What Is Content Intelligence? Definition, Benefits & Software


Content marketing is only growing in popularity and importance. In fact, almost half (47%) of buyers look at three pieces of content or more before talking with a sales rep.

That means content plays a vital role in not just marketing, but overall sales and revenue. Content intelligence is a way to ensure that you can create the right influence with the right audience, ultimately creating more value with content marketing.

So, in this post, we’ll explore what content intelligence means, its benefits, best practices, and good tools to use for it.

Without further ado, let’s jump in.

What is Content Intelligence?

Content intelligence involves the use of software, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to perform research on your market about the impact of certain types of content.

Marketers can use content intelligence to create high performing content, with the confidence that their predictions are backed by powerful and objective data.

In short, it’s a shortcut to generating a content marketing strategy. You can generate more awareness, leads, and ultimately conversions that lead to revenue.

What are the Benefits of Content intelligence?

So we know that content intelligence is essentially using technology to automate content marketing research and creation.

But why is it so important to do this in 2021 and beyond? Here are some of the main benefits of content intelligence for brands and marketers:

• Reporting – Content intelligence tools provide excellent reporting and metrics. Their analysis of big data provides you with fast insights based on real time metrics like reach, engagement, and even revenue estimation. That way, you can make better decisions on which content to create in the first place.

• Content Level Analysis – Aside from knowing what trends are popular in general, you can drill down into specific content tactics. Content intelligence helps you create content using the right brand voice, keywords, and length thanks to natural language analysis. In other words, keyword research and other on-page factors become a science instead of a guessing game.

• Automate – Save huge amounts of time in crafting the right brand content. These tools help you automate the process of creation and promotion, so that you get the highest ROI possible from your content.
• Managing Content – You can integrate content intelligence software with your CRM. This means that you are leveraging external data and internal data to maximize the effectiveness of every post, infographic, or other asset.

In essence, using content intelligence allows brands to create content that makes their target audience happy, engaged, and more likely to convert into paying customers. And you can achieve this without the wasted time or guesswork.

Content Intelligence Best Practices

Understanding the value of content intelligence for your marketing campaigns is one thing. But it’s a whole different story when it comes to implementing it.

It’s worth pointing out that you don’t need to completely transform your current content strategy. However, it is important to retool your approach and embrace a data-driven philosophy at every stage.

With that said, here are the three most important best practices when it comes to using content intelligence in your business:

1. Domain Data

Leverage content intelligence tools to uncover the best SEO opportunities according to domain-level info.

This helps you adhere to the following best practices:

• Ensure all of your domain’s content has relevance for your niche
• Optimize primary topic clusters (related keywords and pages)
• Update or change current pages
• Check health of overall domain
• Ensure your content is in good condition for audiences and search engines

2. Cluster Data

When you understand what content is the most relevant for your audience, you still need to know which pages are important for each content cluster.

A best practice to follow is ensuring that you focus on each cluster individually, one at a time. Once you get significant growth in one topic, you can begin driving more traffic organically.

Google puts a lot of focus on topical relevance when giving a website authority and rankings, so stay narrow first before expanding.

So, as a best practice, make sure you or your team answers the following questions:

• Which topics do we need to add to dominate this niche?
• What are the top priority topic clusters?
• What keyword clusters should we be using?
• How many pieces of content do we need to create to have authority in this niche?

3. Single Page Data

The final step when you’ve determined which content is underperforming or missing topical relevance is using page level data. In other words, create great content that is optimized for your ranking goals from the beginning.

Content intelligence tools can help you understand what kind of keywords or content types to use. However, writing unique quality content is still not something that can be automated.

Luckily, content intelligence software can help you identify page length, relevant keywords, and other data points to structure your article so you can focus on creative planning and not mundane technical SEO.

By letting content intelligence work on the hard data, you can use your team’s unique perspectives to create SEO friendly content that your audience will love, share, and convert from.

Some questions to ask yourself during this final part of the process are:

• Does this page structure make sense?
• How can I include relevant phrases that my audience is looking for?
• What type of content should I create? (Video, text, audio, etc.)

Luckily, content editors like SurferSEO help you with this final step, marrying technical SEO and creative SEO to make content built for Google and human searchers alike.

Let’s look at some other content intelligence tools and their benefits for your content marketing strategy.

5 Content Intelligence Softwares

Yes, it’s possible to conduct research and content intelligence manually. However, using software can save hundreds if not thousands of hours for this process.

If you’re committed to content marketing, you’re virtually guaranteed to get more value out of using tools than you pay for them. With that said, let’s take a look at some of the best content intelligence software available right now:

1. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo helps you understand what kind of content is popular with your audience, leading to better performance and ROI. It leverages discovery and research from your market and competitors.

The tool can analyze social media feeds, blog posts, and other online content to present you with hot trends related to your niche. From here, you can create targeted content as well as keywords to use, resulting in better traffic from relevant users.

2. Contently

Contently is another great content intelligence tool. It has a unique technology called StoryBook which predicts which content will have the most positive impact for your brand.

It analyzes the web and uses this data to give you a content marketing strategy that matches your audience’s needs. Contently provides you with specific recommendations regarding brand voice, SEO, and other guidelines.

After creating your content, the tool gives you insights into what content performs best and provides the best ROI. That way, you can double down or rethink your approach.

3. Curata

Curata is a content intelligence platform that uses AI to identify the best content according to your audience. It determines why people like certain content, so you can use these strategies for your own brand.

The software also provides SEO assistance so you can share your content on the channels most likely to generate engagement.

4. Crayon

Crayon’s competitive intelligence informs your content marketing strategy with specific recommendations. You can snoop on competitors and see what works for them, implementing your own version of high performing keywords and social strategies.

It analyzes review sites, blogs, and other content to understand the messaging that your audience is responding to right now. It’s great for generating new ideas and saving time on market research.

5. Knotch

Knotch helps CMOs and other marketing professionals gauge the ROI of their marketing efforts. The software allows you to map your content according to your customer’s buying journey.

It classifies content according to keywords, URLs, and more, pulling from top publishers and competitors that have high engagement and ROI for your niche.

You can find insights for everything from publishing schedules, to keywords, to content length that ultimately makes a strong content campaign for your brand.

Conclusion

Your content strategy is more important than ever. More brands are competing for the same markets, meaning you need the right length, type, and angle for your content.

This is true whether you use video, blog posts, or other types of content to grow your business. Using content intelligence, you leverage incredibly detailed data to automate most of your analysis.

By the way, as important content marketing is, so is proper monitoring. Check out this content marketing monitoring tutorial to boost your skills and enhance your marketing strategy.

That way, your marketing efforts can focus on creativity and unique value that serves unmet market needs, catapulting your brand in front of the competition.