May 23, 2019
Aki Balogh, Co-Founder and CEO of MarketMuse, a company that works with companies and agencies to transform content marketing into performance marketing, speaks on a topic that is relevant to both agencies and companies – content – and talks about the benefits of long-game strategy vs. the short-term transactional “push.”
Every company needs to create content to build product and brand awareness, drive demand and lead generation, and engage their audience. The problem with content marketing is that the research process can be tedious, the writing process unwieldy . . . and the results can be unpredictable, unscalable, ineffective, and inconsistent—everything is done by hand. Additionally, many companies write generic content, miss the opportunity to specifically answer people’s questions, and fail to describe the “sandbox” they play in.
MarketMuse utilizes a proprietary intelligence and strategy technology to compress the research phase by downloading a million relevant articles from the web and crunching the data to provide a metadata blueprint of how to cover the topic comprehensively, what questions to answer, what subtopics to develop, and what recommended resource links to include.
This work is done at scale, so every article the client writes generates a blueprint and a spec – a foundation that lets the client scale the company’s content channel as effectively as it can scale the ad tech channels and the paid acquisition channels.
MarketMuse’s focus, for the most part, is on long-form (1,000 to 2,000 words) top of the funnel and middle of the funnel informational or comparison content. Aki feels it is important to develop that top of the funnel content first – before talking about the specifics of your company and your product – and to use a branched hub and spoke model—one detailed long-form pillar content item with subsections and then links from those. Links provide content that is shorter but way more targeted. The objective is to provide logically-structured content for every topic (from 2 to 20.000) relevant to the client’s company for every stage of the buyer’s journey.
MarketMuse’s software is also able to do shorter form content at scale. Additionally, MarketMuse’s self-service SaaS platform provides Customer-side strategists at small clients the ability for to perform website content inventory and build content strategy. These smaller clients may be writing 5 to 10 articles a month . . . instead of 250.
How does MarketMuse convince potential clients to go for the long-term win?
In looking at a website on a first contact phone call, MarketMuse’s consultants can show initial or first value within minutes. Even in just looking at a site, MarketMuse experts can identify areas to improve rankings or traffic, then create a content brief, and send it to the potential client. The solution is so data and science-driven that MarketMuse is able to predict the ROI companies can expect to make if they implement recommended website changes. Aki says that their AI-supported process accelerates content analysis and planning very effectively . . . results typically show within the first 3 months.
Aki can be reached by email at aki@marketmuse.com. Visit the company’s website at marketmuse.com, to see the product, the free preview version of the brief and posted blog articles and case studies.