Best Content Experience Platforms

What are Content Experience Platforms?

Content experience platforms allow companies to create various types of content, often with an emphasis on interactive and personalized content, to help engage their audience or web visitors. This content is typically served to a specific audience segment, or made available for a group of users to self-serve. This type of software is closely related to content marketing software. The types of content businesses can create with content experience platforms include:

• Video

• Audio

• Images

• Articles

• Ebooks & white papers

• Infographics

• Newsfeeds

• Interactive content (e.g. quizzes, surveys, polls, calculators)

• Chatbots

• Ecommerce product recommendations

• Websites or blogs

These tools enable businesses to store content assets and segment them by use case, target persona, or even engagement level. Other core competencies of content experience platforms include publishing content and tracking user engagement with different types of content. Some products also include robust content performance analytics capabilities.

Certain content experience or content creation products are more focused on marketing end-users, while others are more focused on designer and web-builder end-users. For example, PathFactory, Outgrow, Uberflip, and Ion by Rock Content are all more focused on marketing and sales use cases. On the other hand, products like Weld and Ceros are more focused on designer and web-builder use cases.

Benefits of Content Experience Platforms

The primary goal content experience software helps marketers and designers achieve is creating personalized and engaging content for their users, customers, or a broader audience. Users that are more engaged with a brand’s content are more likely to take an action aligned with a specific business outcome. For example, they may be more willing to sign up for a webinar, download a whitepaper, sign up for an email newsletters, or even make a purchase. These actions often map to business outcomes like:

• increased conversions on CTAs

• lead generation from things like form fills or webinar attendee lists

A secondary goal that content experience platforms help marketers achieve is increased content ‘SEO goodness’. I.e. creating content that resonates more with users and thus starts ranking higher on search engine result pages (SERPs) or ranking for more/better keywords. This helps bring in more traffic to the brand’s website and increase their brand awareness and authority.

Content Experience Platform Features

Most content experience platforms will include the following features:

• Content organization (e.g. content tags or taxonomy)

• Content repository or hub

• Content creation

• Drag-and-drop content editor

• Content personalization

• Content publishing

• Tracking user engagement with content

• Content performance tracking

• User engagement data collection

• Content self-service tools

• Integration with third-party systems (e.g. CRM, Marketing Automation, CMS, Email Marketing, etc.)

Content Experience Platform Comparison

Before deciding to invest in one content experience platform over another, consider the following key factors:

• Integrations: Does the platform integrate well with the other marketing, sales, or design software you’re business is using? Does it also integrate with the different digital channels and endpoints you push content out to (e.g. social media channels, messaging apps, web apps, mobile apps)?

• Scalability: How many new content experiences will you be creating and publishing per week or month? Will the platform be able to meet the content needs of your marketing and/or sales departments? Make sure the product you’re considering can keep up with the content creation, publishing, and tracking demands of your business.

• Customer support: Does the product you're considering come with good customer support? For example, are there multiple methods of contacting the support team (e.g. webchat, phone, email, etc.)? What is the support rating of the product on review websites like TrustRadius? What do current customers have to say about their experience with support?

Start a content experience platform comparison.

Pricing Information

Most content experience platform vendors charge either on a monthly or yearly basis. The price range for this type of software can vary quite a bit, depending on the number of user licenses required and the number of features included. Some vendors also charge per piece of content created or place a limit on the number and type of content pieces that can be produced on certain business plans. The cost per month can start as low as $25/mo. for one user and range up to $500/mo. or more for 10+ user licenses.