All of a sudden every brand marketer wants to be a publisher. The problem is that while they know a lot about marketing, they know little about publishing and their content parameters are often restricted by corporate edicts. Enter InboundWriter with a new predictive analytics solution for content that can tell would-be publishers what and how they need to write in order to score on the Web.
“Tell us the name of the website and the topic and we can tell you your probability for success with your content,” says InboundWriter CEO Skip Besthoff, a former venture capitalist who joined the company due to the great promise he saw for content marketing. “Typically, this kind of predictive analysis was done with keyword searches, but what we’ve found is that doesn’t work. Search engines now have semantic capabilities, so you can’t base your content just on what people are searching.”
Inbound’s new software not only suggests properly honed topics for publishers to write about, but offers direction on the types of information that should be included. “Say I’m a beer brand and want to write about the best barbecue in Boston,” says Besthoff. “When you put the topic into the program, it might suggest to you that writing about seafood will get you much better results, or writing about the best barbecue in sports bars.”
The software will also provide a graph showing the trending of that topic online over the previous two years and projections for the coming year (see below). It provides users with scores on how their website might compete with others on a particular topic and how good a match the content is for the site. “You may decide you need to write about a topic, but five other sites have been writing about it for years and you may waste your time trying to take attention away from them,” Besthoff says.
The software’s dashboard uses a green-yellow-red traffic light indicator system to flag preferred topics and avenues of coverage. A performance graph, for instance, displays the colors to show whether news, local angles, or shopping information in copy will produce higher readership.
InboundWriter released the new version of its software following a beta test with 20 users, including Time Warner Cable and Enthusiasts Publishing, which publishes Motor Trend and Snowboarder, among other titles.
