Optimizely Content Marketing Platform

Score7.3 out of 10

81 Reviews and Ratings

What is Optimizely Content Marketing Platform?

Optimizely Content Marketing Platform brings teams together in a single, AI-powered workspace to share plans, collaborate on assets and execute campaigns.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Screenshot of Marketing Work Request Prioritization. This streamlines and prioritizes marketing requests with dynamic intake forms, automatic routing, and integrated workflows to ensure that requested work gets completed.

Screenshot of Digital Asset Management. With Optimizely Content Marketing Platform's integrated asset repository, marketers can upload, organize, and share assets within the same platform where content planning, creation, and collaboration take place.

Screenshot of a Visual Calendar. Optimizely's Content Marketing Platform provides visibility into marketing activities - from content to events to campaigns - with flexibility to support changing timelines.

Screenshot of the Calendar. This offers visibility into planned and scheduled content and campaigns with the ability to save and share views.

1 / 5

Screenshot of Opal, Optimizely's AI, which acts as an extension to the marketing workforce. Use cases include building comprehensive campaign and content briefs, suggesting how to best execute a campaign, creating on-brand content for any channel and providing suggestions for ongoing optimization.

Competitive analytics
Provides a view on competitors' content performance and/or strategy for comparison.
Category average: 8.3
Content distribution
Allows users to push content to different channels, such as social media or websites, from within the tool. This may be handled via integrations.
Category average: 8.1
Audience profiling and targeting
Determines profiles—types that can be used for segmentation—based on audience behavior or demographics. Helps deliver targeted content via website personalization and/or marketing automation campaigns.
Category average: 8

Content promotion
Includes tools for promoting content by connecting to paid and earned media channels.
Category average: 8.1
Network for content licensing/production
Includes access to a database of content that can be licensed or a talent network for licensed content production.
Category average: 7.3
Forms / Gated content
Users can set up forms for lead generation, which can be used to gate content. Forms may pop-up (to gate the site itself) or prompt users to register for a download.
Category average: 9.3

Idania Borrero-Knight

Global Digital Planning Manager in Marketing at Ingredion Incorporated (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use the CMP to manage all our marketing activities, so from the planning to the execution. Anything that we produce that has a customer facing asset, be it an email, a web page, a landing page, or a brochure, all gets managed through the platform. We use it to make sure that everything is centralized and also that all our teams are aligned and they know at any given point, what are we working on, what the deadlines are, what projects are dependent of one another. With the global organization, it's very hard to keep everyone in line. The CMP allows us to be able to do that.

Pros

The CMP really is useful for us not only to manage the processes behind how we create content that we serve in different platforms like websites, landing pages, emails, social media, but it also help us as a team that is scattered around the globe to be able to be connected all the time to be able to see what we're working on, to be able to share assets as well. We are not reinventing the wheel to be able to show to other people within the organization what is happening at any given point. We use it not only for assets now, but we use it also for things like planning our webinars, planning our face-to-face events, so it truly is the heart of our marketing organization within the business.

Cons

I'm not sure if this is room for improvement for the platform as such, but it's definitely an area of improvement for us. At the moment, there's a lot of talk around AI. There is Opal AI that has been added to the platform. I think that's the first platform from Optimizely that was given access to Opal and we've been very slow in adopting it, mainly for a couple of reasons, lack of knowledge, lack of resource. We are just starting to scratch the surface with that. So to us that's a big opportunity now to explore how Opal can help us not only streamline some of our processes, but also help us with repetitive tasks that perhaps are taking us a long time to do that are not necessary for a person to be sitting there and doing them that potentially can do for us. So we're excited about that.

Return on Investment

I think a lot of those things do apply, but more importantly I guess is just being able to have that single one voice as a business where there's no interpretation. Everything is managed centrally now, and we can then bypass that on to all our regions. We are all having the same brand, the same messaging. That has improved a lot in the past. They used to do their own thing and there was a central message over here, but then it was being interpreted differently depending on each region. We managed to get rid of all of that by having everything centralized in the platform.
We also are able to be very transparent with regards how long things may take to complete and also who's doing what. We know what team needs to do some steps within a particular process and how that may affect the next team that needs to come along. It has improved the communication between teams as well and the understanding between one team and another in terms of how long they need, why their processes may be a little bit more complex, how they all come together. They are one team in the end, even though they're working outbound or inbound. In reality, they're all delivering towards one goal. That to me is one of the best attributes of the platform is that it brings that uniformity if you like, to everything that we do and that transparency to understand how we all work together.

Usability

Malay Patel

Chief Operating Officer in Corporate at DotcomWeavers (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I’ve been using Optimizely Content Marketing Platform to manage everything from campaign briefs to final reporting. We also use it for blog submissions and consent tracking with CMP.

Pros

i like that I can structure everything—briefs, dialogue, assets—all in one place
the workflows and templates really help when we’re managing content across two continents
the direct contact with the Optimizely team is great—they actually listen and act on our feedback, like with Task Templates

Cons

it's not very flexible when I need to make quick changes
it was very challenging to set up at first

Return on Investment

it simplified content creation by reducing the number of tools we used—everything is centralized now
it made it easier to assign tasks and keep projects moving from idea to publication
we’re not missing deadlines anymore and our strategy is more consistent

Usability

Other Software Used

Certificate Authority Service by Google Cloud, Microsoft Access, Adobe Analytics

Michelle Grainger

Content Strategist in Marketing at CIPD (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Optimizely Content Marketing Platform for content management and collaboration

Pros

manage the process via shared teams

Cons

it can be restrictive when creating campaigns and views

Return on Investment

improved collaboration and visibility

Usability

Zach Reisler

Associate Manager Email Marketing in Marketing at Epson America Inc. (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We wanted to know which types of landing pages we had were performing better than others. The AB testing feature helped us figure it out by showing us traffic and objective metrics that proved that one page layout and version of copy was better than another. Would recommend to all.

Pros

AB Testing
Analytics
Ecommerce

Cons

Too expensive.
Personalization
AI

Return on Investment

Helped us grow revenue by 15%.
Reduced FTE hours building pages.
Idea to finished product in no time.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill), Sender and Klaviyo

Other Software Used

Salesforce Marketing Cloud, MailCharts from Validity, Bazaarvoice

Verified User

Manager in Marketing (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The way that we use it is to manage campaigns efficiently for the marketing team. So for example, if you have an email automation request, instead of doing it via the normal Word brief, you would send a brief via Optimizely. The relevant personal team would get that request. For example, if it's email automation in customer insights, which is a Microsoft tool, I would get that request and it would say email type design, everything associated with the brief and how that email should look, including the delivery. We would want to manage that all via Optimizely so that it's clear what all the tasks are when we need to meet them. And then we include approvals as well. It's about automating our workflows so they're all contained in one system and we can manage those requests, prioritize them, and make sure that we have a one stop review of everything that's going on in marketing. But the email automation was just one example. You might have a request for a brochure or for a social media post or a web post. We've got a whole range of requests that marketing have, but the content management platform is a way to host the brief for each type.

Pros

It allows the user to create as many briefs as they want for different type of requests. So if you are a team that wants to break things down into lots of different pieces and you want to request for everything, it does that. Or you could group things under four categories and then that's enough. It just gives you that flexibility to design plan and deliver that's suitable to the team and to the firm.

Cons

At the moment, whilst there's flexibility for designing briefs and workflows for a financial services firm, there isn't on the other side enough restriction and controls. I want to be able to control the list of approvers so that only certain SMEs can approve a brief that comes through. At the moment, that request goes to a whole group of people instead of individual. I've seen other tools where you have a dropdown of people you can choose from and at the moment optimizely does not have that flexibility. I would say that overall we need better ways of using data and governance specific to the firm to have more controls around those workflows. It's great for collaborating and managing campaigns, but when it comes to controls, I think there's definitely lack there. Hence why our particular project has been brought to a halt and we can't meet a deadline for November. I think if the tool had more flexibility around that, then it'll be great.
At the moment, I think Optimizely is, it seems to have a generic setup for every type of firm versus honing down on, right? If you're a financial services type of firm, you probably want these requirements and this kind of setup, if that makes sense, because you are going to get clients who want to refine and customize workloads and campaigns specific to their use, but they don't want it on a request basis. They want it to be available from the get go. And there's a misunderstanding that Optimizely already offers that and that's not so clear. I think on a high level, yes, it does offer great things, but when it comes to the finer detail, it needs more work compliance. I think compliance and approvals is the biggest question mark that I've seen at the moment.

Return on Investment

I think the main setback has been these constraints, strengths, the fundamental one being around governance and controls. And we were very excited to launch in November alongside another vendor, which we've now gone into contingency unfortunately. So we've got to work on a backup model, which is not ideal. And I think it just validates the skepticism, which is a shame for me because I need to, with Optimizely in some ways, resell the, and so actually was a good decision to implement. So it does take us a few steps back, but hopefully a few steps back is 10 forward and maybe I think this kind of interim period is good for everyone because there's been so much question around the workflows and a lot of confusion around what this tool can actually do, but sometimes I think we get lost in the detail, so hopefully this interim period will help us just reset and look at the bigger picture.