Why we are building the next era of content marketing technology

Maybe it's part of being a stereotypical nerd, but I've been into comics for as long as I can remember. There's a lot to like: clever illustrations, intricate storylines, magical worlds, and of course, the characters. There is one character in particular that resonates with me: Captain America.

Despite being an excellent tactician, he was an ordinary soldier until he was injected with “Super Soldier Serum”. The serum transformed him, elevating his "strength, endurance, agility, speed, reflexes, durability, and resilience to the pinnacle of natural human potential. “This little bit of natural human potential is what really captures my imagination. Unlike his famous counterparts – Superman, Hulk and Silver Surfer (to name a few) – America is limited by the natural limits of human potential. An oddity for sure, but there's something about him that makes him so much more real.

But what does ol' Cap have to do with content marketing analytics? When I think about what our analysis should look like, I think about the analysis on Super Soldier Serum. In other words, what is the peak of potential value that can be added by a content marketing analytics product?

When we started our analytics project more than two years ago, we realized that the age of page views was on its way out. We thought to the limits of our technology and our understanding of successful content, and with help from the geniuses of our product team, built an external metric to measure the limits of success. Outside of performance analysis at the time: interaction.

The interaction gave us an opportunity to observe the behavior of our readers. It tells us which pieces of content were actually read or viewed. It gives us a more accurate view of what pieces of content are capturing people's interest and building an audience for a brand.

But all in all, it's a proxy and it's not perfect.

That was 18 months ago. Many teams will be content to rest on their laurels and make incremental improvements. We are not that team. To borrow another comic book, content marketers' needs continue to change, and we continue to adopt the Super Soldier Serum.

So I'm happy to introduce to you The next generation of content marketing analytics . Whether content is aimed at growing audiences, building thought leaders, converting readers into buyers, or really anything in between, this product enables content creation that really works. to achieve those goals.

That's because we're committed to doing goal-driven results analytics, rather than simple pageviews or interactions. In other words, we're building our analysis on what matters to content marketers, rather than traditional websites or publishers. Everything will deliver back into the box a greater content ROI so content marketers will know — really know — what works and what doesn't.

We're doing this through six core product innovations:

Collaborator Analysis: With contributor analytics, you can filter by type, length, goal, and other parameters to find and optimize creative talent – both from your own team and from Content.

Conversion tracking: Business results have taken the place of content analysis for too long. With conversion tracking, Contently Analytics allows marketers to easily customize and track conversion events with their content.

Integration with Marketo: By integrating with Marketo, the Contently platform enables clients to leverage Marketo's data visualization to better report on ROI and optimize their content creation process.

Track returning visitors and track how often visitors: No matter how engaged your readers are, it doesn't matter if they don't come back. Analytics can now track deep metrics like returning visitors and visitor frequency so marketers can see how loyal their content is generating.

Attribute tagging: Without content attributes, it's nearly impossible for complex content marketing operations to keep track of what's working and what's not. Complex attribute tagging allows Content users to tag their content based on appearance, length, goal, and other key attributes.

Automated, custom metrics dashboards built around your goals: Different content marketers have different goals. Continuity allows marketers to easily input their goals — such as lead generation or brand awareness — and our metrics dashboards automatically customize around them.

Over the next few weeks, our product manager Michael Enriquez will outline these new features, explaining both how they work and why we're implementing them. Ultimately, we hope that you will find that our technology is entering a new era of content marketing analytics.

Contact the Contently media team at press@contently.com .