Kapost Review

Kapost lets you manage the editorial and content creation process from start to finish regardless of your content strategy.  Within Kapost, you can brainstorm compelling content ideas, onboard and organize writers, run the content production process and editorial calendar, distribute your content, promote the content, and then measure results.  Kapost is primarily geared towards text based content but also handles video, tweets, and eBooks.

The actual product consists of a content store of documents similar to Google Docs / Drive where you can see the status of each asset, the next steps, the author and the submission deadline. From there you can edit some of the content directly within Kapost if it is text based, and designate various metadata properties such as what client this is for (useful for agencies), categories, tags, twitter status, persona, buying stages, and submission deadlines.

One of the most powerful features is the ability to control the status and stage of content in the editorial process through tasks as shown in the screenshot below.  For example, the article in the screenshot as a next step needs to go through copy editor review.

You also get a Google Calendar like interface where you can view a publishing calendar for all your content by submission deadlines and you can drill down by content type or status.

You can also manage payments for content by assigning a payment per post.  This is likely meant for an outsourced team of writers using services like Textbroker or Scripted.

For distribution, you can publish your content to a wide variety of content management systems such as WordPress and Joomla, social media channels namely Twitter and LinkedIn (but notably not Facebook), and other various channels (YouTube, Tumblr, Slideshare).  They also market themselves as integrating with Eloqua, but unfortunately the only way to actually get your content into Eloqua is through a manual cut-and-paste.

Lastly, for analytics you can view content performance by page views, unique visitors, tweets, and likes.  One of the powerful features here is that you can pivot these statistics based on the type of content, category, or author to name a few.

Who should use Kapost

Multiuser teams. Kapost only makes sense where you have a team of people involved in the content production process.  It’s not clear based on our review what the minimum number of users should be, but with less than three users it adds more overhead than value. In fact, the larger your team, the more powerful Kapost becomes.

Companies with a multistage approval process. Many companies in regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services, or companies with strict brand guidelines, may find Kapost useful to manage the approval process within their marketing department or between marketing and legal.

Agencies. Kapost seems like a strong fit for agencies or professional services firms because they have both large editorial teams, and multiple clients / destinations for created content.

Pricing: Kapost pricing ranges from $1200/month to $3000/month and beyond.  Read this for a full overview on Kapost pricing.

Pros

• End of end solution, from content inception, to publishing, to analytics.
• Very strong workflow process for large teams or high volume content production teams.
• Great editorial calendar overview.
• Familiar user interface if you use Google Apps.

Cons

• No analytics on sales performance of content such as leads generated.
• No clear way of incorporating marketing automation systems or email marketing systems.
• Relatively light featured to support payment for outsourced writers.