hold each other accountable and ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

6. “We have a variety of stakeholders in Marketing, but we never got true buy-in and suffer from misalignment.”

Deficiency: Insufficient on-boarding failed to create organizational alignment and underestimated the change management required to modernize and facilitate true Marketing transformation. Over-course- correction now has some vendors prescribing expensive, time-consuming, in-person workshops that severely delay time-to-value.

Solution: To strike the right balance between up-front work and time-to-value. This requires Marketing Content Advisors and change management consultants, not just platform implementation specialists. The strategic and consultative relationship between client and provider should begin before onboarding to identify goals and objectives, address current pain points and challenges, and outline shared objectives and KPIs (for both parties).

At NewsCred, we employ RISO (Rapid Implementation Service Offering), an onboarding methodology focused on achieving faster time-to-value through incremental and phased deployments, coupling our platform and expertise. This begins with defining the MVP (to achieve time-to-value within 7 days), identifying key onboarding milestones (to set the foundation for and streamline scalability), and planning ongoing adoption milestones (to support the core team during the rollout for continuous adoption). This continues throughout the entire engagement to ensure alignment and facilitate client success.

The reality, of course, is that teams shouldn’t face these deficiencies.

New innovations in CMPs are becoming a catalyst for Marketing Transformation, and today’s best-in-class solutions are built with the necessary integrations, purpose-built features, and data-driven tools that help unlock the true potential of global, enterprise Marketing organizations. Instead of ‘making do’ and creating workarounds, marketers should be focused on deploying modern, integrated strategies — and the technology should be the driver in those efforts.

That’s exactly why NewsCred developed the Integrated Marketing Edition of our Content Marketing Platform — and complimentary Integrated Marketing Advisory Services — to become a centralized workspace for Marketing planning, content creation, distribution, reporting, and measurement, as well as help empower teams to work better together on a single platform in order to elevate the performance of Marketing.

If you’re interested in learning more, request a meeting with one of our experts.

Read more: How Every Marketer Can Learn Basic Project Management Skills (And Why They Should)