With new platform, content management provider DNN adds content marketing to its resume

(Updated subscription info at 10:25AM PT, 1.27.15)

DNN, long known as a provider of content management systems and communities, is now a content marketing company.

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The evolution is marked by the release today of Evoq 8.0, the newest version of its central product. The Evoq platform, which includes CMS and Social, has about 2,000 customers globally and powers over 800,000 websites.

“Before, we were a content management company,” CEO and president Navin Nagiah told VentureBeat. “With 8.0, [we’re] a content marketing company, [where we] push content to any online channel and measure the effectiveness of that content.”

New features include real-time personalization based on visitors’ profiles, rule-based content distribution, and built-in integrations to marketing automation platform Marketo and cloud storage platforms Box and Dropbox.

There are also new capabilities for offering promotions and sharing opportunities to brand fans, and analytics indicating which content led to sales.

A content distribution system can now push content with metadata to Salesforce, in addition to the previous ability to push to websites, microsites, Facebook, Twitter, and branded communities.

DNN now sees content marketing and engagement as part of a redefinition, not only of itself but of the category.

“Content management is not just about managing a website,” Nagiah told us, “but about managing content throughout the buyer’s journey.”

“The website is an anchor point, [and] as a customer engagement platform, we take content to the customer — wherever they are.”

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DNN is making this transition rather late in the game, at a point when there are a number of tools for content marketing. But Nagiah said that “the domain is not as mature as marketing automation,” and there are still opportunities.

As one example, he noted that content is often stored in multiple locations, and “there is no standard repository” for many brands.

To deal with that, version 8.0 offers a single interface for managing content in multiple repositories, whether in Dropbox, Amazon Web Services, internal servers, or wherever.

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Key competitors, he said, include Sitecore and the Adobe Marketing Cloud.

“We don’t do all the things Adobe does,” he noted, but “the difference is that we’re focused on the mid-market.”

Dennis Shiao, DNN’s director of marketing, said his company defines the mid-market as companies “in a range of $50 million to $3 billion in annual revenue,” for whom the $20,000 annual subscription for DNN’s CMS, communities tool, and content marketing “is well within their budget.”