Ashlee Sierra

How do you feel about New Year’s resolutions?

I don’t mean going to the gym, packing more protein or eating less carbs. I want to know about your marketing goals and efforts.

Maybe you’ve kicked off previous years determined to invest in better marketing tools, launching more data-driven marketing campaigns, learning more about content creation or becoming everyone’s favorite brand on social media.

No matter what those resolutions were or how much progress you’ve made since, it’s never too late to adopt renewed marketing perspectives.

And it all starts with a marketing performance platform that’s capable of uniting every data source, marketing channel and member of your marketing team.

Performance Marketing Platforms: The Whats and the Whys

They say having a workout buddy or personal trainer can keep you motivated to go to the gym — a big deal when you’re trying to keep promises you made to yourself. As it turns out, there’s a similar rule for marketing resolutions at any time of the year. 

The only difference is that your motivation isn’t coming from a friend. It’s coming straight from your competition.

That’s right: With 82% of organizations planning to perfect their marketing tech stack, everyone else’s digital marketing is about to get a huge boost. Plus, nearly half of marketers are planning to use better data to create personalized content — so the competition for your audience’s attention is officially on. 

As multi-channel campaigns become the norm, the pressure to use marketing analytics tools that aggregate data collection from search, email, influencer marketing and social media continues to grow.

Fortunately, the right marketing performance platform can help you step up to the plate on all these fronts and then some, delivering a user-friendly interface and customizable dashboards that make data-driven decisions second nature.

What Is a Performance Marketing Platform?

In many ways, a marketing performance platform — sometimes called a “performance marketing” platform — is the Swiss Army Knife of a data-driven world. It acts as a marketing hub, campaign monitor, shared workspace and more, bringing your most important functions into one place

Better yet, you can easily customize it to fit into your workflow — and that’s control without the coding, so your IT team can kick back and relax.

While every digital marketing platform is different, here are some of the top things it should be capable of:

  • Helping you manage digital assets to support multi-channel marketing strategies.
  • Providing insight into calendars, planned dates, task activity and more with real-time reporting so marketing teams can adjust resources on the fly.
  • Putting the marketing team’s communication in one place, improving customer support and cross-functional collaboration.
  • Tracking and managing resources across multiple marketing campaigns, ensuring every channel is properly staffed.
  • Measuring campaign performance with marketing analytics tools that turn raw marketing data into actionable insights.
  • Integration with your favorite tools, such as Google Analytics or Semrush, so data sources stay connected and consistent.

Remember, while it’s just one piece of content marketing software in a constellation of interrelated tools, this kind of platform can be your North Star. It can guide you with real-time data, data protection compliance and a clear view of every marketing cloud integration.

Why Do You Need One?

If you’ve ever had to keep track of a bunch of little utensils in your junk drawer, you know the value of a Swiss Army Knife. The same is true for marketing tools. You want all that functionality, but you don’t want to constantly switch interfaces, remember tons of passwords, move data back and forth and — worse yet — pay for redundant features.

A performance marketing platform integrates performance management practices, often through iPaaS solutions, to solve all those problems efficiently and ensure seamless tool integration. It’s your one-stop shop for every marketing task, from ideation to publication. 

It also provides a framework to keep those responsibilities on track and on time. Perhaps most importantly, it helps contextualize all of this in a world of fast-moving customer data and marketing analytics, helping ensure that every move you make is pushing in the right direction.

Basically, to reach new heights in 2026 and beyond, you need one of these bad boys — especially if you want your marketing cloud, CRM and analytics platform to work together without a hitch.

The Top 10 Marketing Platforms

You’re about to fall in love with a content marketing platform (CMP) — or maybe 10.

How do I know this? Simple: I’m using one as I type this. And if you can take this content writer (with 40 tabs of research, several individual thesauruses and multiple computer monitors) and get her to use just one tool, then you know you’ve got something special. 

Check out the top 10 marketing platforms and what makes them unique:

1. The Brafton Content Marketing Platform

Remember when I said I’m using a digital marketing platform right now? I’ll give you 10 guesses as to which one it is. And that’s not because I’m biased. It’s because Brafton’s platform has everything I need — and everything our entire team needs — to do what we’re best at, from campaign performance tracking to cross-department collaboration.

Key Features

Real-Time Resourcing Views

Zoom in and out to get the resourcing information you need. You can look at an individual’s workload and task distribution or compare numbers across entire departments to ensure you’re right where you need to be. Plus, the user-friendly visual design makes it all possible at just a glance, helping managers optimize marketing campaigns without leaving the dashboard.

Shared Task Calendars

Brafton’s platform helps you visualize projects based on their due date, scheduled dates and how long it will take to complete them. Not to mention how they overlap with other projects, too. 

Color-coded markers help you keep track of task status, while clickable titles immediately bring you to specific details and related assets. That means you can see every individual step of a project, even when it’s spread between multiple individuals or teams.

Customizable Workflow Templates

Our system intelligently creates workflows for your projects, managing departments, contributors and due dates so you don’t have to. You can also customize steps for a specialized project or tweak the details as things change (which they always do in the fast-paced world of marketing).

Digital Asset Management

Our system automatically archives every piece of content ever created, from notes and outlines to drafts and finished pieces. It’s an infinite library at your fingertips, and you can search it all in just a few clicks — a huge advantage when you need historic marketing data to inform new strategies.

Performance Tracking

Don’t just integrate with Google Analytics, Semrush and all your other tools — bring that data to life and use it in every marketing campaign. You can track performance metrics such as users and sessions, all side-by-side with the related projects.

Manage all your marketing

From just 1 tab on your browser with the Brafton Platform.

2. Hubspot

The Hubspot Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform enables you to streamline and manage tasks that will keep your customers loyal, while its marketing cloud capabilities ensure seamless data collection across touchpoints.

Key Features

  • Meeting scheduler: Simplify scheduling and sync to Google and Office 365 Calendars.
  • Email template builder: Build and personalize templates to make email marketing more efficient.
  • Live chat software: Connect with website visitors in real-time.
  • AI email writer: Harness the power of AI to write clean, compelling emails in less time and keep marketing campaigns on-brand.

3. Semrush

With more than 50 tools and features, the Semrush platform is a great opportunity to combine your search engine optimization (SEO) needs in one place.

Key Features

  • Keyword research tools: Plan your SEO campaign with the right keywords and metrics.
  • SERP tracking: Find out where your pages land in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
  • Advertising research: Learn how to optimize paid search ads with targeted tools.
  • Social media management: Take your social media content marketing to the next level with personalized strategies and real-time reporting that connects performance data with actionable insights.

4. Google Analytics

From marketing automation to cross-platform data, Google Analytics has a little bit of everything — plus Google expertise at your disposal.

Key Features

  • A suite of tools: Use Google Ads, Google Cloud, Google Search Console and more of your favorite tools all in one place for seamless multi-channel attribution.
  • Real-time reporting: Monitor activity and gather insights right as they’re happening, enabling swift, data-driven decisions.
  • Advertising workspace: Understand the return on investment (ROI) of your advertising investments across different channels.
  • Data management: Securely import and leverage first-party data while maintaining data protection best practices.

5. AnyTrack

Built for ad tracking and attribution, the AnyTrack platform helps you do more with your data.

Key Features

  • Lead gen funnels: Track every funnel stage and plan better campaigns.
  • Engagement tracking: Find out where users are engaging with you and why, using real-time data to adjust your marketing strategies.
  • Integration: Bring eCommerce apps, affiliate networks and other everyday tools together through a user-friendly interface.

6. LeadDyno

If you’re looking for an affiliate marketing solution, LeadDyno might be a good place to start. Its customizable dashboards help partners view performance metrics at a glance.

Key Features

  • Integrations: Use PayPal, HubSpot, WordPress and more.
  • Recruitment processes: Streamline onboarding for better affiliate relationships and influencer marketing opportunities.
  • Reporting and analytics tools: Get granular data so you can pivot where necessary.

7. Tapfiliate

Tapfilliate is another affiliate marketing solution built to integrate seamlessly into your website and broader marketing cloud stack.

Key Features

  • Tracking: Keep an eye on both offline and online sales with coupons and links.
  • Automated recruitment: Referral programs and other solutions make marketing automation simpler than ever.
  • Flexible commissions: Customize settings to make every relationship unique.

8. Rebrandly

With Rebrandly, you can customize URLs and links for better brand awareness and access.

Key Features

  • Custom domain options: Create your unique web identity with URL tools.
  • Tracking features: Use your links to track clicks and gather valuable insights, turning every touchpoint into valuable marketing data.
  • Link shortener: Rebrandly’s link shortener helps optimize links for better results.

9. Voluum

This cloud-based ad tracker combines different datasets to contextualize and improve your campaigns, drawing on multiple data sources for a holistic view.

Key Features

  • Marketing analytics: Track ads of different kinds across multiple channels for a more complete view.
  • Integrated AI: Voluum can send ad traffic to the web locations that perform the best, boosting conversion rates through data-driven insights.
  • Fraud solutions: Detect and reject bots and other fraudulent actors or activities, protecting budget and data integrity.

10. Everflow

Last but not least, Everflow is a partner marketing platform that makes growth more achievable than ever.

Key Features

  • Payment management: Customize terms and complete invoices in seconds.
  • Ad placement review: Learn which ads perform the best and which aren’t delivering results.
  • Full analytics: Integrated tools combine conversion, performance, engagement and other data types for a full view.

Actionable Insights With Brafton

When it comes to marketing performance platforms, you have many options. But if you want to set and keep solid 2026 marketing resolutions, from streamlined content creation to more reliable communication, it’s time to try the Brafton Content Marketing Platform. 

Our CMP unifies data collection, analytics and execution, giving you exactly what you need to turn raw information into future-proof strategies.

See you on the CMP!

Editor’s Note: Updated November 2025