Optimizely Content Marketing Platform vs. PathFactory

I think it's really well suited for organizations that have either big marketing teams that are scattered across different regions and different time zones because it helps everyone be aligned in terms of what is happening at any given time. That to me is one of the best things it can offer. The second thing is the management of the processes. You are not constantly reinventing the wheel when you work in marketing, you tend to have a process for doing certain jobs. For example, if you need to do an email or if you need to do a webinar, you will know what steps you need to take in order to deliver that. If you have lots of stakeholders that need to review things and need to approve things before they can go live, the CMP is the best tool for this because it keeps track of everything that is happening. You can assign steps to your legal team or your regulatory team and they have to go into the platform, be able to review whatever it is that you need them to review or approve. It keeps track of when that happened. There's no guesswork. You eliminate having to send things by email, by teams, by smoke signals. It's all in one place and if you ever needed to go back into things, everything gets saved there as well. All your working files up to your final files are all saved within the platform. You can manage your versions, you can reuse things in the future. There's so many possibilities for it. It depends on what you're trying to do, but at bedtime, if I do anything, no matter what you're trying to do, you'll find the right application within the platform to be able to make your job alive easier.

Incentivized

It's a great tool if you want to create experiences on web and share content with your audience - especially if you want to create bingeable content. For a microsite, I would like to see more modules that build up a page, and great examples for inspiration

Incentivized

• Customer Service: They'll contact you with a "we're looking at your issue" email within the hour, even on weekends and holidays. Beyond solving your issues/problems with the software, they'll also follow up later to make sure you don't have additional associated issues.
• Live Analytics: You're given a snapshot of how your blog content is doing at any point in time, since they've been tracking your posts/content. You can compare this month's traffic to last year's trafffic during this same month. Other data points include: Unique Visitors, Average Attention Time, Pageviews, Engagement Rate, etc...and you'll even get referral traffic source. There's much more that I'm leaving out here.
• CMP User Interface (UI): Love the easy to use interface to upload blog posts, to use for editing and publishing content, and broadcasting social shares. Besides easily identifiable icons, you can create/edit content in the WYSIWYG or use the html view to make sure everything looks exactly how you prefer. Another cool thing is that the CMP auto-embeds live links of social updates (like Youtube, Twitter, Instagram) for more dynamic blog posts.

Incentivized

• Create Visually appealing performance report
• Give more in-depth information about performance metrics than most alternatives
• Ability to track performance over time and compare this performance across time periods
• Provide and send auto-run reports to top level management based on predefined criteria and timeframes

Incentivized

• In my opinion, there are too many notifications, making it difficult to manage and figure out which ones are necessary and which ones are not.
• I feel workflows are over engineered.
• For medium-sized organizations, the tool is overly complicated and requires a significant investment to optimize it.

Incentivized

• Microsite was very hard to build ourselves. Changing the site can be really confusing and is not always intuitive. We have trouble knowing how to update items to get it to work the way we want it to.
• Better instructions on how to customize tracks and use the different tools.
• Users that come in without UTM parameters should still be included in all data reporting.
• The reporting is confusing.

Incentivized

We have seen a lot of value from our team's use of Path Factory. We also like working with this vendor as they actually take our feedback and implement it on their roadmap. A great vendor with a great product

Incentivized

As a Content Operations Manager, I find the customizable task views and calendar views to be most helpful in the Plan Module. This allows me to have visibility into each team's overdue tasks, and determine where my time is best allocated to help in content production. The Library is a easy to access and highly used function as well for sharing assets across teams

Incentivized

Overall, I think the tool is fairly easy to use to get a basic content uploaded to create a track and even the more complicated features become easier once you become familiarised with the process

Incentivized

I have not experienced any prolonged outages. From time to time there will be errors but nothing that significantly slows down production

Incentivized

I think there was only one time where we had issues reaching our account manager, otherwise PathFactory was always willing to hop on the phone to talk through strategy, to work through issues, and help build custom solutions to fit our needs. Customer service is a big selling point of PathFactory.

Incentivized

Optimizely Content Marketing Platform's performance is generally good. Nothing that has impacted production. Page load speed doesn't typically lag longer than a few seconds. Reports take some time but not any longer than we're used to with other platforms. We have not experienced lag when integrating with other platforms

Incentivized

The analytics and reports feature is fairly new and have proved very popular with many areas of our business and is growing in popularity. The metrics that are attainable are very insightful and provides a clear picture on the performance of the track.

Incentivized

The NewsCred team is very responsive and helpful with any technical issues.

Incentivized

Working with the Solutions Consultants is amazing. They are extremely knowledgeable and willing to go way above and beyond - ie working in our Marketo instance to trouble shoot form issues. Love having access to chat the support team in-app. CSMs are knowledgeable and we also get to draw on the expertise of marketers inside PathFactory

Incentivized

I was able to browse around the tool quite easily once some basic training was given. I learnt much from using those method and only needed further help when wanting to learn about Reports, External codes and adding forms.

Incentivized

Training was clear and concise. It was intuitive and helped me understand how to navigate the platform. Options to dive in on each action or skip to learn about areas of regular use. Resource links available to when I had additional questions or needed more training in a specific area. Overall, the training allowed me to use the platform without interruption

Incentivized

The customer service, from technical through to customer success, is one of the biggest reasons I'd recommend PathFactory. This is true of their training. It can be as bespoke as you like, at least in my experience, and the team is always willing (where possible) to incorporate your suggestions.

Incentivized

Any implementation of a tool like PathFactory is going to be a heavy lift in terms of organization, strategy, tracking, and execution. However, we on boarded at a time where a lot of what we wanted to do with PathFactory had to be custom built, from CTA buttons to matching the brand to the landing page look, it took a ton of work and a lot of time from other departments to execute and to feel truly “ready.”

Incentivized

I use mainly Microsoft Dynamics, CRM, customer insights, journeys for marketing, email automation or marketing automation. I use Seismic. We're looking to launch an events platform, which I'm not using yet, but that will be a tool that I will want to integrate with the other systems I'm using. Customer Insights Journeys is probably the biggest other tool that I use that I'm trying to be an SME in.

Incentivized

I used Uberflip in a past company. I think they are pretty comparable. From what I remember, Uberflip was more intuitive to use, but I think PathFactory might have more capabilities. Although this was years ago, I am not aware of Uberflip's functionality now. I have had good experiences with both.

Incentivized

Optimizely is generally a reliable platform for A/B testing and digital experience management. It's helpful for it's stability, flexibility, and comprehensive features, which is helpful when managing an enterprise website

Incentivized

Pathfactory is growing in popularity amongst individuals from different parts of the organisation and it would be difficult to forecast how scalable this can become

Incentivized

• It certainly has helped. I think there is guardrails in how you use CMP, what you are putting in. It needs to be the right way of how you want to work, otherwise you're going to create a mess within CMP. So creating that framework outside and implementing it into the system I think is quite important. Again, that's our way of working, but I think it has helped us.

Incentivized

• Simple and consistent landing pages without needing web or design teams. Huge time saver for us and helps our team be more efficient.
• Searchable, filterable collateral library for internal use. Again, this helps us be more efficient and also makes sure that teams have the right and updated resources, as that's been hard to manage.
• Providing a method for reps to provide curated content to prospects without Marketing intervention. Helping push deals down the funnel.

Incentivized