Tools & Technology – Curata Blog

Ultimate Guide to Online Content Marketing Courses

Sasha Laferte — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 15:06:52 +0000

Content marketing is a relatively new – and quickly evolving – profession. It’s not likely that you went to college and majored in content marketing. In fact, few colleges offer digital marketing courses, let alone a content marketing degree. And because content marketing requires proficiency in such a variety of skills – from audio and video editing to writing compelling content to statistical analysis – even professionals who have a background in marketing struggle to become expert in this diverse field. Content marketing is expected to be a 300-billion-dollar industry by 2019. With that in mind, now is the time to invest further in your marketing skills and register for online content marketing courses.

Despite the fact that 86 percent of brands have adopted content marketing practices, 82 percent of marketers say they’re not receiving training – WrittenT

To start learning right away, check out our content marketing expert series below.

No matter what level of experience you have – whether you’ve been in the industry for a while or are looking to break in—creating a plan for growing your career expertise is beneficial.

Pam Didner, Content Marketing Consultant, Author, Speaker | @PamDidner

Having a plan is a good starting point. At the end of the day content marketing is about getting your hands dirty. Start producing different types of content pieces and syndicate/promote them. Then, use analytics to optimize them. It’s a journey, my friends!

Fortunately, there are many online content marketing courses that provide content marketing knowledge for people of all levels. Whether you’re an experienced marketer looking to learn more about the latest trends or you’re a small business owner seeking ideas for how to use content marketing to advance your business, there’s a learning opportunity out there for you.

This article addresses some of the top online content marketing courses available today. It gives you details on courses that can fill in your knowledge gaps so you – and your content marketing – can be more successful.

How to Determine What Course Is Right for You

Before starting any online content marketing course, you should think about what your knowledge gaps are and what you would like to get out of the course. There are a variety of online content marketing courses designed for specific purposes, so you’re sure to find one that fits your specific goal.

General Understanding

A broad overview on best practices is the best choice for people who want to grow their overall understanding of content marketing. There are different types of overview programs available, depending on what you want to achieve with your knowledge:

Starting or Growing A Career in Content Marketing: If you’re looking to start or grow a career as a content marketer, look for a class that can give you full, in-depth understanding of all aspects of content marketing.

Many colleges and universities offer certificate programs in content marketing or have content marketing as part of an overall marketing certificate program. For example, Northwestern University allows you to specialize in content marketing and Cornell offers content marketing as part of an overall marketing certificate program. (more programs are listed later in this article.)

Professional Development: If you’re looking to take a class to build on the work you are currently doing in marketing or other parts of your organization, you can choose from a variety of online or in person seminars. These types of online content marketing courses will help you gain further insight into what content marketing is, how it is done, and what makes it successful. At these classes, you may also hear about a topic or idea that you’d like to learn more about in the deeper-dive class described above.
Introduction or Knowledge Enhancement: There a plenty of content marketing webinars offered by companies and professional association. While some of these webinars may have a sales pitch included with them, they will provide a good overview specific ideas or topics. A webinar can be a good start to developing your understanding of content marketing.

Knowledge on a Specific Topic

In addition to these broad overviews, you can also learn about a specific sub-topic of content marketing. These online content marketing courses focus on a specific area of content marketing, including:

SEO: Effective content writing for search engine optimization (SEO).
Paid Traffic: Learn how to make the most of your online advertising.
Social: Get the information you need to better leverage social media.
PR: Learn how fit public relations into your content marketing.
Metrics: Advice on how to analyze your results.

Andrew Davis, Bestselling Author & Keynote Speaker | @DrewDavisHere

Changing the way you measure the impact of your content marketing is one of the easiest ways to improve. Instead of measuring views, visits, leads, or downloads measure revenue per subscriber.

More details about specific classes are available later in the article.

Think carefully about how much time you can realistically put into a content marketing course. Also, consider how much time and resources you will have to implement what you learn after the course.

Sally Hubbard, Senior Editor, Tech Antitrust Enforcement, Host of Women Killing It! podcast | @Sally_Hubbard

I feel myself and so many people I know spend our days running, running, and rushing on the hamster wheel, but where you are going is not where you are meant to be going. It’s all a waste of time. We all tell ourselves we don’t have time, but what is more of a waste of time than killing yourself to get somewhere you don’t want to go?

If you have limited time and budget, taking an in-depth course so you can implement an entire content strategy might not be the best approach. Instead, take a seminar on starting a blog or creating a podcast. Implement these ideas into your business and grow from there.

Tap Into Your Content Marketing Software

If you use software to support your content marketing – or are looking into software – don’t overlook the software company’s educational offerings.

Many larger marketing software companies offer online content marketing courses for free. These courses will simultaneously teach you how to use their software and how to strategize your content marketing activity. Here are some examples:

HubSpot Academy: Offers a variety of courses and certifications for all levels and types of marketers.
Marketo: Get certified on Marketo’s own software or learn more about marketing operations, analytics, or demand generation.

Read more about the different content marketing software options.

How Much Are You Willing to Pay?

Costs for online content marketing courses range from free to thousands of dollars. Before determining how much to spend, consider what the ROI will be for the course.

If you already have a robust set of content marketing expertise, you probably don’t need an expensive course promising to teach you content marketing from the ground up. Alternatively, you don’t need an expensive analytics course if you have not yet started to create content.

Now that you’ve decided what type of content marketing course might be right for you, we’ve got a comprehensive list of resources you can choose from.

The Emergence of the Content Marketing Platform

Pawan Deshpande — Mon, 02 Oct 2017 14:02:58 +0000

There’s a movement to build a more cohesive and useable software platform that leverages marketing automation platforms (MAPs) and sales automation platforms (SAPs) to enable content marketers to drive more impact across their organizations: the Content Marketing Platform.

Although marketers have been practicing content marketing for decades, digital marketing coupled with a new, buyer 2.0 environment has created a whole new set of opportunities and challenges in the content marketing realm. This next generation of content marketing is producing significant dividends for marketers as they continue to invest in this effort to further drive leads and revenue. [source]

75% of marketers are increasing investment in content marketing
42% of companies have an executive responsible for content marketing, reaching 49% in 2017
Key process areas are being established such as content strategy, production (with an editorial calendar and workflow management), distribution and analytics.
57% of leading marketers predict an increase in marketing analytics spending.

There has been a mind-numbing proliferation of technology vendors and solutions to address the needs of content and digital marketers. Curata’s content marketing tools map has increased from 40 vendors to over 130 vendors in its most recent version.

What is a Content Marketing Platform?

Regardless of which market studies you look at, content marketers have the following evergreen challenges:

Limited budget for staff and program spend.
Creating enough quality content on a regular basis, whether in-house or externally sourced.
Distributing content across multiple channels, including publication and promotion.
Measuring the impact of content, i.e., what works and what doesn’t work to drive awareness, leads and sales enablement.

Content Marketing Platforms (CMPs) help marketers solve these challenges. A definition of a Content Marketing Platform is as follows:

A Content Marketing Platform is a software solution that helps marketers be more successful in driving awareness, leads and revenue from their content. This platform enables a data-driven, scalable, and multi-channel approach across four process areas: strategy, production, distribution (publication and promotion) and analytics.

A Vision for the Content Marketing Platform

The below framework provides additional details about the four key process areas addressed by a CMP. Ultimately, a CMP helps content marketers develop and execute an effective and efficient content marketing strategy.

The following frameworks offer additional perspectives as to what processes and related tactics are addressed by a Content Marketing Platform.

CMI’s Content Marketing Framework:

Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose assembled the framework based upon their own success at the Content Marketing Institute. These areas represent common elements of a high impact content marketing practice.

Content Marketing Framework for Startups:

Lee Odden, a thought leader in the content marketing space and CEO of TopRank Online Marketing, put together this simple to follow, yet powerful, framework for successful content marketing.

Content Marketing Use Cases & Subcategories:

Rebecca Lieb of Altimeter did a very thorough job identifying the more tactical areas required to fulfill three key use cases for content marketing: Feed the Beast, Refine (including content analytics, segmentation, and promotion), and Govern.

Content Marketing in 7 Steps:

Jay Baer of Convince and Convert put this framework together using the knowledge gained from helping many big brands form their own content marketing strategy. His seven-step approach helps kickstart the process of formulating a content strategy, a process he says can take up to 60 days.

8 Steps to Fast-Track Your Content Marketing Plan:

Content marketing expert and consultant Barry Feldman created a comprehensive post outlining this eight-step content marketing plan to quadruple your leads.

13 Step Content Marketing Plan:

Heidi Cohen, content marketing expert and President of Riverside Marketing Strategies, provides these 13 steps to successfully establishing a content marketing strategy:

Determine the goals for your content marketing plan.
Know your content marketing audience.
Incorporate your brand into your content.
Determine what information your audience seeks.
Tell your firm’s “once upon a time.”
Use different content formats.
Build an editorial calendar.
Make your content attractive to prospective readers.
Make your content findable.
Allocate sufficient resources.
Distribute content.
Promote content.
Measure content marketing results.

What a Content Marketing Platform Is—and What it Isn’t

There are countless tools available to help marketers work their way through each of the process areas and tactics described above. Only a small fraction of them however, have the mission of addressing most, or all of these areas in one solution. To help marketers navigate the sea of vendors across the content marketing technology space, here are some clarifications of what a CMP solution is and isn’t:

A content management system (CMS) for the web is NOT a Content Marketing Platform.

A CMS is designed to run web sites (e.g., corporate web sites, blogs, content repositories), and to avoid the need for manual coding. Their main function is to “store and organize files, and provide version-controlled access to their data.” [source] CMPs are designed to orchestrate the development, delivery, and analysis of content to CMSs, as well as many other types of digital media entities. A foundational element of a Content Marketing Platform is its ability to interact within an ecosystem of marketing teams, processes, and technologies, without being the sole hub for content delivery. Examples of CMSs include WordPress, Drupal, Joomla!, Percussion and Uberflip.

The value enabled by a CMP cannot be provided by a marketing automation platform (MAP) such as Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot, Act-On, etc. MAPs are designed to plan, execute, and measure demand generation campaigns and the interaction with leads from these campaigns. MAPs are lead-focused, not content-focused. However, MAP data is a key component of the value provided by a CMP, as detailed below.

A CMP provides interoperability with the various software systems that make up the marketing technology ecosystem, such as:
- Multiple CMSs
- Social channels or Social Media Management Systems
- Marketing Automation
- Sales Force Automation
- Content repositories: Ask anyone that has attempted to stop the use of SharePoint systems how likely it is you’ll get everyone to use only one content storage area. Therefore a CMP should—either today or as part of its roadmap—interoperate with different content repositories.
- Email as a method of collaboration amongst internal and external teams will not be replaced anytime soon. Attempting to get all parties involved in content marketing onto one system only reduces the potential for technology adoption. Therefore a CMP should interoperate with email applications, and be able to track communication about specific content pieces as part of orchestrating the content production process.

A CMP enables orchestration of the content production process in a minimally invasive manner.
- Team alignment: A high impact content marketing strategy requires alignment and interaction with many functions across marketing. For example, content marketers may have to interact with product marketing for content creation, social media for promotion, or marketing operations for analytics. A CMP enables collaboration across these different teams without requiring all of them log into the CMP, increasing its adoption and impact.
- Content creation tool: Some CMP vendors require content creation within their own platform, necessitating all content creators to be trained on system usage and to interact with it on a regular basis. Other CMP vendors track content creation progress in a less process-invasive manner, enabling the continued use of industry standard creation tools such as Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Microsoft PowerPoint, Google Spreadsheets, Photoshop, and WordPress.

CMPs are not limited to a specific content type or publishing environment, working with any:
- content format, e.g., video, text, images.
- type of content, e.g., ebooks, white papers, infographics, blog posts.
- source, e.g., created, curated, licensed, outsourced, crowdsourced content.
- distribution channels, e.g., paid, earned, owned.
- content internal to or external to the CMP.

A CMP enables the measurement of your content’s impact across awareness building (such as social channels, Google Analytics), demand generation (such as leads generated and influenced), and sales pipeline impact (such as sales opportunities generated and influenced). This is only possible if a CMP is capable of aggregating data from many applications, both within and external to your company. Even better is if a CMP can measure the pipeline impact of content published off-site on someone else’s blog or media property.

Where Should a Content Marketing Platform Sit in Your Marketing & Sales Technology Stack?

To understand how a CMP fits into your technology stack, begin with a basic question: What are the ultimate objectives of marketing and sales technologies? The bottom line—or should I say the top line, is REVENUE. That’s where our story begins.

The Advent of Sales Force Automation

Right around at the turn of the millennium there was a shift from the expensive, outbound sales model to inbound telephone and Internet-enabled sales. This change was driven by the advent of the Internet and the resulting online presentation tools such as WebEx, which effectively enabled salespeople to perform demonstrations of software and presentations—and ultimately close deals—without ever meeting their customers in person.

But the growth of insides sales teams was chaotic. Unlike outside sales people who each carry their own physical rolodexes, inside sales teams manage their leads in spreadsheets.

While this was a large advancement over the prior generation, it presented a host of new problems such as:

How are leads and territories assigned across a sales team?
Sales managers need to keep tabs on sales activities being performed by their teams.
A sales account executive needs to know what prior interactions a company has had with an account.
How can sales management easily report and predict their pipeline revenue across large and sometimes geographically distributed sales teams?

The solution to the above challenges was Sales Force Automation (SFA) platforms (often misidentified as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems) such as Salesforce, Oracle, Siebel, and Microsoft Dynamics among others. These systems:

Let sales managers hold their teams accountable in terms of their sales activities.
Offer transparency for reporting.
Provide a means to scale sales teams.

Most importantly, they provide value for the everyday sales representative: convenience, efficiency and a single unified interface as a source of leads, activities, and deals.

The Rise of Marketing Automation Platforms

With the growth of inside sales teams, there was increased demand for leads, particularly online-sourced leads, to feed these teams. Pressure rapidly shifted to marketing teams to create more and more leads.

Demand generation teams stepped in to help address this challenge, employing a variety of techniques such as email, newsletters, and events. Over the next few years, demand generation teams and related marketing disciplines faced a similar set of scaling challenges as the sales teams once had:

How do demand generation teams effectively manage marketing-generated leads?
How can marketing operations have a single unified view of all marketing leads and associated marketing activities against those leads?
What’s the best way for marketing to measure the effectiveness of their demand generation campaigns?

About seven years later in 2007 or so came another type of platform in the emerging stack: Marketing Automation Platforms (MAP) from vendors such as Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, Act-On and to some extent, HubSpot, amongst many others.

These platforms allowed marketers to:

Keep a single unified repository of all leads.
Track all digital marketing activities associated with those leads, be it on a website, via email, or through pay-per-click campaigns.
Easily push qualified leads into Sales Force Automation systems.

Suddenly, marketers now had insight, visibility and self-accountability for their lead generation and nurturing campaigns.

The Emergence of the Content Marketing Platform

SFA platforms fuel revenue by tracking and supplying sales opportunities and leads. Marketing Automation Platforms drive SFA by supplying marketing qualified leads. But what drives the marketing activities and leads of Marketing Automation Platforms? Content!

Content is the fundamental currency for marketing automation.

Like a car without gas, marketing automation can’t get very far without content.

Content is needed for everything from a website (which is tracked by marketing automation), to email campaigns, to even pay-per-click landing page offers.

If not for content, many of marketing automation’s key components would cease to function. Drip campaigns come to a halt if there is no content to drip to leads. Lead scoring would stop without content for a lead to browse on a site. With no content, many demand generation campaigns would come to a halt because there would be no enticing offers for many lead capture landing pages.

Content is crucial to the customer acquisition process—so what tools and technologies can support this? There are myriad content marketing tools out there. But there’s still a need for a Content Marketing Platform (CMP) that sits on top of the Marketing Automation Platform and Sales Force Automation system. A CMP needs to supply content downstream to generate and nurture leads, that are then converted to opportunities and revenue by sales.

Similar to the pains that demand generation and sales teams have gone through in the past, many of today’s content marketers have little accountability and transparency in terms of how their content is performing. Their content and the associated metadata is often warehoused and stored in multiple disparate systems and spreadsheets.

Much like its predecessors, a CMP enables content marketers to:

Have a unified, consolidated view of their entire content supply chain from ideation to production to promotion.
Have top-down visibility on how their content is impacting lead generation and marketing pipeline, and sales pipeline and revenue generation.

With a CMP, content marketing managers suddenly have a data-driven and scalable way of managing their content supply chain and understanding their contribution to business growth.

Where Does a Content Marketing Platform Sit in the Marketing Technology Ecosystem?

The following figure depicts the location of a CMP in the marketing technology ecosystem. There are certainly many other categories and vendors within this ecosystem. However, these are the most important integrations and/or handoffs that need to occur for effective implementation of content marketing.

Who Sells a Content Marketing Platform?

You can find a lot of companies that may appear to have Content Marketing Platforms from a cursory view of their website. However, many offer point solutions and are more aptly described as content marketing “software” vendors, and/or don’t meet the broader definition provided at the beginning of this post.

We have assembled a list of the current vendors who have begun to solidify the vision of a Content Marketing Platform. Each of the following companies is further defined according to different categories to make it easier to distinguish each company’s area of expertise.

B2B Content Marketing Platforms:

Curata CMP
The Curata CMP Content Marketing Platform is designed specifically for B2B marketers to help drive leads and revenue from content. Key components to find in Curata CMP include strategy, production (e.g., calendaring, workflow) and analytics.

Sample customers: Xerox, Lionbridge, RingLead, Yesler, Alcatel-Lucent
Pricing: Starting at $999/month

Kapost
Kapost’s Content Marketing Platform allows marketers to collaborate, distribute, and analyze all content types within a single platform.

Sample customers: LeadMD, ThermoFisher Scientific, AT&T, Dun & Bradstreet
Pricing: $3,500/month

Eloqua (formerly Compendium)
This was a startup company acquired by Oracle in 2013. It has now been absorbed into the Oracle Marketing Cloud under the product name Oracle Eloqua Content Marketing.

Sample customers: Eaton, Bass Pro Shops, Indiana University
Pricing: $2,000+/month

B2C Content Marketing Platforms:

Percolate
Percolate is a leading social relationship management platform that also offers unique content management capabilities for large B2C companies.

Sample customers: GE, Unilever, Chobani, Mastercard, Amtrak
Pricing: $5,000/month to $15,000/month

Newscred
NewsCred helps brands manage the entire content marketing process on one platform. By managing content creation, distribution and measurement, it enables vendors to scale and streamline the entire customer experience.

Sample customers: Pepsi, The Hartford, ConAgra Foods, VISA
Pricing: $2,950/month to $10,500+/month

Services-Oriented Content Marketing Platforms:

These companies by contrast, have a core value with content creation services that they either deliver or field to a marketplace of professionals. On top of the services, they have built content marketing software.

Skyword
Skyword’s motto is “Moving Stories. Forward.” Skyword provides access to a community of thousands of freelance writers and videographers, an editorial team, and program managers. The Skyword Platform makes it easy to produce, optimize, and promote content to create meaningful, lasting relationships.

Sample customers: New Balance, MasterCard, Stack, GMC
Pricing: Dependent on the volume of writing services needed

Contently
Contently meanwhile, helps you “tell great stories.” It helps leading brands build loyal audiences through premium, original content, and also offers software that lets marketers orchestrate content creation, approval, distribution, and measurement.

Sample customers: GE, American Express, IBM, Walmart
Pricing: $3,000 – $25,000 a month

The Future of Content Marketing Technology

The modern practice of content marketing has only recently begun to reach the masses. Organizations are beginning to staff their teams with content marketing experts, and processes are beginning to take shape to better tap into the power of a common focus (and investment) around content. The proliferation of content marketing vendors is therefore due to the many challenges (and opportunities) for marketers. In the future, the Content Marketing Platform will sit in the center of this technology landscape.

This will enable marketers to streamline their processes, and ultimately better scale content operations.

So, where to start? Look within your own organization to pinpoint specific needs. Do you have someone in place to lead content marketing? Have you developed a content marketing strategy in alignment with other parts of your organization? Are you using an editorial calendar to facilitate alignment and to help execute your strategy? Are you quantifying the return on your content marketing investment through more advanced metrics?

To help answer these questions and many more, download our free checklist to start scaling your content operations. This checklist will help you:

Define content marketing and build internal support
Develop a content marketing supply chain
Consolidate and integrate marketing applications

This post was co-written by Michael Gerard.

Why Artificial Intelligence Is the Future of Content Marketing

Paul Roetzer — Mon, 11 Sep 2017 15:00:04 +0000

In 2015 my marketing agency, PR 20/20, was struggling to create enough content at scale while maintaining quality, a challenge faced by many marketing organizations. At the same time, advancements in marketing AI (artificial intelligence) convinced me that machine-assisted content could be a possibility in the near future.

The big question I couldn’t get out of my mind was: Could my company automate and scale our content marketing activities using marketing AI to create greater value for our clients and efficiency for our business?

I heard the managing editor of the Associated Press and the CEO of Automated Insights talk about how the AP had automated the creation of its earnings reports using AI, and I knew we had to explore the technology further.

As we did, we learned not only how to better automate and scale content creation, but that marketing AI was about to transform content marketing forever.

Artificial Intelligence and Content Marketing

Consider how much time you and your team spend on mundane content marketing activities. Things like discovering keywords; planning blog post topics; writing, optimizing, personalizing and automating content; testing landing pages; scheduling social shares; reviewing analytics, and shaping content strategies.

Now imagine if a machine performed the majority of those activities and your primary role was to enhance rather than create. In fact, many solutions (including Curata) already exist to perform these tasks. And they free up marketers to perform higher-value activities and drive business performance.

This shift is possible thanks to artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence is the “science of making machines smart,” according to Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, an AI startup acquired by Google for north of $500 million in 2014. This, in turn, augments human knowledge and capabilities.

AI is an umbrella term to describe a suite of unique, but related, technologies at varying degrees of maturity. These include, among others, machine learning, deep learning, neural networks, natural language processing (NLP), and natural language generation (NLG).

Image: John Koetsier

Most machines function thanks to algorithms, a set of mathematical instructions that tells the machine what to do. Except with AI a machine can create its own algorithms, determine new paths, and unlock unlimited potential to advance marketing, business, and mankind.

Implications for Content Marketers

Today, marketers manually assemble workflows for later automation. If a visitor to a website downloads an ebook, then send them a three-part email nurturing campaign.

But what happens when the reality becomes more complex? What if there are 10,000 eBook downloads across five personas, originating from multiple channels (social, organic, paid, direct) that require personalized emails and website experiences based on user history?

The marketing automation that content marketers use today is, ironically, largely manual. These platforms do save time, increase efficiency and productivity, and drive performance. But they do not provide deep insights into data, recommend actions, predict outcomes, or create content.

Once you add artificial intelligence, however, the game changes completely.

C-3PO image courtesy Jiuguang Wang, with some rights reserved.

Disruption, Transformation, and Opportunity

Nearly 90 percent of all the data in the world has been created in the last two years thanks to the proliferation of the internet (and video). As a result, marketers (and everyone else) are drowning in information. Marketers have access to data from dozens of sources, such as social monitoring, web analytics, email, call tracking, sales, advertising, remarketing, and ecommerce.

Human beings, however, have a finite ability to process information, build strategies based on that information, and create content at scale. Artificial intelligence systems, in contrast, have an almost infinite ability to process data, and deliver predictions, recommendations, and content—better, faster, and cheaper.

And yet, content marketing remains largely human powered, with a bit of automation mixed in.

As other industries show however, the future may be closer than we think.

On Wall Street today, more than 60 percent of all trades are executed by AI with little or no real-time oversight from humans, according to Christopher Steiner in Automate This.

UPS leverages algorithms of staggering complexity to calculate all the possibilities for each of the 120 stops each of its drivers make per day (the number of possibilities has 180+ zeros).

Netflix suggests content and manufactures shows based on analysis of viewer data from its machine learning systems. In fact, 75 percent of what people watch on Netflix is from an algorithm-generated recommendation. Artificially intelligent algorithms also power Tesla self-driving cars, Apple voice assistants, and Amazon product recommendations.

Marketing is Next

Marc Benioff, CEO and founder of Salesforce, told Fortune that marketing is in an “AI spring,” and that “data science will fundamentally change how we run our business because we’re going to have computers aiding us in how we’re interacting with our customers.” In fact, the company is all-in on marketing AI, rolling out artificial intelligence capabilities across its entire product suite.

Marc Benioff image by Thomas Cloer with some rights reserved.

Facebook uses deep learning, an AI subfield, to filter your Newsfeed and recognize faces in the photos you upload. In the long term, Facebook seeks to “understand intelligence and make intelligent machines.”

Google’s head of artificial intelligence now leads the company’s search operations, indicating that the very organizational structure of the internet will depend on AI.

IBM possesses an estimated 825 AI-related patents. It built IBM Watson, a technology platform which leverages natural language processing and machine learning to reveal insights from large amounts of unstructured data. (Watson attracted renown for beating a human champion in the TV game show Jeopardy.)

Watson (center) defeated Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings (left). Image: IBM

Internet giants aren’t the only ones getting into the game. Twenty-four marketing AI startups we track and write about have more than $218 million in funding. Six AI companies in CB Insights’ AI 100 list have direct applications to marketing and more than $500 million in funding. Across all industries, deals to AI startups have risen by 4.6 times in the five years to 2016.

Artificial intelligence is about to take the marketing industry by storm. It will transform jobs, enhance roles, and create huge opportunities for businesses that leverage marketing AI effectively.

So, how can content marketers evolve and adapt to what’s coming?

How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of AI

While disruption will happen faster than most anticipate, it’s important to realize we’re still in very early days. Many of the rising AI tech companies have significant venture capital funding. However, they have limited market success to prove their products work and that the models are scalable.

AI also requires massive amounts of data and customized solutions, so large enterprises are more likely to see short-term benefits from AI investments.

However, there is a push to make AI technology more affordable and accessible, which should accelerate AI development and adoption. The challenge, however, will be finding technical talent capable of building and executing AI solutions.

This means that now is the perfect time for content marketers to get ahead of the curve.

Here’s how:

Evaluate repetitive, manual marketing tasks that could be intelligently automated. There are dozens of AI-powered marketing tools that you can use to plan, optimize, create, personalize, promote, measure, and analyze content. Tools like Acrolinx help you plan and optimize, while solutions like Automated Insights help you create content at scale. Tools like OneSpot offer personalization and promotion. And AI tech like Curata and Scoop.it are great for promoting, measuring, and analyzing that content’s performance. (See an expanded list of useful content marketing AI tools here.)
Assess opportunities to get more out of your data. There are plenty of ways to discover insights, predict outcomes, devise strategies, personalize content, and tell stories at scale with the right type and amount of data. However, the right type and amount of data are highly specific to your organization and your needs. Marketers should involve the internal owners of datasets in this process as soon as possible.
Consider the AI capabilities of your existing marketing technology. Platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot are actively integrating AI into their existing products. Existing platforms give content marketers a great place to start familiarizing themselves with AI capabilities. From there, explore the potential of emerging AI solutions. (The Marketing AI Institute is a great place to start.)

Content Marketing Careers are About to Change. Rapidly

This is only the beginning of marketing AI. While developments are moving fast, most content marketers have not undertaken much study of how AI can—and will—affect their jobs, performance, and businesses.

Artificial intelligence won’t just automate or augment certain content marketing activities. It will also alter how marketing channels work—and which skillsets are required to thrive in the near future.

When marketing AI systems are able to automatically optimize search and paid campaigns, the skills valued in marketers will change. As marketing AI is increasingly able to generate insightful reports, the type of analysis required of and valued by marketers will be different than in the past. If marketing AI is able to write basic content, content marketers will need to adapt.

This is obvious: marketing skills change with the times. But with marketing AI, these skills will change faster than in the past. As intelligent systems learn and improve, they will become more and more capable of performing cognitive tasks formerly reserved for humans.

Marketing AI is Already Here

We expect this shift to happen far faster than the transition from traditional to digital or mobile channels. Content marketers should prepare now.

Marketing AI is most prominently manifesting in a new technology known as content intelligence. To learn more, download the white paper Content Intelligence: The New Frontier of Content Marketing.

Content Intelligence in Five Minutes [Infographic]

Mitchell Hall — Mon, 28 Aug 2017 15:00:33 +0000

Content intelligence is arguably the hottest buzzword in content marketing technology right now. That said, much of the excitement is based on its potential rather than its current capabilities. Because of this, few marketers know what content intelligence is or how it might be directly relevant to them. Let Curata help you with this brief overview and at-a-glance infographic.

Content intelligence is a nascent form of revolutionary content marketing technology. It allows you to understand everything there is to know about a piece of content—including its context, so you can use that knowledge to guide decision making for that piece of content. It can even automate and execute some of those decisions.

Content intelligence integrates several existing technologies and applies them to content marketing. These include machine learning, natural language processing, big data, and artificial intelligence (AI). Let’s expand on what a couple of these terms mean:

Big data involves computationally analyzing extremely large data sets to reveal patterns, trends, and associations; especially those relating to human behavior and interactions. People use big data for everything from predicting stock performance to seasonal buying behavior. And it helps the NSA know whether your post about “blowing up the joint” refers to your bomb-making or DJing skills.
AI has a more nebulous definition, because what is considered AI is constantly changing. One way of thinking of AI is as intelligence exhibited by any device that perceives its environment and takes actions to maximize its chances of achieving a goal.

Content intelligence may draw on artificial intelligence and big data, but it is neither of those two things. It’s the systems and software that transforms data into actionable insights for content strategy and tactics. Content intelligence means having the full context of an individual piece of content. Not only that, but the whole corpus of content. It allows you to make better decisions about anything pertaining to the content in question.

Check out the infographic below. It offers a quick overview on what content intelligence is, what it can do for you, and where it currently exists in the content marketing space.

Content Intelligence is the Future of Content Marketing

Want to know more about content intelligence, such as which vendors exist, and what you can do to prepare your organization for adopting this technology? Immerse yourself in Curata’s Content Intelligence: The Next Frontier of Content Marketing Technology.

Content Promotion Tools: The Ultimate List

Mitchell Hall — Thu, 06 Jul 2017 15:00:47 +0000

The promotion required for all the content marketers create now can easily exceed the hours in a day. But with the content marketing tool landscape growing, there are more tools available—both free and for a price—to help your content promotion in a variety of ways.

To figure out which tools fit your needs best, we put together the following list of content promotion tools.

This list includes social media networks, social media management tools, paid content promotion tools, distribution tools and advocacy tools. Please note this list is not comprehensive and there are other ways to promote content such as emails and newsletters. For a look at the entire ecosystem, see our complete content marketing tools map.

Content Promotion Tools

Social Networks

Use these networks to build followings, reach out to influencers, and even pay for sponsored posts and customized reach. For expert tips on using social media, see Neal Schaffer’s guest post: 11 Effective Ways to Use Social Media to Promote Your Content.

Twitter – Boasts 328 million monthly active users as of Q1 2017. Users can post messages of up to 140 characters, share photos and videos, create custom lists, send direct messages, and more. Promote content on Twitter organically, with Twitter cards, or paid promotions.

Facebook – The social media giant has two billion monthly active users as of June 2017. It lets users connect with friends, share links, photos, videos, and events, join groups, and more. There are options for promoting content organically and through paid promotions.

Pinterest – Share your images and videos on customizable boards and “repin” others’ images. Pinterest has 175 million monthly users as of Q1 2017.

LinkedIn – A business-focused online network. Users can share links, add connections, join groups, write recommendations, and search for connections by company, industry, skills, and more. Marketers can share content through company updates, sponsored updates and LinkedIn Pulse posts.

Google+ – Google’s social network. Set up “Hangouts” using video chat, and create “Circles” of people for organizing contacts and targeting messaging.

Offerpop – A social media platform for businesses to recruit, engage, and convert customers.

SlideShare – Upload and share slide presentations, gain insight into who’s viewing your presentations, collect business leads, and more.

StumbleUpon – A discovery engine for finding and recommending web content. Allows users to discover and rate web pages, photos, and videos personalized to their tastes using peer-sourcing and social-networking principles.

Flipboard – Curate articles, videos, pictures and more. Save them into a glossy, shareable digital magazine format.

Social Media Management Tools

These tools help you organize your online presence. Many allow you to post to several social networks. They also typically analyze your posts’ performance through a dashboard, showing which content performs best on which platform.

Sprinklr – Large global companies use this social media management system. Engage with customers, connect with CRM systems, build custom widgets, publish and manage content, and more.

Tweetdeck – Track brand mentions and hashtags, manage multiple Twitter accounts, and schedule Tweets, all in a single Twitter platform.

Hootsuite – Administer multiple social media accounts. Analyze social media traffic, track brand mentions, collaborate with other team members, and schedule messages and tweets.

Buffer – Add articles, photos, or video. Buffer automatically posts content to your social media accounts throughout the day.

Traackr – Discover influencers, nurture relationships with them, and demonstrate the impact of these relationships.

Sprout Social – Allows multiple users to schedule, publish, and analyze social media posts across several platforms.

Social Bro – Follow trends on Twitter and capitalize on them with this fully functioning Twitter listening and publishing tool.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud – Find and analyze what’s being said about your brand and your competitors’ brands. Find out what customers want, which content is working, and how to keep up with the conversation.

Social Mention – A social search engine that searches for and analyzes real-time aggregated content across 100+ social media platforms.

Bottlenose – Track what’s trending in your industry. Get warnings about breaking news stories using advanced topic discovery and Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Spredfast – Company-wide social media collaboration and monitoring, and social analysis reports.

Meltwater Buzz – A social media marketing SaaS platform. Combines monitoring and analytics with engagement to give you a complete lifecycle approach to social media community management.

Marketwired Resonate – Connect to your industry marketplace in real time through social media and traditional distribution.

CisionPoint – PR software that helps you reach your audiences and manage campaigns across traditional, digital and social media.

GetStacker – Receive all social media mentions in a single inbox. Schedule messages across platforms, and run reports on social media content.

ViralHeat – Publish, analyze and run reports about social media posts via multiple networks.

Followerwonk – Discover metrics such as who your Twitter followers are, where they are, when they tweet, and easily share your reports with the world.

Content Marketer – Three products to help you find and contact influencers via email and Twitter. Email templates feature tracking, scheduling, and follow up sequences.

Narrow – Build a targeted Twitter following by interacting with the users most likely to be interested in your company’s offerings.

Image Sharer – Create viral traffic by allowing your readers to automatically share images on your site and link back to you.

Jing – Capture basic video, animation, and still images from your computer screen, and share them on the Web.

Meet Edgar – A social media scheduling tool. Catalog your updates in a library that builds over time and automatically refreshes.

Oktopost – A B2B social media management platform. For managing, measuring, and amplifying your social media marketing.

Viraltag – Easily pull visual content from websites, Instagram, Pinterest, Flickr, Dropbox, RSS Feeds. One click scheduling for all social networks, and measure results from each channel.

DrumUp – Content discovery and social sharing. DrumUp uses data mining and NLP algorithms to discover, analyze and rank content based on relevance to the user’s interests.

Paid Promotion Tools (aka Native Advertising)

Use these content promotion tools to advertise content on websites across the Internet.

ContentGain – This widget places links to third-party content on other websites to boost distribution. The original content publisher shares ad revenue with the website sharing the content.

OneSpot – This tool automatically turns owned or earned content into optimized ads. It distributes the content across OneSpot’s ad inventory, retargets users, and monitors results.

Gravity – Using algorithms based on users’ reading and sharing history, Gravity enables websites to deliver personalized recommendations.

Outbrain – This content discovery tool recommends your content to readers of other premium publishers. It offers a personalized reader experience while exposing your content to engaged readers.

Vocus – Scans for prospects looking for companies like yours, suggests relevant social conversations, and distributes your press for traffic and search.

Taboola – Takes your content and places it on publishing websites, targeting it towards your selected audience.

nRelate – This platform helps content developers and publishers find an easier path to your target audience. Grows your reader-base from your site or elsewhere on the web.

Content Blvd – Connect with brands and publishers to create relevant and rewarding product placements.

Vibrant Media – This native advertising tool places content ads within other forms of editorial content. All triggers are user-initiated.

Disqus – Allows bloggers and website publishers to engage readers with an industry-leading comments section.

ContentClick – A native ad delivery system. Integrates content into thousands of blogs and websites.

Zemanta – Partners with many native ad networks such as Outbrain and nRelate.

Adblade – Target content with advertisement opportunities on over 100 branded content sites.

Mylikes – Places content on various websites and allows you to control your daily budget and bidding strategy.

PubExchange – Helps create partnerships between content creators. Partners then share ads for each other’s content on their blogs and other websites.

Resonance – A content retargeting tool for keeping your message in front of people who visit your website. Tracks the content they view and makes them aware of the next most relevant piece.

Zemanta – Programmatically buy native content ads on almost all native ad platforms. Target your audience with the reach and frequency to meet your marketing goals.

Distribution Tools

Content promotion to these networks will expand your reach.

Brightcove – This cloud content services provider offers an online video platform. Add custom video players to websites, social media profiles, and mobile destinations.

PR Newswire – Distribute news releases to a global media database of more than 700,000 journalists and blogger contacts. Monitor traditional and social media, and engage in real time conversations with journalists, bloggers, and other influencers.

Cadence9 – A unified solution for managing content marketing. Plan content using an editorial calendar, assign tasks to team members, administer content creation and publishing workflow, and more.

Dynamic Signal – Cloud-based promotional tool for content marketers. Distributes to multiple channels and alerts marketing and sales teams when content is published. Leads are integrated into Salesforce and marketing automation platforms.

JustReachOut – Find the right journalists and bloggers to pitch by searching keywords, competitors, niches, publications, and more.

Advocacy Tools

One of the most powerful forms of content promotion could be inside your own company. Use these tools to enable your employees—and in some cases your customers—to share content across their own social media profiles.

GaggleAMP – Amplify social media efforts. This tool allows you to create “gaggles” of people who can share company social media updates to their followers.

SocialChorus – Amplify social media posts and create brand ambassadors out of employees, customers, and partners.

Amplifinity – Creates advocacy programs across various mediums, including email, direct mail, and social media.

EveryoneSocial – Employees and customers can build their own social profiles to share your company’s created and curated content.

SoAmpli – Encourage employees to become brand advocates. Helps you feed them content and reward them accordingly.

Influitive – Create an army of advocates with Influitive. Fosters a community of customers to share your content across various platforms.

SocialLook – Increase content traffic and conversion rates by sending messages through employees’ social media presence.

Smarp – Empower employees to discover and share content such as blogs, events, and open positions to social media networks. Employees can measure the impact their content has on their network.

Content Promotion Tools are Crucial for Content Marketing

Do you use a tool for content promotion we haven’t mentioned here? Let us know in the comments below. If you’re interested in furthering your content marketing career as much as your content, download Curata and LinkedIn’s joint eBook: The Ultimate Guide to a Content Marketing Career.

Content Intelligence: The New Frontier of Content Marketing Technology

Mitchell Hall — Thu, 04 May 2017 15:00:24 +0000

We live in an age where science fiction ever more quickly becomes science fact. Big data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are revolutionizing industries across the developed world, from retail to finance to international spying. These technologies are automating functions previously considered tasks only a human could do, and offering detailed, personalized predictions a human could never make. Now these tools are underpinning a new era of content marketing technology: content intelligence.

What is Big Data?

First, some definitions. Big data involves computationally analyzing extremely large data sets to reveal patterns, trends, and associations; especially those relating to human behavior and interactions. It is used in everything from predicting stock performance to seasonal buying behavior to helping the NSA know whether your post about “blowing up the joint” refers to your bomb-making or DJing skills.

Every human who uses any form of digital communication generates data constantly, both about themselves and about humans in aggregate. Big data refers to the ability to find, sort, and make sense of this ocean of ones and zeroes. It encompasses structured, semi-structured, and unstructured information, both human-generated and from sensors, machines, and public records.

Structured data generally means information residing in a fixed field within a record or file, such as that found in spreadsheets and relational databases. Information that’s tagged to show some elements within the data, such as metadata in email or photos, is semi-structured data. Unstructured data meanwhile, includes content such as untagged text, images, audio, video, and so on.

Big data can also include demographic or psychographic information about consumers. Think product reviews and commentary, blogs, content on social media sites, and the digital exhaust streamed 24/7 from mobile devices, sensors, and technical devices.

Defining Artificial Intelligence

The definition of AI is more nebulous because what is considered AI is constantly changing. One way of thinking of AI is as intelligence exhibited by any device that perceives its environment and takes actions to maximize its chances of achieving a goal. Another instance is when a machine mimics “cognitive” functions such as “learning” and “problem solving”—also known as machine learning.

Alan Turing, father of AI. (Image courtesy Infobunny.)

Capabilities currently classified as AI include understanding human speech, self-driving cars, and interpreting complex data. As the technology improves however, capabilities once defined as AI are removed from the definition. For instance, optical character recognition is no longer perceived as artificial intelligence, but as a routine technology. The same with GPS navigation systems.

Another way of thinking of AI is that it merely refers to algorithms we don’t fully understand yet.

The implications of this technology could feel as if we’re living in an anime cyber thriller, hurtling towards some utopian (or dystopian) future—the finale isn’t clear yet.

Applying Artificial Intelligence to Content Marketing

We’re barely at the beginning of applying the technologies of AI—such as natural language processing and machine learning, to content marketing. Artificial intelligence today has very narrow applicability. It is typically built to do one complex thing—usually a complex data-driven thing—more efficiently than a human can do it. Over the last two to three years, several technology startups launched that are purpose-built for individual content tasks. These companies are trying to apply AI capabilities to a task that’s very time-intensive for humans, to make it more efficient and effective.

Paul Roetzer

AI technology is still raw, and arguably pretty stupid. “It’s basically no smarter than a preschooler in a lot of cases,” says Paul Roetzer, the Cleveland based founder of the Marketing AI Institute, a resource for those interested in applying AI to content marketing. “But it can be trained to do one thing exceptionally well, almost super-human, and that’s where a lot of the companies are focused.”

AI as it applies to content could involve any content-related task we do as marketers, predicts Roetzer. Whether finding keywords, picking blog post topics, determining what to share on social media, writing hard copy, creating landing pages, or writing headlines. Everything we do that requires us to manually create a strategy or plan, develop content, and promote it can be automated or enhanced with artificial intelligence.

It pays to be skeptical about anything touted as ‘AI’ however. Thirty years after the 80’s, AI is once again a buzzword. Many software tools that call themselves AI aren’t really. They’re more like 80’s expert systems that merely rely on hard coded rules.

Who’s Making it Happen?

The main software leaders in the AI field are the obvious players, such as IBM’s Watson, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft—all the big tech companies.

IBM Watson

However, this field is young. Think Internet in the early 90’s young. There are few content AI or marketing AI platforms as yet. There are mainly tools that perform specific tasks in equally specific contexts. You currently need multiple different tools to build AI into a content strategy. One related challenge marketers will face, argues Roetzer, is that the majority of those tools won’t be independent companies within 18 months. The big companies are buying up promising AI upstarts because there is a lack of talent that can actually build AI solutions.

What About Purely Marketing Companies Developing AI?

San Francisco’s Salesforce has made massive investments, buying multiple AI companies for a cool couple of billion dollars. That technology was then built into Salesforce Einstein, which launched in September 2016. San Mateo-headquartered Marketo now has predictive content recommendations, although this technology seems to have been mainly from acquisitions.

The Marketo and Salesforce marketing automation platforms use lead scoring technology. It examines which content someone’s consumed, how much they’ve consumed, and their demographic and firmographic to give them a score. Based on this data it automatically sends them to sales, and starts sending them relevant content. It will then send them different content based on what they continue to consume.

Curata founder and CEO Pawan Deshpande

“I don’t know if it’s quite intelligent though,” muses Curata CEO Pawan Deshpande (Curata is my employer). “Because it’s basically a hardcoded set of rules determined by the marketer. It’s not learning from past performance and evolving and adapting. Marketing automation doesn’t really have much in the way of machine learning in it at present—but it certainly could.”

Boston-based Curata has been around since 2007. It uses natural language processing and machine learning to power two software platforms. Curata CMP offers full funnel predictive content analytics and editorial calendaring. Curata CCS is a curation platform that discovers content, filters out noise, sanitizes text, extracts metadata, automatically summarizes, and makes it easy to review, curate, publish and promote content. It uses machine learning to self-optimize and learn user preferences to find better content.

Other marketing companies using AI in content tools include Manhattan-based opentopic, which has a personalization project called Sia built on Watson. Austin-based OneSpot uses image recognition and natural language processing to automatically tag and categorize content and images. It then uses machine learning to automatically surface relevant information to the right visitor on the right channel at the right time. Conversica is headquartered in California with offices in Missouri and Washington. It uses AI to automate the lead contact and qualification process, and identify which leads intend to purchase and are ready to buy.

Storytelling Machines

Natural language generation refers to a computer using data to produce natural language as a human would write it. Machines write 100 percent of Associated Press earnings reports, along with some of their basic sports news stories. Two major players in this area are Narrative Science, headquartered in Chicago, and North Carolina-based Automated Insights.

Persado has $66 million in funding and offices in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Rome, Athens, London, and Germany. Persado uses natural language processing and natural language generation to automatically create Facebook ads, landing page content, and email subject lines. They are unique in that they are in the creative realm of using machines to create content that isn’t data-driven.

There are dozens of other players in this field.

So What is Content Intelligence?

Content intelligence may draw on artificial intelligence and big data, but it is neither of those two things. It’s the systems and software that transforms data into actionable insights for content strategy and tactics. Content intelligence means having the full context of an individual piece of content. Not only that—but the whole corpus of content, to make better decisions about anything pertaining to the content in question.

Forrester analyst Ryan Skinner defines content intelligence as “technology that helps content understand itself—what it’s about, how it speaks, how effective it is at accomplishing certain goals, what emotions it calls to mind, etc.”

So what does having the full context of a piece of content mean? It’s understanding what the content is, what it’s related to, how it’s performed in the past, and how related content has performed in the past. This includes understanding how competitor content may have performed as part of the broader context it sits in. As well as other content it’s competing with in search engine optimization and search engine results pages.

Content intelligence means understanding everything there is to know about a piece of content. And to the extent that the past can help predict the future, using that comprehensive understanding to guide decision making for that piece of content. It doesn’t necessarily have to include the automation and execution of those decisions.

The Evolution of Car Navigations Systems

Once you have a content item’s full context, the next step is automation and execution of certain tasks. Think of the evolution of car navigation systems. For decades when people wanted to get somewhere, they would look at a paper map, then approximate a route.

But the information a map gives you is woefully incomplete. It just doesn’t give you much context for your trip. For example, you don’t know any of the speed limits, or where there’s stop lights, rest areas, or gas stations. Forget about real-time changing conditions such as roadworks or traffic. So people would plan out trips just based on a map and guesstimate most things.

Then GPS comes along and lets you pinpoint exactly where you are on your journey. (Although it didn’t necessarily tell you which path you needed to take.) Next came the navigation system. It could suggest an optimal route, absent traffic information. It could say where you are, where you want to go, and some good ways of getting there.

The next evolution was Google Maps and Waze. These platforms have real-time traffic data—not to mention satellite navigation such as Sirius, offering a real-time dynamic understanding of traffic flows and patterns.

The next step beyond is automation. It doesn’t just give you intelligence on what to do and guide your decisions. It actually does it for you: i.e. the self-driving car. We haven’t quite conquered this as yet—but we’re close.

Content Marketers Are Still Using Maps

Many content marketers are now at the very first stage of using maps when it comes to content strategy. They don’t really understand where they are because they mainly look at ‘vanity metrics’ such as pageviews, social shares, and so on. These are top of the funnel metrics that offer a rough approximation of how content is doing. But they don’t measure content lower in the funnel, or show content’s impact on your business.

Some marketers today however, go beyond vanity metrics. They connect all the dots by pulling in significant quantities of data that’s hard for a human to compile, let alone compute. These companies pull together data from many disparate sources and apply that to content to get a fuller understanding, manifested as analytics and reporting. They can look at a report and get comprehensive data at a glance. They can then make an intelligent and informed decision about a course of action, which was formerly not possible.

These marketers understand the business results they’re driving exactly. This includes the leads, revenue, and sales pipeline a particular piece of content is generating. This is where the technology is at today.

Content intelligence technology is exciting relative to where we’ve come from, but it’s still nascent. At this stage it’s mainly collating full context data to provide intelligence. “I think we’re really at the data aggregation stage,” says Deshpande. “Simply collecting all the data about content from disparate systems is a challenge. After that, machine learning systems have the full context to make intelligent recommendations.”

The next step for this technology will see it do the majority of computation and inference to determine the best course of action, based on a given set of data. Currently this is where marketers apply their intuition. This could include choosing whether or not to refresh an evergreen article. Or whether to spend money on paid promotion for an article that’s popular and could go viral. The best course usually isn’t obvious however, requiring a lot of data exploration digging, which machines are much better at.

Which Problems Does Content Intelligence Address?

Every marketer alive today proclaims how “data driven” they are. But if you look at how content is utilized, it’s still mostly based on intuition and guesswork. At marketing conferences, if you want to know what content to create you’ll always be advised to go ask your sales team. Or to go search online and see what questions people are asking. Or to look at search volume. These are all good inputs, but they’re mainly based on what’s worked in the past.

What to Share

Sales teams typically share content based on anecdotal feedback. You’ll often hear one sales person yell out on the floor, “Do we have a piece of content about analytics that I can share with this prospect?” And someone else will say, “Yeah, here’s a tasty piece.” These anecdotes reinforce behaviors. So if something worked well and someone hears how a content item helped them close a deal, the next sales rep likely repeats the pattern. Demand generation teams will do AB-testing on emails when looking at what data to share. But beyond that a lot of it is just very anecdotal, or looking at very rudimentary metrics.

Jeff Brewer, Lead Software Engineer at Lux Research and a former quant in futurist Ray Kurzweil’s hedge fund, believes content intelligence can really pay dividends when paired with consumer behavior models. “This means moving beyond content suggestion by anecdote to using consumer models and characterizing content from previous interactions to suggest what to share next,” he says. “Besides improving sales outcomes, a data-driven suggestion platform can evaluate new, untested content to determine efficacy with minimal risk to the sales pipeline. This helps both sales and marketing departments hone their craft. These models can be as unique as every company’s set of products, content, and markets. AI based content intelligence customizes these models for each company.”

There are many other channels where most decisions about how to utilize content come down to intuition. These include social channels, websites, advertisements, and so on. This is where content intelligence can add the most value. It can make those decisions informed, and even automate some of those decisions in a scalable manner.

What to Read Next

On a web page you’re usually presented with the most popular or most recent stories. With content intelligence, expect instead to see stories based on your previous browsing history and position in an organization’s hierarchy. Along with what your title is, what you’ve consumed in the past, what other people in your organization have consumed in the past. Even which content—or certain pieces of content, shared in succession—has the highest conversion rate at the stage you’re currently at in the consumption cycle.

Those are just a few factors. But there are literally hundreds of possible factors that can be fed into an algorithm to find the right weight for all those inputs. So you know exactly what context something has, and what the right piece of content is. Content intelligence helps utilize your existing content inventory most effectively.

Which Content to Update

Another way content marketers can use their inventory more effectively is by knowing when to refresh evergreen articles. Say a particular article or blog post performed really well, but it hasn’t been refreshed in a year. You are automatically sent a prompt for this article to be refreshed and shared.

There’s a constant stream of things a content marketer can do to be a lot more effective, that don’t take up much time. But it’s hard to figure out what they are. Content intelligence can surface that information in an easy-to-understand, and easy-to-act-on way. So you can login every day, or every week, get some really useful feedback or advice, make those changes, and see specific growth in certain areas.

You can do this at every different touch point with content intelligence. Your website, a sales person on the phone or emailing with a prospect. Any time you have a touch point with a customer, you can show targeted information that’s highly valuable to them.

Which Content to Create

The content creation process is another area to be optimized. Content intelligence can make recommendations about what you should be creating based on what performs well, or what your competitors are doing. And the recommendations can vary based on what your goals are. So you could say, “we have a goal of a certain number of leads or pageviews generated for this quarter.” And you could receive recommendations to help you achieve that. The recommendations will differ based on the goal.

While machines can mainly only create data-driven content for now, that’s evolving quickly. IBM partnered with a movie studio and created a video trailer using AI, which took over the creative process. Coca-Cola has used AI to generate TV adverts, selecting the music and creating scenes. If Pepsi had content intelligence, they may have avoided uniting the entire Internet in opposition to their Kendall Jenner ad.

How to Promote

Think about how hard it is to know what to promote, when to promote, and where to promote it. Content intelligence will enable highly personalized, cross-channel promotion that humans are just not wired to do.

“I am a big believer that the first major AI platform to be built, will probably be the first billion dollar AI company, because it will completely redefine marketing strategy,” says Roetzer. “Think about a company trying to spend a hundred thousand dollars, or a million, or hundred million dollars on marketing. Humans are incapable of figuring out the best way to spend that money. Given all the channels, all the need for personalization, all the different possibilities of what you can do with that money, there is just no way… the greatest strategists in the world together can’t figure out the optimum way to spend a million dollars. But AI can. It’s the hardest problem to solve, but that’s the one that is going to change everything.”

The Solution to Content Shock?

Mark Schaefer

Tennessee-based marketing strategist, speaker, and author Mark Schaefer coined the term content shock in 2014. It describes the phenomenon of an ever increasing arms race to produce more, and more compelling content. This content is seldom personalized, and consumers’ attention span is resolutely finite. But marketers keep producing more and higher quality content for a slice of a pie that’s not growing.

Content intelligence is a significant competitive advantage for organizations wanting to overcome audience content shock. They have the insights to produce better, more engaging content. And more intelligent means of distribution to get content to the right sections of audience where it’s most compelling. Content intelligence enables you to present the right content to the right person, every time.

For a B2B marketer, downloading an eBook on most sites means you’ll likely be presented with that same eBook as a call-to-action if you revisit two days later.

If you’ve created enough great content however, with content intelligence you can truly tailor the experience someone has with your brand and site to an individual level. It’s the Netflix or Amazon approach. You don’t feel there are too many products on Amazon, because you only see the stuff that matters to you, based on your behavior. If content is the same way—if you only see what’s relevant to you all the time—it doesn’t matter to you how many millions of eBooks are out there.

Source: Ceralytics

Who Are Some of the Players in Content Intelligence?

The term content intelligence has been around for over a decade. But the companies building the technology are generally less than ten years old.

Curata CMP pulls in data from many different sources. This including the content itself, social metrics, traffic metrics, lead metrics, marketing pipeline metrics, sales pipeline metrics, and revenue metrics. It shows the precise business impact of every piece of content you produce.

Headquartered in Brighton, England, BuzzSumo pulls together social sharing data for all content across the web. Idio has offices in London and New York, and uses machine learning to analyze content, marry it to a consumer profile, and serve personalized content. Washington D.C. based TrackMaven focuses more on competitive analysis. It helps you track how your marketing performs against competitors, peers, and industry influencers. Conductor Searchlight has offices in New York City and San Francisco. It shows you how your content is doing in SEO and how your competitor’s content is doing. Florida-based Ceralytics is a platform for creating, analyzing, and promoting your most effective content.

Where is the Technology Moving Next?

Content intelligence is increasingly looking at what’s driven business results in the past, and advising you what to do going forward based on your goals. Or telling you where you will end up in terms of those metrics. It will automate parts of this process. This year expect a focus on helping to optimize your current content inventory for immediate benefit. Longer term, expect more of a focus on external data sources.

The past doesn’t always predict the future. Content marketing is inherently a very creative process, and thinking outside the box should not be underestimated. So expect the more mundane, repetitive, unskilled parts of content marketing to be automated by content intelligence. But not the need for experimentation.

How to Prepare for Content Intelligence

The insights content intelligence provides are only as good as the amount and quality of the data you have. To leverage this technology for competitive advantage requires a sufficiently long history of well-structured, well-maintained, trustworthy data. Deshpande offers an example of the importance of this from when he worked at Google in 2005.

“Back then Google Translate worked best for Chinese and Arabic,” he says. “And it wasn’t because Google had the best algorithms for those particular languages—it was because they had the most data. The Department of Defense translated so many documents in those two languages that Google had the most training data to input into the system. It really demonstrates how data is more important than the algorithms behind it.”

Know What You’ve Got

One of the most important steps an organization can take is to conduct a content audit of inventory. Best practice is to do this at least once a year, and it’s also vital to effectively utilize content intelligence. This audit should capture the content text, images, metadata, and other associated attributes invisible to the content consumer. For example: the persona, the buying stage it’s designed for, the vertical it’s for, and who wrote the article—especially for organizations using ghostwriters.

Given sufficient examples/inputs and their resulting outputs, a machine learning algorithm learns which inputs correlate with which outputs. Then it can predict which inputs correlate to positive outputs, and optimize for a desired output. Content marketing inputs are those in your content inventory. Performance related data makes up the outputs. This means things such as leads generated, revenue generated, social shares, traffic data, variants such as time on page or bounce rate; whatever you’re trying to optimize for.

You can then examine marketing pipeline metrics to see how these inputs turn into opportunities for sales. For example, which leads consume which content, how often they consume it, when they consume it, and so on. Did someone consume something when they were an opportunity, at purchase decision, or much earlier? Which of these pieces of content then led to revenue, and how much revenue? Then there’s outside, broader context data such as competitive data, and related topics and trends at the time.

Promotion and Distribution

The last phase is understanding how content is distributed and promoted. It can be hard to tell why a piece of content did well. Is it because it’s fundamentally strong, compelling content, and therefore got traction because people are sharing it? Or was it just heavily promoted mediocre content?

For example, on the homepage of Google News they used to have a ”recommended stories” section. These stories got the highest click-throughs, so the team felt they were making good recommendations. But it turned out they were getting the highest click-throughs because it was the first thing on the page. It was the problem of display bias.

Collecting, Storing, and Cleansing Data

Again, clean data—and lots of it, is imperative. You can’t just go out and buy a machine learning algorithm, flip it on, and start seeing immense value. Any time you use an AI application, with machine learning in particular, you have to teach the machine by giving it data.

Cleansing your data means de-duplicating it. I.e. making sure there aren’t two contacts with same email address, or the same contact with two different email addresses. Simple things like that ensure your data is correct. There’s a tool called IBM Watson Analytics which allows you to upload a dataset to find out how good your data is.

Marketing automation systems warehouse content consumption data that pertains to leads further down the funnel. But vendors don’t currently retain that data well for storage reasons. For example, Marketo only stores web activity data for 90 days, after which they start purging the data. Oracle stores your web activity data for 25 months.

The longer your data goes back, the better. So it will pay to pull data outside of your marketing automation system and build a data warehouse. Other systems pull social data. It’s easy to go and see how a piece of content is doing today in terms of social shares. You can look at a snapshot and say, “Ok, I got this many shares on LinkedIn.” It’s harder to go back and see how the numbers changed over time. So the sooner you start cataloging and storing that information the better, so you get more historical context.

Google Analytics is pretty good for storing historical data, but even that has issues. If a company has over 500,000 pageviews in a given time period, Analytics starts sampling data. It’s too much for their channel, so you’re don’t actually get truthful data.

Every system has its downsides, and it’s important to know what the downsides are. To avoid being hindered by those limitations, it will pay to store data outside many systems.

Clippy’s Revenge

There are some applications around now that are about as useful as Microsoft Clippy. Clippy was the famously intrusive Microsoft Word paperclip that used to give unhelpful, obvious suggestions. (Microsoft euthanized Clippy in 2007.) Many content intelligence tools are arguably still at the Clippy stage.

While everyone likes to make fun of Microsoft, they’ve morphed Clippy into other technologies. Now if you use the same language or phrasing over and over in a Word document, it offers subtle, non-obvious stylistic suggestions beyond just spelling and grammar. Rather than being an annoying paperclip in the corner, it’s built into the workflow. That’s where content intelligence is working towards to provide value.

The adoption of content intelligence will likely come down to a question of trust in the technology. Firstly trusting that the data is right. Then that the insights are right. Then trusting that the system’s suggestions will actually help rather than hurt. And finally trusting the system to automatically perform the suggested action on its own.

Think about this analogy. In the 1920’s when elevator technology first started displacing elevator operators—that was a big deal for elevator passengers. Many people would take the stairs because they just didn’t trust an elevator sans operator. This dynamic exists with people’s attitudes towards self driving cars. Content intelligence needs to overcome the same level of trust. The technology needs to develop and provide insights and automation. But even with that, it may take even longer for folks to really trust it to make the right decisions.

Where did you say the stairs were?

The Content Intelligence Disruption

We’ve reached the point with certain systems where we trust machines more than we do ourselves. It doesn’t make sense for us to tell an elevator what the best routing is to get to a floor. Many people now trust a GPS navigation system over their own intuition in most cases when driving cars. This is the point content intelligence needs to reach before we see wider adoption.

Content intelligence right now is reducing or removing the need for freelance writers who produce low level copy. It may do the same for certain marketing operations and demand gen positions. (There will be plenty of software engineers kept in gainful employment however.)

It will likely take another two years for the intelligence to offer more consistently helpful insights. And perhaps another three years to gain wider adoption and trust. That said, content intelligence, like all new technology, will offer first movers a significant competitive advantage—whether vendors or users. It will also eventually devolve into a more utility-like function as economies of scale allow full industry penetration. From now until then however, marketers ignore this technology at their peril.

Content Curation Tools: The Ultimate List

Mitchell Hall — Mon, 17 Apr 2017 15:00:40 +0000

For content marketers, content curation is integral to online strategy. Effective curation helps position you as a thought leader in your space, and is an economical way to maintain a consistent publishing schedule of quality content. But manually trying to find the most relevant content in a given industry and then publishing it across multiple channels can be time-consuming. To curate effectively thus requires automation. This ultimate list of content curation software includes both business-grade and personal curation tools for hobbyist or organizational purposes.

Curata defines content curation as when an individual (or team) consistently finds, organizes, annotates, and shares the most relevant and highest quality digital content on a specific topic for their target market. Curation is a great way to support a created content strategy, publish content consistently, and keep track of your favorite information sources. Enlightened content marketers use a content mix that is only 65% created, with the remainder being 25% curated and 10% syndicated.

The Purpose of This List

This map was constructed to help you or your organization navigate the growing world of curation and find a tool that best fits your content needs. If you’re all caught up on The Ultimate Content Marketing Tools List, then you already know the content marketing tools universe is vast—and expanding.

Marketing technology is constantly providing marketers with simpler solutions for publishing higher quality, more relevant content. Whether you’re one of the 75 percent of marketers increasing content investment this year, or you’re just looking for a tool to help keep track of news and social media, this list cuts through the curation clutter to make sense of what differentiates each application, service, and platform.

Disclaimer

It is increasingly difficult to keep up with the rapidly expanding universe of content marketing. Not to mention each sector it encompasses, such as content curation. For this reason, this list is not comprehensive. There are certainly other tools out there as effective as the ones listed below, which may serve different functions.

We welcome your suggestions in the comments section to help make this list more complete.

Content Curation Tools

Curata – Curata is the leading provider of business grade content curation software. Curata CCS enables marketers to create, curate, organize, annotate and share the most relevant and highest quality content as part of a successful content marketing strategy.

flockler – Combine all your content, including what your fans say about you, into one social hub. Create your own social hub or bring social content into your existing websites, applications, ecommerce sites, and other services.

The Tweeted Times – Aggregates news in your Twitter stream every hour. Ranks each piece by its popularity amongst your friends.

Addict-o-matic – Search the best live sites on the web. Find the latest news, blog posts, videos and images to keep up with trending topics.

Pinterest – A visual discovery platform. Collect ideas for different projects and interests using interactive boards.

Feedly – Delivers fast, mobile-optimized content using RSS feeds. Browse and share content from your favorite news sites, feeds, blogs and YouTube channels.

Storify – Create ‘stories’ or ‘timelines’ by collecting and publishing content from social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

RockTheDeadline – A curation platform. Makes it easy for brands, agencies, and publishers to create and manage compelling content. Curate timely news and promote that content over multiple channels.

Paper.li – Publish ‘newspapers’ comprised of content from anywhere on the web to treat your readers to fresh news daily.

Sutori – Create and share visual stories, collaboratively.

List.ly – Curate, crowdsource, and engage readers via live embedded list content inside blog posts.

Kuratur – Consistently publish fresh content on websites or blogs in minutes a day to keep readers engaged.

Pearltrees – A visual and collaborative curation tool. Allows you to collect, organize, and share any URL, and upload personal images and notes.

Juxtapost – A fast, free and simple way to bookmark online images. Collect and manage categorized post boards.

HeadSlinger – Find all your news in half the time. Scan your favorite sites’ headlines in a matter of seconds, and store your favorite news sources in quick, easy to find folders.

Scoop.it – Helps individuals and businesses publish content in an efficient and impacting way. Uses big data semantic technology to help you quickly find relevant content.

CurationSoft – Enables content curation for users. Helps establish brands as an authoritative voice, and a go-to source of information.

TagBoard – A social media hub for hashtags. Aggregate, moderate, and follow hashtags, as well as create and follow your own hashtag conversations.

Curation Traffic – A WordPress plugin that allows you to collect posts, articles, infographics, videos—really any type of content. Share it in the way your market finds helpful and interesting.

Spredfast – Helps brands, media, and agencies involve and connect with audiences by integrating social media into their marketing and advertising efforts.

BagTheWeb – A content and curation networking company. Users can find, create, and share ‘bags’ of web content on topics they care about.

papaly – A bookmark management and discovery tool.

Pulse – Makes it easy to consume news on mobile phones and tablets. Provides a curated feed from reputable news sources.

Pocket – Save articles, videos, or other content on the web. Works in your browser, or from apps such as Twitter, FlipBoard, Pulse and Zite.

Trap!t – A personalized content discovery application. Can be used by brands, publishers, or individuals to discover, engage, share, and publish content.

sprinklr – Helps brands and organizations distribute curated social media content to support their content strategy. Platforms include websites, event displays, retail signage, and mobile apps.

Newsle – Track users’ Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, and email contacts in the news. Never miss an important story about a friend, professional contact, or public figure.

Bundlepost – Aggregate and schedule social media content. Search, edit, and schedule with the browser plugin or social media dashboard.

Postplanner – Makes it easy to post like-worthy content. Provides status ideas, delivers content based on users’ keywords, and helps users find blogs and experts in their niche.

Flipboard – Create your own personal magazine. Catch up on news, read stories from around the world, and browse articles, videos, and photos your friends are sharing.

Storyful – Helps newsrooms find the most valuable content on the social web. Uses a “human algorithm” to sort through verified curated news from various mediums.

RebelMouse – Create a blog, website, or social page in seconds. Simply connect your social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+ or LinkedIn.

Waywire – A video curation tool. Embed hundreds of top-quality sources from trusted media makers to enhance your site with topical, timely, and contextually-relevant video.

Eqentia – A platform for web content publishing, distribution and engagement. Features advanced curation, real-time aggregation, and text-mining where content is discovered to match your existing content.

Shareist – A home base for users’ content marketing activities. Capture bookmarks and ideas, share them on social media, and save them for building and publishing pages to blogs.

Pluggio – A secure, web-based system. It helps individuals, businesses, organizations and marketers easily grow and manage their social media profiles.

Kbucket – A user indexed search site. Expert “content curators” organize, comment, tag, and publish their research to support their content marketing strategy.

Flashissue – A Gmail newsletter creator. Helps you find content, create mailing lists, and get reports and analytics for emails sent.

symbaloo – A personal startpage that allows you to easily navigate the web. Compile your favorite sites into one visual interface. Save your bookmarks in the cloud and access them from anywhere with any device.

ContentGems – Find, curate, and share engaging content. Build your company’s thought leadership and increase qualified website traffic.

Vidinterest – A social video discovery platform which allows you to bookmark videos and create private or public playlists of videos. Bookmark videos from any website featuring videos from YouTube, Daily Motion, and Vimeo.

Folloze – A B2B content engagement platform for marketing and sales. Create content experiences that dynamically adapt to a visitor’s profile, company, industry, and stage of the deal.

Channelkit – Allows you to tag and structure all kinds of information in one place. This includes websites, contacts, articles, PDF files or images—all displayed as neat cards in channels.

Sharpr – Break down information silos, improve collaboration, and share what matters most with the people who matter most to your business.

Huzzaz – A video curation platform that allows you to discover, collect, and showcase YouTube and Vimeo videos. Analyze viewing behavior, find out which videos matter most to your viewers, and increase site engagement.

UpContent – A content discovery and curation tool that crawls the web to pull news articles and blog posts. Sorts by factors like social influence and recency, reducing the need to browse through hundreds of pages of results.

LinkHubb – Curate and share links visually, upload documents and files to the cloud, and use affiliate technology to generate ad-based revenue. Features an enterprise dashboard with detailed metrics.

Crowdynews – Automatically integrates real-time social content alongside editorial content to increase engagement and drive revenue.

DrumUp – A social media manager and content marketing app. It mines web content in real time to recommend to your audience, reducing your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter management time.

elink – Offers a fast way to turn a bunch of links into content. It enables you to curate, publish and share online content in a visually appealing way.

Zimilate – A webpage clipper. Save perfect copies of webpages, files, images and notes from your browser to collections stored in the cloud. They’re accessible even if the original page changes or disappears.

Roojoom – Create Smart MiniSites, online magazines, and e-newsletters. You can personalize content for each user to increase engagement and conversions across the customer life-cycle.

Know of any other great content curation tools? Leave a comment below!

How Artificial Intelligence is Changing Content Marketing

Fahad Muhammad — Mon, 10 Apr 2017 13:00:37 +0000

Artificial intelligence (AI) has come a long way since Alan Turing first posed the question, “Can machines think?” in 1950.

Computers have since defeated a Russian chess grandmaster at his own game, won at Jeopardy, written a sci-fi screenplay from scratch, and can successfully prompt suggestions every time you make a search engine query.

Machine learning algorithms are enabling marketers to make sense of overwhelming amounts of data and deliver better customer experiences. And to generate content in record time.

The power of artificial intelligence is changing the content marketing landscape for the better. And this is exactly what we’re going to discuss today.

The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Content Marketing

Artificial intelligence refers to machines with capabilities that mimic cognitive functions associated with the human mind—most notably learning and problem solving.

AI already plays a significant role in the field of content marketing, helping to streamline processes at a time of immense content overload.

Here’s a recap of what 60 seconds on the Internet looked like in 2016:

The rules of content marketing change every year. Blog posts are longer now, hyper-focused web pages and personalized advertising have become a necessity, and Google has launched new machine learning updates.

Artificial intelligence is helping marketers decipher the ever-changing world of content marketing by analyzing user data and helping marketers make sense of user intent.

Below are six ways artificial intelligence is changing content marketing.

1. Automatically Generate Content

With artificial intelligence marketers can automatically generate content for simple stories such as stock updates and sports reports. You’ve probably even read content written by an algorithm without noticing it.

It may surprise you that the following opening sentence is a sports story written solely by an algorithm:

“Tuesday was a great day for W. Roberts, as the junior pitcher threw a perfect game to carry Virginia to a 2-0 victory over George Washington at Davenport Field.”

Looks like a sentence you’ve read before, right? That’s because machines have been automatically generating content for years. Companies such as the Associated Press, Yahoo, and Fox have been using them for quite some time.

2. Deploy Chatbots to Interact With Users

Chatbots are computer programs that use artificial intelligence to mimic conversation with users. One example is in Facebook Messenger, which uses chatbots to carry out quasi-conversations with users, answering queries and concerns in real time.

Companies such as Uber and 1-800 Flowers use Facebook Messenger chatbots to allow users to request a ride (without having to open the app), or to choose their flower arrangements.

Facebook Messenger chatbots can also be used to send promotional content, if a user initiates the interaction.

Chatbots help streamline the customer support process. Instead of having users fill out a form, they can just type in their query and get an answer in real time.

3. Custom News Feed Algorithms

Artificial intelligence enables social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to customize users’ news feeds. This allows them to only see the posts they’re interested in.

These social networks analyze literally hundreds of variables, and can predict with reasonable accuracy which posts a user will like, comment, hide, or mark as spam. Algorithms also give relevancy scores to social media ads so users only see the ads they might be interested in.

This information helps marketers understand which type of content visitors find engaging. This in turn helps marketers create similar content to increase their social engagement. Knowing which ads your target audience are likely to click also helps you create your own Facebook advertisements.

4. Predictive Intelligence

Predictive intelligence makes businesses more efficient. It helps companies understand an individual customer and personalize content that appeals to their needs and interests.

It also greatly affects lead scoring—a points system used to determine where your prospects are in the buyer journey. Predictive lead scoring allows marketers to fast-track the sales process by ascertaining which customers are ideal to convert, depending on their past behaviors and history.

According to a recent Gartner study, “Predictive Lead Scoring Can Yield Significant ROI for Technology Provider Marketers, Even for Lower Lead Volumes.”

Predictive intelligence also gives marketers insight into which content pieces to target to which customers. When you understand where users are in the buyer journey (via predictive lead scoring), you can apply that information to target the specific style of content they are most likely to engage with.

Seeing which content an audience positively responds to helps you create future content that yields better results.

5. Curate and Create Content

Content curation is when an individual (or team) consistently finds, organizes, annotates, and shares the most relevant and highest quality digital content on a specific topic for their target market. (Become a curation pro—download The Ultimate Guide to Content Curation eBook.)

Curating engaging and relevant content on a regular basis is no easy task. However, tools like BuzzSumo help with researching which topics are trending. It still takes significant time and energy to sift through content though. Let alone to curate something that’s both relevant to what your audience wants to read, and is also engaging.

Ultimately, we don’t create content just for the sake of creating content. Our goal is to move a prospect through the awareness stages, so that they are more likely to buy our product. Artificial Intelligence helps marketers create relevant content for their audiences at each stage of the marketing funnel.

Algorithms make it easier to collect data on about a target audience. This can include what they like to read, which questions they want answered, and any concerns they have about your specific business. Armed with this knowledge you can then curate and create content that is relevant and answers their questions. This boosts engagement and ultimately conversion for any offers you advertise to them.

6. Creating a Better Customer Experience

You’ve likely heard of IBM’s Watson, the computer that thinks. Contrary to Siri and Cortana, Watson doesn’t just make suggestions based on what it learns from requests and questions. Watson also has the ability to process language commands and respond to them in a human-like manner, either verbally or via text. Watson is AI because it understands, reasons, learns, and interacts.

Watson’s AI can also be used for IA—Intelligent Assistance.

Imagine one of your users interacting with an intelligent computer to solve a problem instead of filling out a standard form. Watson will not only be able to help them with their immediate query. He’ll be able to direct them to relevant marketing materials that the user may need in the future.

Two great examples that demonstrate the power of artificial intelligence are The North Face and Hilton Hotels. The North Face uses a bot that attempts to recreate the store shopping experience. The bot asks a small series of questions to shoppers about their jacket preferences, and recommends options based on the user’s selections.

Similarly, Hilton Hotels Connie is a concierge robot that interacts with guests and assists them with their queries:

Watson opens a world of possibilities for personalization. It uses AI to give a person the right message at the right time when you don’t even know them.

AI helps you understand your audience based on collected data, and allows you to create and target personalized, dedicated pages for them. Personalized landing pages answer visitors’ questions through the landing page elements. They’re then more likely to click a call-to-action button and fulfill your conversion goal.

Artificial Intelligence Facilitates Better Marketing

Artificial intelligence enables marketers to focus more on the customer and take care of their needs in real time. Data that algorithms collect and generate makes it easy for marketers to understand what content to target at customers, and which channel to use at which time.

The personalized experiences that AI facilitates makes users feel more at ease—and more likely to buy what you have to offer.

Of course, the best technology won’t help you much if you don’t have a strategy for how to use it. To find out how to construct a smart, effective content marketing strategy, download The Content Marketing Pyramid eBook. It provides a clear, comprehensive framework to develop and execute a winning content marketing strategy.

A Comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Software

Sasha Laferte — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 16:00:49 +0000

The right content marketing software can make the difference between you being the New York Mets of content marketing—and you being the New York Yankees of content marketing. But there are currently over 5,500 marketing technology solutions for marketers. Imagine if you had 5,500 of any other thing to choose from. 5,500 ice cream flavors? How about 4,000 flavors, 500 toppings, 500 candy coats, limited budget, and you need to choose at least one of each?

This example isn’t nearly as high stakes as spending thousands of your company’s dollars on software. But it’s easy to see how walking out of that ice cream shop without anything might be the easiest option.

Counting marketing technologies is like counting stars in the sky—there’s always a higher resolution at which you could see more. – Chief Martech

The sheer volume of technology solutions, the variety of possible combinations, and confusion about how the different options play together makes choosing content marketing software a difficult process. This guide shows you what to look for and which steps to take when choosing content marketing software.

What exactly is content marketing software? Unlike other software categories, you can’t easily compare content software to other content software in a simple “which one is cheaper, better, more effective” kind of way. This is because the software options within this category are so disparate.

When you examine all the myriad of products offered under that umbrella—production, workflow, curation, distribution, resource markets, analytics, etc.—you quickly realize they aren’t apples-to-apples: there are oranges, bananas, pears, and a whole exotic fruit basket in there. – Chief MarTech

Categorizing marketing software can feel like trying to define the latest craft beer style when your usual drink of choice is Bud. There’s a constant evolution of marketing categories, along with a lack of definition around content marketing software.

This guide defines which aspects of a content marketing software tool to look at when you’re selecting. It also covers how you can use these aspects to develop your ideal tech stack, the questions to ask a sales rep, why they’re important, and an overview of several types of content marketing software. There’s also the key players in a given category, and their biggest strengths and weaknesses.

Understand: What Is Content Marketing Software?

To determine what falls under the umbrella of content marketing software, let’s first look at the definition of content marketing:

The function of Content marketing is the process of developing, executing and delivering the content and related assets needed to create, nurture, and grow a company’s customer base.

Content marketing software, then, is software that helps with these functions. It should assist with the creation, distribution, consumption, or analytics for your content.

Some examples of content marketing software functions include:

Content sourcing
Editorial calendars
Content sharing and distribution
Curating content
Content optimization (think SEO)

The ways these software solutions can help are varied and broad. But the general benefits to having content marketing software in your arsenal include:

Speed up creation
Better creation
More creation
Assistance with ideation
Simplified collaboration
Easier scheduling and planning
Distribution to multiple channels
Data analyzed for you

The tools that will win going forward are those that aren’t in silos.
– Amanda Kahn, 6Sense

Evaluate Your Needs

If you’re a content marketer, you need some form of software to support your content marketing. There’s a 124 percent higher response-to-win rate when using content marketing software, and a 44 percent higher conversion rate. This makes it hard to ignore the merits of using software to support your content marketing strategy.

Investments in content, process and technology are replacing media as the place marketers are spending to save money to innovate. – Matt Heinz, Heinz Marketing

Here are some points to consider when determining which software will most benefit your organization.

Content Marketing Goals

Don’t start shopping for software before you determine your broader marketing goals, content goals, and content strategy. Once your strategy is complete, look at the biggest goals for your team and compare that against your biggest gaps to determine need. Some of these goals might include:

To increase site traffic

Produce more content
Increase lead volume
Improve lead quality

The focus shouldn’t be to always stay ahead of technology. The speed and succession in which the platforms change is mind-boggling. The focus should be aimed at making sure that you are investing in the technology that makes the most sense for your specific business and customers. —Michael Williams, former CMO of Grand Prix of America, Formula 1

Photo: Morio

Content Marketing Gaps

The first way to evaluate software is based on your marketing team’s gaps. Start with one of the four main processes of content marketing: creation, distribution, consumption, and insight. While many content marketing tools do more than one (or even all four) of these things, knowing where your weakest area is can help you determine what to look for.

Luckily, it’s becoming less and less difficult to determine which solutions are the best fit for your organization.

Technology must become an extension of how marketers work on a daily basis. – Dale Zwizinski, KiteDesk

Point or Platform Solution

Today, there are many content marketing platforms available. While these are very helpful for organizations that already have a strategy in place, some fledgling content marketing teams might benefit from a point solution first (or in conjunction with a platform) to get their content marketing off the ground.

“You could also mix in content recommendation engines like BrightInfo and personalization software like Optimizely that enhance or improve those experiences, or data enrichment software like DemandBase or ReachForce to fill in the information gaps on your leads. There are numerous platforms and point solutions that touch or “own” a portion of content experience management, much like there are ones that touch or own other buckets within the other pillars.” Convince and Convert

Integrations

Only 21 percent of sales people consider their CRM software’s integration capabilities with marketing software or other tools to be high quality. Integrations are important if simplifying processes and reducing time spent on housekeeping tasks is a priority. Poor integrations will cause your team to become bogged down by sharing and comparing data in more than one platform.

Company Reputation and Establishment

There’s pros and cons to this one. Knowing how long a company has existed, its credibility, and its reputation is important in determining if a software solution is right for your company. An established, widely adopted technology provides a level of stability and assuredness in selecting it. However, a new solution can help position you as an early adopter, and enable you to be a ground breaker in a new method or technology for achieving your goals.

Budget

Determine how much budget you have to spend before you start shopping. It’s easy to get sucked into all the bells and whistles of an enterprise level solution, but chances are if you don’t have the budget to buy it, you probably don’t have the bandwidth to fully use it.

Tech Management

Even an all-star marketing and content marketing team can sometimes hinder the success of your marketing technology implementation. Consider your team’s experience implementing and managing technology before determining which software solution you want to implement. While technology should simplify, a lack of understanding of technology or experience managing a robust platform can sometimes hinder your team’s success.

Most brands and marketers only utilize 15 percent of technologies and capabilities they are already paying for, so the focus should not be in the number of technologies that need to adopted, but in “applying” them to solve business needs and changing consumer behaviors. —Mayur Gupta, SVP, Head of Digital Capabilities & OmniChannel Business, Healthgrades

Evaluate Types of Content Marketing Software and Options

For the purpose of this post, we’ll focus on software that ties specifically to the four main parts of content marketing. For a more complete look at content marketing tools, check out The Ultimate List of Content Marketing Tools.

Content Creation Software

Key Functions: Assisting with the creation or scheduling of content.

Curation
Outsourcing
Ideation
Planning
Outlining
Calendaring

Examples include:

Percussion
Percussion simplifies the content creation and publication process. It enables content contributors without technical skills to take content from zero to live quickly, and provides tools for measuring effectiveness and improving SEO.

WordPress
WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) in the world. It is a powerful publishing platform that allows marketers to create and maintain websites and blogs.

Content Distribution Software

Key Functions: Whether helping you push out via email, social channels, or some other medium, it helps you distribute your content. While the examples listed below focus on the act of distribution, platforms such as SlideShare could also be included in this category.

MailChimp
An email marketing platform that assists with distributing and automating emails to promote and share content.

BrightCove
A video media platform dedicated to improving engagement and supporting video online.

Content Experience Software

Key Function: Impacts the way your audience experiences the content you’re creating. This could mean assisting in creating an interactive experience, personalizing your content, or something else.

Here are some examples.

Evergage
Evergage’s real-time personalization platform enables digital marketers to improve visitor engagement, customer experience, and conversion rate optimization.

Ion Interactive
Creates interactive customizable landing pages for your content.

Content Marketing Analytics Software

Key Functions: Offer content marketers greater insight into how they can improve their marketing based on data, analysis, and insights.

Here are some software examples.

Acrolinx
Acrolinx helps improve your content by analyzing your content for style, readability, and SEO. It helps ensure your content is on brand and on target.

Rival IQ
In-depth content analytics that offers insight into your content’s performance whether it’s your website, social media, or SEO.

Content Marketing Platform

Key Functions: A software solution that helps marketers drive awareness, leads, and revenue from content. This platform enables a data-driven, scalable, and multi-channel approach across four process areas: strategy, production, distribution (publication and promotion), and analytics.

Here are some examples.

Curata CMP
Curata Content Marketing Platform integrates with your marketing automation software and CRM. Features include an editorial calendar, the ability to track content (both gated and ungated) directly to revenue, and track performance by author, topic, content type, and more.

Kapost
Offers advanced calendaring, and designed to support planning, executing, distributing, and analyzing full-funnel content.

NewsCred
Helps outsource writers, calendar, and analyze content process. Task management, brand governance, security.

Looking for a content marketing platform to supplement your content marketing strategy? Learn How to Select a Content Marketing Platform Vendor.

Talk to Sales

So, you’ve narrowed it down to two or three software options. Now it’s time to talk to sales. Here are some questions to ask, and some some tips for getting a better understanding of the software.

1. Ask Questions

When doing research, ask yourself the following questions:

Will my team actually use this?
Is this useful for other departments?
How flexible is the vendor in price, implementation, etc.?
Is the software flexible? Are there varied use cases?
Will this software scale with my company?
Can it generate custom reports?
Does it allow for easy external/internal communication?

2. Check Out The Vendor’s Content

The vendor’s website and content are a good indicator of how you could use the software and the type of content you can create with it.

3. Look at Reviews

Consider these options for online software reviews:

4. Read Customer Testimonials and Case Studies

Most software companies include testimonial and case studies on their website. If you’re looking for something specific, reach out to sales.

5. Speak to an Existing Customer

You can do this before or after your demo call. Speaking to an existing customer can give you a more thorough idea of how the software has performed for other organizations beyond the information shared on the vendor’s website.

Don’t just ask for customer references. Go on blogs and review sites to get an unbiased variety of customer experiences.

After researching vendor options, pick your top two or three content marketing software choices and schedule a demo. This will show you what the interface looks like and how your team could benefit from the software.

Questions to Ask During a Demo

When examining a new product and learning what you’re getting yourself into, be thorough. Ask the following questions during your software demo:

Does your software integrate with XYZ software?
What training/onboarding is involved, and is it included?
What kind of support will I get after onboarding?
Is there a limit on the amount of content/leads collected/customers/ etc. before having to pay more?
Are you able to customize your software to my specifications (if there’s an added feature or change that would make the platform more attractive to your organization)?
How often do you update this platform? What updates are in the pipeline?
Why should we choose you over your competitors?

It’s also beneficial to make a list of key features/processes you want the vendor to cover in the presentation and create scorecards based on the priorities you outlined above.

Pick Your Software

Modern marketers like you will want to choose vendors and solutions that are best-in-class for their respective function, rather than buying into false hopes of all-in-one suites. —Convince and Convert

Choosing content marketing software requires significant due diligence. You need a clear understanding of what content marketing software is, how it aligns to your organization’s goals, and the key features you need.

One of the most important things content marketing software should offer is granular analytics capabilities that allow you to measure exactly how your content is performing. Learn how to use data and technology to optimize your content marketing ROI with The Comprehensive Guide to Content Analytics and Metrics eBook below.

Content Marketing Tools: The Ultimate List

Pawan Deshpande — Tue, 21 Feb 2017 16:00:39 +0000

Reader demand for businesses to provide excellent content continues to rise. Seventy five percent of content marketers are increasing their content marketing investment to meet this demand, according to Curata’s 2016 content marketing industry survey. Because of this, the content marketing tools universe has expanded.

Curata has created a map of content marketing tools to help guide you through the many content marketing tools and technologies available to find the one that best fits your needs.

This list has been updated as of February 21, 2017. Of particular note is the continued emergence of the Content Marketing Platform category.

For more on choosing a Content Marketing Platform vendor, check out our eBook.

Why am I Doing This?

There has been major growth in the content marketing tools available to content marketers. While many of these tools existed for years prior to the advent of content marketing—and would normally be deemed as simply internet marketing tools, many of them are rechristening themselves as content marketing tools.

However, many of these tools are quite different from each other and serve vastly different purposes within content marketing. Some technologies may help create content, some may help distribute content, yet others help measure the effectiveness of your content marketing. Having attended dozens of content marketing conferences over the years, I have seen countless marketers and even analysts not know where to start, or how to make sense of the universe of content marketing tools.

Hasn’t This Been Done Before?

A few dedicated folks have attempted to assemble comprehensive collections of content marketing tools. Each of these attempts have arguably fallen short in one regard or another. Some have been limited in the amount of tools they covered, while others have been comprehensive but not grouped the tools together in an intuitive manner.

Regardless, here’s a list of people and organizations who have made honorable attempts in the past:

Everything PR. In January of 2013, Everything PR put together a list of 100 Content Marketing tools. While it’s one of the most comprehensive lists, I have seen, it doesn’t strictly list “tools” in the sense of technologies. Many of the entries are resource sites and blogs such as the Content Rules Blog, or events such as Content Marketing World 2013. While such resources can be helpful for marketers, they are not strictly tools. The list also makes no attempt to organize and group tools together.
Oracle Marketing Cloud. In December of 2012, Eloqua published an infographic called the Social Business Shift. While it’s a nice graphic, it doesn’t strictly focus on content marketing; it instead focuses on tools with a social component such as Kiva and Kickstarter for crowd funding, or Taleo for talent sourcing.
Altimeter. In April of 2013, Rebecca Lieb of Altimeter started a list of 15 content marketing vendors. We were flattered to have Curata included in the initial list. More recently, Altimeter has published a content marketing vendor landscape which includes over 100 content marketing tools. However, the list does not include some of the broader categories we have included here.
Content Amp. Also in April of 2013, U.K.-based content marketing agency Content Amp created an impressive and visually appealing infographic featuring a wide variety of content marketing tools, with an attempt at groupings as well. While this is perhaps the best map of the content marketing vendor set I have seen, it is lacking in the number of vendors and categories covered. For example, it misses content curation tools entirely, and has a confusing category called Curated Content & Forums that includes technologies such as the commenting system Disqus, which has no relevance to curated content. The infographic is not strictly restricted to “tools” and has a category for content marketing agencies.

Disclaimer

I have pieced together this graphic over time, but few could keep up with the rapidly evolving space of content marketing tools. Here are some disclaimers and areas where things could be better.

It’s not comprehensive. For every tool you see in the map, there is a long tail of many other tools that are similar or perform parts of functions of the tool included in this graphic. I have included the content marketing tools I feel stand out the most in their categories. For a further breakdown of some of these categories, check out the following: Content Writing Services: The Ultimate List, Content Promotion Tools: The Ultimate List, Content Curation Tools: The Ultimate List, and Content Marketing Agencies: The Ultimate List.
It’s not as clear cut as it seems. There are many content marketing tools that fall into multiple categories, but I have placed them in the category that best represents them. For example, Marketing AI measures analytics for your content, then helps you better optimize your content. In this case, should Marketing AI fall into the Analytics or Optimization tools group? In this case, I placed them in the Analytics group. However, Parse.ly is a relatively similar tool I decided to place into the Optimization category.

It’s not complete. I am sure there are entire categories missing here. I hope you will recommend and suggest additional content marketing tools for this map in the comments below.

Content Marketing Tools

Website Analytics Tools

Webtrends – Offers tools for measuring and optimizing digital campaigns. Webtrends offers analytic intelligence including customer intelligence and behavioral segmentation, targeting and scoring, and more.

Mixpanel – Instead of measuring pageviews, Mixpanel measures actions such as searches or shares to gain greater insight into user behavior.

Woopra – Uses real-time stats that can be broken down to an individual-level view. Woopra helps brands tracks visitors across multiple devices and build comprehensive timelines for every user.

Kissmetrics – An ecommerce customer intelligence tool. Offers person-centric data in real time, and ties anonymous activity to known activity once a visitor becomes a customer.

Google Analytics – Customize reports, measure the impact of social media and mobile on website traffic, measure conversion rates, and more.

Docalytics – Cloud-based platform that allows departments across a company to view documents, review analytics, and track leads.

Simplereach – Collects real-time data to track the impact of digital content. Offers insights into which direction users should take their created content strategy.

Parse.ly – A predictive analytics tool. Empowers publishers to track the performance of authors or topics, capitalize on web trends, promote in-demand content, and tap into the potential of recommended topics.

Trialfire – A visual editor for analytics. Helps marketers circumvent coding their website in order to put tracking on different pages.

Social Media Analytics Tools

Curalate – Discover which images in Pinterest and Instagram are most engaging for your audience.

Socialbakers – View metrics and statistics for Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Visible – This social intelligence solution lets users monitor, analyze and engage with topics across social media platforms.

CrowdBooster – Track your company’s social media engagement with information about interactions, follower growth, and more.

Nuvi – Provides real-time data visualizations. Portrays social chatter in a way that is easy to understand and show to others.

Trendspottr – Uses real-time data to identify trending topics across social media platforms before they become popular.

TrackMaven – Gathers information on your competitors from all social media channels into one platform.

Simply Measured – Analyze social media posts across nine different platforms. Create comprehensive reports, such as a competitor comparison analysis.

Crimson Hexagon – Measure the impact of past social media campaigns. Improve future campaigns by backing up changes with data.

Rival IQ – This analysis tool helps optimize content promotion by reporting on past and competitor performance.

Zuum – Get insights into competitor content on social media with this tool that identifies viral content and popular influencers.

SumAll – Measures your social channels, websites and eCommerce. Provides you with a complete look at the success of all online initiatives.

IBM Social Analytics – Analyze and predict customer behavior with this tool from IBM. Also allows you to create custom social media campaigns.

Cafyne – Cafyne offers many tools to help manage your social media including brand protection, employee engagement, and powerful analytics and reports.

Web Analytics Tools

Quantcast – Receive audience insight through geographic and demographic data, in addition to information about interests and related website activity.

Alexa – This web traffic tool provides traffic data and global rankings for commercial websites.

Compete – Gain insight into the competition. Examine which websites and keywords others are using to drive traffic online, compile lists of the top websites based on a variety of metrics. Track online market share by industry.

Funnel Analytics Tools

Full Circle Insights – A marketing performance management tool that gives Salesforce users insight into their overall marketing impact.

Squeeze CMM – Measure the ROI of content with this tool that generates reports and tracks audience activity and interests.

Insight Squared – An all in one analytics software for sales, finance, marketing and support data.

Bright Funnel – B2B Platform that allows CMOs to attribute, forecast, and benchmark their demand generation efforts

SEO Analytics Tools

Raven Tools– Report on all marketing campaigns using metrics that pertain to SEO, PPC and social media.

SEM Rush – Gives users the ability to track keywords across both paid and organic search campaigns.

moz – Enables users to monitor social media, manage SEO campaigns, and more.

BrightEdge – Measure and improve the SEO of your site with this content performance tool.

MarketMuse – Crawls your site to identify gaps in content. Finds prominent keywords, and determines how your site stacks up against competitors.

gShift – Gauge your company’s web presence with this analysis tool. Then use the insights to improve the discoverability of your brand on search and social.

SerpStat – Conducts in-depth competitive analysis based on SEO performance through domain lookup.

Marketing Automation Tools

Pardot – This lead management tool lets marketers and salespeople move prospects through the sales funnel. Create automated, targeted messaging based on prospects’ activity.

Genius – Sales and marketing people can collaborate using this online-sales lead tracking software system. Send personalized campaigns, see who’s visiting the website or opening emails, and assess prospect interest for follow up.

Marketo – A marketing automation platform. Integrates email, social media, offline events, content, and more. Helps sales and marketing teams prioritize prospects based on demographic and behavioral criteria, measure performance of marketing campaigns, and more.

Eloqua – A flexible campaign editor. Offers a whiteboard-like canvas where users can drag and drop elements such as email, segments, actions, and more to create smart marketing campaigns.

Act-on – This cloud-based platform helps marketers organize campaigns, integrate marketing into sales and support systems, and measure results.

HubSpot – An integrated inbound marketing system. Create personalized landing pages, emails, web pages, and more. Plus tap into HupSpot’s vast knowledge base around content marketing best practices.

Bislr – A marketing automation tool. Users can draw collaborative automated campaigns on a whiteboard, listen to prospect behavior, and create database prospects through social media hashtags and keywords.

AutoPilot – Multi-channel marketing automation software for email, SMS and direct mail.

Route – A marketing and sales automation system to convert leads into customers.

Right On Interactive – Lifecycle marketing automation software. Uses a Customer Lifecycle Map to help users visualize where their prospects and customers are in their lifecycle/journey with the organization.

SalesPanda – Inbound marketing automation software. Helps you create a strong online presence, enhance your website traffic, and increase lead conversions for your business.

Infusionsoft – An integrated sales and marketing software solution for small businesses. Combines CRM, marketing automation, e-commerce, and payments solutions with a marketplace of apps, integrations, and partners.

PeopleVine – Combined platform for CRM, marketing, sales and operations. Allows users to engage with customers in real time, while building rich profiles for targeted marketing.

Personalization Tools

Monetate – Turn real-time into relevant digital experiences. Take a snapshot of every visitor, create multivariate tests and rules-based product recommendations, and more.

Demandbase – B2B marketing tool. Create targeted, relevant conversations with buyers at every stage. Personalize the web experience, segment and analyze companies and more.

40 Nuggets – Harness marketing automation strategies, audience-analytics, and predictive intelligence. Personally engage with and tailor content to each customer.

Idio – Improve content marketing strategy by examining specific customer interests and increasing the engagement of content.

Evergage – Real-time web personalization solution that empowers marketers to better engage and convert web site visitors without using developers. Personalize content and messages for your audience by using information such as what they’re searching for, clicking, buying and more.

Triblio – Create a personalized, multichannel email and web campaign in 60 seconds. Marketers can personalize messaging, content, and calls-to-action for their multichannel campaigns by persona, account and buying stage. (Account based marketing is a significant feature of Triblio.)

Email Marketing Tools

Constant Contact – Design professional-looking emails, grow and manage your email list, and track results. In addition to email, Constant Contact offers tools for social campaigns, online surveys, and more.

iContact – Create HTML emails and signup forms, send campaigns to customers inboxes, track email campaigns, and more. Also offers social social media marketing tools.

Campaign Monitor – Customize your email template, send campaigns, conduct A/B testing, integrate with your blog, and more.

Vertical Response – This free tool enables companies to send emails and newsletters that are responsive on all platforms.

RapidMail – RapidMail is an email newsletter software that also delivers statistics and insights needed to grow a subscriber base.

Sales Panda – Create better marketing collateral, improve SEO, and share relevant content on social media to build your sales pipeline.

GetResponse – GetResponse is an email marketing software that assists in the design and distribution of content for better consumer engagement.

Emma – This email marketing software offers several different editions, customized for businesses, agencies, non-profits and universities.

MailChimp – Use this email marketing software to create a subscriber base, automate and personalize emails.

Sales Enablement Tools

Seismic – Make sure all your content is up to date and relevant to create polished presentations and forecasts.

Savo – Savo benchmarks users’ sales enablement process against the industry they’re in. Has a set of integrated sales enablement tools to accompany an organization’s existing process.

Docurated – Helps to create presentations with repurposed content and surfaces users’ most relevant content to be included.

Postwire – Post, edit, and share various types of content. Manage relevant content for your sales teams in one spot.

Qvidian – Sales enablement solution. Helps businesses reduce the sales team onboarding time, and allows these teams to collaborate more efficiently.

Jive Software – Enables company-wide collaboration in one workspace. Get collateral out the door quickly, stay organized, and better enable sales.

SalesFusion – Align marketing and sales with lead scoring, marketing automation and much more. Created specifically for mid-sized B2B companies.

Social Media Management and Listening Tools

Sprinklr – Large global companies use this social media management system. Engage with customers, connect with CRM systems, build custom widgets, publish and manage content, and more.

Tweetdeck – Track brand mentions and hashtags, manage multiple Twitter accounts, schedule Tweets, and more, all in a single Twitter platform.

Hootsuite – Manage multiple social media accounts, analyze social media traffic, track brand mentions, collaborate with other team members, and schedule messages and tweets.

Buffer – Add articles, photos, and video. Buffer will automatically post it to your social media accounts throughout the day.

Keyhole – A real-time dashboard shows how many people posted with your hashtag. Also the number of Retweets, Likes, and Impressions your campaign is generating.

Sprout Social – This management tool lets multiple users schedule, publish and analyze social media posts across several platforms.

Social Bro – Follow trends on Twitter and capitalize upon them with this fully functioning twitter listening and publishing tool.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud – Find and analyze what’s being said about your brand, and your competitors. Find out what customers want, which content is working, and how to keep up with the conversation.

Social Mention – Social search engine that searches for and analyzes real-time aggregated content across 100+ social media platforms.

Bottlenose – Track what’s trending in your industry. Get warnings about breaking news stories using advanced topic discovery and NLP (Natural Language Processing).

Spredfast – Creates company-wide social media collaboration and monitoring, and configures social analysis reports.

Meltwater Buzz – A social media marketing SaaS. Combines monitoring and analytics with engagement to give users a complete lifecycle approach to social media community management.

Marketwired Resonate – With this platform, users connect to their industry marketplace in real time through social media and traditional distribution.

CisionPoint – PR software that helps users reach their audiences and manage campaigns across traditional, digital and social media.

Mentia – Helps you find relevant content and schedule social media updates to earn a better ROI.

MavSocial – Free social media platform for managing distribution.

Post Planner – Makes it easy for marketers to find and post content to social media consistently, while getting predictable and measurable results.

ReachPod – This platform helps to monitor and manage web presence and social media accounts

Social Media

Twitter – Boasts over half a billion registered users. Twitter lets users post messages of up to 140 characters, share photos and videos, create custom lists, send direct messages, and more.

Facebook – Has over a billion users. Lets users connect with friends, share links, photos, videos, and events, join groups, and more.

Pinterest – Pinterest users share and tag images and videos on customizable boards, follow brands and individuals, “repin” images, and more. Has nearly 50 million users.

LinkedIn – A business-focused online network. Share links, add connections, join groups, write recommendations, search for connections by company, industry, skills, and more.

Google+ – Google’s social network. Allows users to set up hangouts using video chat, create “circles” of people for organizing contacts and targeting messaging, and more.

For a deeper dive into content promotion tools, consult Curata’s ultimate list.

Blogging and CMS Tools

Percussion – This streamlined CMS offers editable templates, shared assets, versioning, automatic link management, drag and drop editing, and more. Enables content producers to simplify their content editing and publishing process.

Tumblr – Known for its community of content creators and curators and its capabilities for sharing multimedia content. This microblogging platform hosts over 100 million blogs.

WordPress – The world’s most popular CMS and blogging software lets users create custom themes, add plugins, publish content, moderate comments, and more.

Livejournal – With over 63 million journals and communities, Livejournal offers a free, open-source platform for blogging and sharing content.

Drupal – This open-source CMS powers millions of websites and applications. Add-on modules and designs let companies or individuals tailor a site to their needs.

ScribbleLive – Combines content planning and publishing tools to allow marketers to create robust content hubs and websites.

Contentful – Content Management platform helping editors and developers oversee and serve content into mobile and web applications.

Content MX – Platform to help define and implement a content strategy across blogs, social media and email newsletters.

Distribution/Syndication Tools

Brightcove – Cloud content services provider. Offers an online video platform for adding custom video players to websites, social media profiles, and mobile destinations.

SlideShare – Upload and share slide presentations, gain insight into who’s viewing your presentations, collect business leads, and more.

Cadence9 – A unified solution for managing content marketing. Lets marketers plan content using an editorial calendar, assign tasks to team members, manage content creation and publishing workflow, and more.

Papershare – Cloud-based promotional tool for content marketers that distributes to multiple channels. Alerts marketing and sales teams when content is published. Leads are also integrated into salesforce and marketing automation softwares.

PixxFly – Automate the distribution and syndication of all your content with this outbound marketing automation solution.

Influencer Marketing Tools

Traackr – Manage influencer relationships. Traackr lets users discover influencers, nurture relationships, and demonstrate the impact of these relationships.

Little Bird – A social monitoring tool. Users can create lists of peer-validation ranked influencers across social platforms on various topics to stay on top of the conversation in their industry.

Onalytica – Provides influencer marketing software and supporting services. Helps users identify industry influencers and improve relationships with them.

BuzzSumo – A content performance analysis tool. Can identify the influencers who are creating popular, newsworthy content.

Klout – Scores social media users’ influence on a 100-point scale. Takes into account platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WordPress, LinkedIn and more.

Exposely – Pairs brands with influencers willing to sell advertising space on their social channels and other owned platforms.

Tap Influence – Makes it easy for brands to identify and communicate with social media influencers, and collaborate on content creation.

Kred – Users can identify social media influencers with Kred, which measures influence based on Twitter and Facebook output.

Brand24 – Searches for mentions across the web. This is a good way for searching influencers, getting news from your niche, checking opinions, etc.

Dibz – A link building and prospecting tool for independent SEO consultants and full-service marketing agencies.

Advocate Marketing Tools

GaggleAMP – Amplify social media efforts. This tool allows you to create “gaggles” of people who can share company social media updates to their followers.

SocialChorus – Create brand ambassadors out of employees, customers and partners. This tool enables the amplification of social media posts.

Amplifinity – Creates advocacy programs across several mediums such as email, direct mail and social media.

EveryoneSocial – Allow employees and customers to build their own social profiles while simultaneously sharing your company’s created and curated content.

SoAmpli – Encourage employees to become brand advocates. Helps you feed content to employees and reward them accordingly.

Influitive – Create an army of advocates. Fosters a community of customers to share your content across various platforms.

SociaLook – Increase content traffic and conversion rates by sending messages through employees’ social media presence.

Dynamic Signal – Lets employees receive and post company-approved content to their social networks, transforming them into experts, advocates, and contributors. By extending their social media strategies, Dynamic Signal’s clients ignite brand awareness, employee engagement and revenue.

Sociabble – An employee advocacy platform. Enables companies to reach and share more effectively by creating a one-stop information hub for employees.

Social Chorus – A handheld app that connects every employee to a daily digest of work news and content.

Paid Promotion Tools

ContentGain – This widget places links to third-party content on other websites to boost distribution. The original content publisher shares ad revenue with the website sharing the content.

Disqus – This discussion platform helps bloggers and website publisher engage readers through the comment section.

OneSpot – Automatically turns owned or earned content into optimized ads. Also distributes the content across OneSpot’s ad inventory, retargets users, and monitors results.

Gravity – Using algorithms based on users’ reading and sharing history, Gravity enables websites to deliver personalized recommendations.

Limk – Content distribution and discovery platform that helps websites grow traffic while reaching highly engaged audiences.

Outbrain.com – This content discovery tool recommends your content to readers of other premium publishers. Offers a personalized reader experience and exposes your content to engaged readers.

Vocus – Scans for prospects looking for companies like yours. Suggests relevant social conversations, and distributes your press for traffic and search.

Taboola – This promotional tool takes your content and places it on publishing websites, targeting it towards your selected audience.

nRelate – This platform helps content developers and publishers find an easier path to their target audience. Grow your reader-base from your site or elsewhere on the web.

Content Blvd – Connect with brands and publishers to create relevant and rewarding product placements.

Vibrant Media – This native advertising tool places content directly within other editorial content and all triggers are user-initiated.

issuu – Publish content such as magazines, catalogs, eBooks and more on this free platform.

Shareaholic – Implement sharing buttons and advertise content with this all-in-one content amplification platform.

Cooperatize – Promote sponsored content with this tool that connects brands with the most popular bloggers and publishers across the Internet.

Zemanta – This plug-in creates connections between bloggers, content creators, and publishers that publish content on similar topics.

For a deeper dive into content promotion tools, consult Curata’s ultimate list.

Webinar Tools

ReadyTalk – This online conferencing tool offers a single interface for web, audio, and video conferencing. Also features the ability to record and share webinars and integrate with mobile conferencing.

Webex – Using Cisco’s webinar products, users can host or attend meetings using HD video, share files, and more.

BrightTalk – Run interactive live webinars with features including real-time polls, downloads, question and answer, and more.

GoToMeeting – This online meeting platform allows users to host unlimited meetings with up to 25 attendees. Is supported for Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, and Android.

iMeet – A cloud-based video conferencing platform that allows up to 15 users to talk via webcams.

Event Marketing Tools

CVENT – Offers software solutions to event planners. Includes online event registration, venue selection, event management, mobile apps for events, email marketing and web surveys.

Double Dutch – Mobile event applications, with a unique focus on capturing and surfacing data from live events.

Certain – Designed specifically for marketers and other professionals to easily organize, manage and produce live events.

EventPro – Can be used for all of your event scheduling needs, from booking rooms to catering and beverages.

eTouhes – Helps your whole team collaborate and manage the event planning process from end to end.

Eventbrite – Set up events, control ticket prices and communicate with attendees.

Guidebook – Build and launch branded mobile app guides for corporate meetings, sales kickoffs, trainings, conferences and events.

Digital Asset Management

Widen – Create, manage, distribute and preserve content with this digital asset management system.

WebDAM – Gives enterprise customers the ability to store, organize, find, retrieve and share digital files.

Canto – Simplifies the management of all digital assets within a company, creating smarter workflow processes and organization opportunities.

Razuna – Stores, shares, secures and indexes digital files and then makes them available in a search tool.

Adobe Experience Manager – Companies can create, manage, and optimize digital customer experiences. Works across a number of channels including web, mobile apps and sites, as well as social communities.

IntelligenceBank – Offers four different asset management apps based on your business size and specific needs. Provides features such as file storage, and risk and compliance.

Media Valet – Access and manage your assets from virtually anywhere with this cloud computing software.

Bynder – Cloud-based brand management software that optimizes and automates internal content processes.

Content Audit Tools

Content Insight – Develop a content inventory with this auditing tool that provides you with a summary all existing content.

Blaze Content – Inventory, audit, and analyze your content.

Sources for Content Creation

Scripted – Subcontract writing projects to an online writing team through this online platform. Also offers copyediting and the ability to request pitches from writers.

Textbroker – Assign writing projects including SEO and website localization through this online platform.

Skyword – This content production system allows companies to manage and pay writers, use an SEO scorecard to optimize content, and more.

Brafton – Features in-house search engine optimization and social media marketing expertise. This online agency creates news content, videos, infographics, and other items for businesses.

Zerys – A project management tool and content marketplace. Allows businesses to locate professional freelance writers, assign and review content, export or auto-publish content, and more.

Pulse Point – Technology platform that combines programmatic targeting, distribution and optimization with content marketing.

DOZ – Sources, qualifies and selects the best local marketing professionals to execute marketing tasks.

Contently – Online platform for content marketing. Find and collaborate with high-quality freelance writers, manage payments and assignments, and more.

Copify – Platform that helps users looking to outsource content creation. Marketers can find qualified copywriters by providing details such as topic and format.

Wordsmith – This software enables you to create an unlimited number of articles or reports using data. Upload your data, design your story structure and generate your content. (Wordsmith by Automated Insights)

For a deeper dive into content writing services, consult our ultimate list.

Content Curation Tools

Curata CCS – Easily find, organize and share relevant content for your business. Position your brand as an industry thought leader, increase brand visibility, and generate leads.

Scribit – Search and browse for articles and videos, share content, and track conversions using this content curation platform.

Magnify – This fully customizable platform allows publishers and brands curate and share online videos.

Content Optimization Tools

Scribe – Created by the people behind Copyblogger Media. Scribe helps content creators identify topics relevant to the intended audience, measure social media engagement around content, and more.

Wordy – Pairs professional content editors with users to edit, proof and optimize various forms of written content.

Atomic Reach – This content scoring system analyzes content based on quality and relevance for specific audience segments such as “Specialist” or “Academic.”

Localization

CloudWords – This translation management tool allows you to localize content. Simply upload it to the system and then select a vendor to translate it.

SmartLing – Speak to customers in their native language. Automates the translation process by connecting content producers with translation professionals.

Translationcloud.net – This is a hub for hiring professionals who translate content to a variety of languages.

Phrase App – Translate content that is stored on websites, mobile and desktop applications with this translation management software.

Crowd in – Manage the localization workflow process. This software helps control the process, and also provides tools for translators to work more efficiently.

OneSky – Translate apps or websites into 47 different languages with this translation service platform.

PoEditor – Allows for a hassle free software localization process through a collaborative translation platform.

Content Enrichment Tools

Storify – Collect social media mentions on a chosen topic, trend, or event. Curate the best social media elements in one place.

Silk – Use your company’s data to create structured web pages that automatically draw connections between facts, data, and more.

AcroLinx – Make all content consistent. This tool analyzes each writer’s content for tone of voice, style, SEO, and more to ensure it aligns with a predetermined company standard.

Writing Tools

Byword – This text editor works across desktops, iPads and iPhones. Allows users to compose text with keyboard shortcuts, word counters, and more.

Hemingway – Hemingway brings clarity to your writing. Identifies common mistakes in sentences such as illogical structure, grammatical errors, and overuse of adverbs.

Evernote – A workspace app that syncs across all your devices. Manage notes, ideas, and sketches to create better, more organized writing.

Ulysses – This text editing app lets users focus on writing. Provides the regular features of a word processor without cluttering up the screen.

Quabel – Use Quabel to write distraction-free in full-screen mode. Also keep track of word count and estimated time for someone to read the piece.

Google Docs – Use Google’s online word processor to write, track changes and collaborate with other users.

WriteWell – Online software that helps you write efficiently and effectively with processes and templates.

Content Collaboration Tools

Compendium – Plan your content using Compendium’s calendar-based tool. Create efficiently placed content across multiple channels, and track the effectiveness of each piece of content.

CoSchedule – An all-in-one collaborative editorial calendar for marketing. Allows you to schedule posts, social media, and team tasks, all from WordPress or the web app.

Divvy – This platform combines web-based calendars, content management and online collaboration. Helps global content teams plan, schedule and produce any type of content across an organization.

ProofHub – Project management tool for organization and collaboration with clients, vendors and stakeholders.

Comindware – Delivers Business Operations Management solutions to enable performance and efficiency optimization.

GatherContent – Organize and streamline your website content. Use drag and drop features, create content guidelines, collaborate with a content team, and export content using this online collaboration tool.

Google Drive – Create, store, and share including spreadsheets, text documents, drawings, forms, and presentations.

Kapost – This content marketing platform allows marketers to collaborate, distribute, and analyze all content types within a single platform.

SocialCast – This collaboration tool organizes workflow into a single location accessible from anywhere on any device.

Marketing-AI – With this platform users are able to collaborate with team members in a calendar, build a content strategy using a framework, promote published content, and measure its impact.

Curata – Curata enables marketers to create better content, and finally know what works to grow leads and revenue. The Curata CMP content marketing platform offers strategy, production (e.g., calendaring, workflow) and comprehensive analytics. Curata CCS offers enterprise level content curation.

Beegit – Use Beegit to organize your content marketing workflow across teams and departments. This all-in-one collaboration tool monitors activity, approval, communications and images.

Brightpod – This project management tool is made specifically for digital marketing activities, monitoring project status, task assignment and more.

Contentful – This cloud-based software allows for live collaboration, image uploading and a publishing tool that optimizes content for any device.

Content Launch – Designed specifically for small and medium sized businesses. Helps manage workflow and distributes content with one click.

Trello – Trello is an easy and visual way to manage your projects and organize anything.

Hightail – Cloud platform for creatives to share files, get feedback, and take projects from conception to completion. Share images, videos, PDFs, presentations, and more.

Conversion Optimization Tools

SumoMe – Add a variety of pop-up and opt-in forms to your website to generate leads and grow your subscriber base.

Pippity – Use Pippity to create pop-up subscription forms for your site. Customize when these forms appear and experiment with A/B testing.

BrightInfo – Assess the conversion rate of your existing website. Create more opportunities for conversion with a variety of opt-in form placements.

Convert – Learn the content preferences of your website visitors using A/B testing. Optimize your site to increase conversions.

Optimizely – Track and analyze all conversion opportunities on your site and make appropriate improvements and changes.

Captora – Captora helps marketers scale and optimize digital marketing campaigns to accelerate pipeline and capture new buyers.

Graphic Creation Tools

Easelly – Uses a theme-based approach to creating infographics and visualizations. This online tool lets users drag and drop art into a theme to create shareable graphics.

Visual.ly – Browse infographics and data visualizations. Create your own to drive traffic to your brand’s website and amplify your social media presence.

Adobe Creative Cloud – Sync and organize your creative assets across multiple devices. Track comments, build and publish websites, apps, and more.

Youzign – Create nine different types of graphics, from infographics to flyers, with this free, online graphic design tool.

Pixlr – Edit and create photos for your website and ensure they are optimized for various devices.

Canva – Online image creation tool that also comes with a stock photo library. Create graphics for your blog, social channels, website and much more.

infogr.am – Helps users create interactive infographics. You can edit data, download infographics and share and embed them.

PicsTouch – Free and easy to use tool for cropping and resizing images.

Piktochart – Provides infographic templates for users and helps you create and share compelling content.

TinyPNG – Allows you to compress png files to host on your website.

Snappa – Easy to use graphics design tool with hundreds of ready made templates to choose from.

Placeit – Drop an image into an iPhone, iPad, or Macbook mockup. No photoshop needed.

Image Changer – This online image manipulation tool lets you crop and resize images, make fun faces, and easily generate memes.

Venngage – An infographic design software geared towards marketers, SMB execs, and educators with over 500 templates.

Video Creation Tools

KnowledgeVision – Turn presentations and web content into an integrated, interactive online video experience. Does not require special software or app downloads.

Brainshark – Sync up marketing and sales people using a systematic, coordinated approach in this content-centric sales platform.

Camtasia – Helps users create high quality videos without prior experience. This tool records on-screen activity and also allows users to import from HD devices to edit and share video content

Jing – This free tool helps users share images and record videos from their screens. Users are able to quickly share this media to email, social and other various platforms.

Wyzowl – This software helps create engaging visual content such as videos to market a brand.

Animatron – Free HTML5 online animation maker, banner maker, and video maker.

idomoo – Personalized video as a service. Provides scalable, secure mass video production. Video is automatically produced and personalized with each customer’s information and/or relevant offers.

Presentation Tools

Prezi – This presentation tool helps users organize and share ideas by creating visualizations.

eBook Creation Tools

Lookbook HQ – Compiles all the information you want to display to customers into a visually appealing lookbook that’s embeddable and shareable.

Uberflip – Pulls all of your content: articles, social channels, and videos, into a single centralized content hub.

Zmags – This platform helps e-commerce users create and share online catalogs, lookbooks, magazines, etc. to increase consumer engagement.

Audio Creation Tools

Audacity – Record, edit and publish podcasts and interviews with this free software.

Podbean – Share and create podcasts with this tool that also lets you sell podcasts with no transaction fee.

ePodcast Creator – Control and customize every step of the podcast creation process. A full editing studio that creates a professional sound.

Interactive Content Marketing Tools

Wheeldo – Use Wheeldo to create lead-generating quizzes for your website, email list or social channels.

SnapApp – Helps users create interactive content that runs across all platforms and is customized for each device.

ion Interactive – This software transforms existing content into interactive content, such as lookbooks, calculators, infographics and more.

Qzzr – Users can create quizzes to embed on websites, share on social media and eventually generate leads.

Contest Factory – Create surveys, questionnaires, sweepstakes and more with this software and service provider.

StatSilk – Statsilk is a visualization software that enables users to make interactive maps and other types of visualizations.

Votigo – Build content, sweepstakes and other interactive elements across social platforms with this social marketing management tool.

Kuia – Create calculators to better understand your visitors. Create charts and quizzes that get results.

Zembula – Enables enterprise marketers to build and implement interactive content across multiple channels—and measure success.

Content Marketing Platforms

Curata CMP – Is designed specifically for B2B marketers to drive leads and revenue from content. Key components of Curata Content Marketing Platform (CMP) include strategy, production (e.g., calendaring, workflow) and comprehensive analytics.

Newscred – NewsCred helps brands manage the entire content marketing process on one platform. By managing content creation, distribution and measurement, you can scale and streamline the entire customer experience.

Percolate – A social relationship management platform that also offers unique content management capabilities for large B2C companies.

Compendium – A startup company acquired by Oracle in 2013. It has now been absorbed into the Oracle Marketing Cloud under the product name Oracle Eloqua Content Marketing.

Kapost – Kapost’s Content Marketing Platform allows marketers to collaborate, distribute, and analyze all content types within a single platform.

Account Based Marketing Tools

Terminus – Terminus enables B2B Marketers to target best-fit accounts, engage decision makers on their terms, and accelerate marketing and sales pipeline velocity at scale.

Engagio – Engagio helps companies with complex sales to engage target accounts, expand customer relationships, and deepen sales-and-marketing alignment.

Demandbase – Create targeted, relevant conversations with buyers at every stage. Personalize the web experience, segment and analyze companies and more using this B2B marketing tool.

Licensed Content

Newscred – NewsCred helps brands manage the entire content marketing process on one platform. By managing content creation, distribution and measurement, you’ll be able to scale and streamline the entire customer experience.

Scribit – Search and browse for articles and videos, share content, and track conversions using this content curation platform.

Survey Tools

SurveyAnyplace – Offers a variety of responsive design, customizable online surveys, and data analytics.

SurveyMonkey – The industry leader for online surveys.

WuFoo – Online form builder with cloud storage for creating contact forms, surveys and invitations.

QuickTapSurvey – Capture data anywhere, even offline. Use iPads, iPhones, and Android devices to collect data in person, or send surveys online.

Tools & Technology – Curata Blog

Ultimate Guide to Online Content Marketing Courses

How to Determine What Course Is Right for You

General Understanding

Knowledge on a Specific Topic

Tap Into Your Content Marketing Software

How Much Are You Willing to Pay?

Top Online Content Marketing Courses

Universities

Paid Courses

Free Online Courses

The Emergence of the Content Marketing Platform

What is a Content Marketing Platform?

A Vision for the Content Marketing Platform

CMI’s Content Marketing Framework:

Content Marketing Framework for Startups:

Content Marketing Use Cases & Subcategories:

Content Marketing in 7 Steps:

8 Steps to Fast-Track Your Content Marketing Plan:

13 Step Content Marketing Plan:

What a Content Marketing Platform Is—and What it Isn’t

Where Should a Content Marketing Platform Sit in Your Marketing & Sales Technology Stack?

The Advent of Sales Force Automation

The Rise of Marketing Automation Platforms

These platforms allowed marketers to:

The Emergence of the Content Marketing Platform

Content is the fundamental currency for marketing automation.

Much like its predecessors, a CMP enables content marketers to:

Where Does a Content Marketing Platform Sit in the Marketing Technology Ecosystem?

Who Sells a Content Marketing Platform?

B2B Content Marketing Platforms:

B2C Content Marketing Platforms:

Services-Oriented Content Marketing Platforms:

The Future of Content Marketing Technology

Why Artificial Intelligence Is the Future of Content Marketing

Artificial Intelligence and Content Marketing

Implications for Content Marketers

Disruption, Transformation, and Opportunity

Marketing is Next

How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of AI

Content Marketing Careers are About to Change. Rapidly

Marketing AI is Already Here

Content Intelligence in Five Minutes [Infographic]

Content Intelligence is the Future of Content Marketing

Content Promotion Tools: The Ultimate List

Content Promotion Tools

Social Networks

Social Media Management Tools

Paid Promotion Tools (aka Native Advertising)

Distribution Tools

Advocacy Tools

Content Promotion Tools are Crucial for Content Marketing

Content Intelligence: The New Frontier of Content Marketing Technology

What is Big Data?

Defining Artificial Intelligence

Applying Artificial Intelligence to Content Marketing

Who’s Making it Happen?

What About Purely Marketing Companies Developing AI?

Storytelling Machines

So What is Content Intelligence?

The Evolution of Car Navigations Systems

Content Marketers Are Still Using Maps

Which Problems Does Content Intelligence Address?

What to Share

What to Read Next

Which Content to Update

Which Content to Create

How to Promote

The Solution to Content Shock?

Who Are Some of the Players in Content Intelligence?

Where is the Technology Moving Next?

How to Prepare for Content Intelligence

Know What You’ve Got

Promotion and Distribution

Collecting, Storing, and Cleansing Data

Clippy’s Revenge

The Content Intelligence Disruption

Content Curation Tools: The Ultimate List

The Purpose of This List

Disclaimer