Kapost, a startup offering tools for content marketers, just announced that it has raised $5.6 million in Series C funding.
This brings the TechStars-incubated company’s total funding to $8.7 million. The new round comes from new investors Lead Edge Capital and Floodgate, as well as previous investor High Country Venture.
Content marketing is basically what the name suggests — content that’s created to promote a company that can take the form of blog posts, social network updates, videos and more. In the funding press release, co-founder and CTO Nader Akhnoukh argues that this is a way to avoid “annoying your buyers with ads” and instead “inform, educate and entertain them – all the while earning their trust.” (Others have suggested that content marketing is where many journalists are going to get jobs in the future.)
Kapost’s tools include a workflow system for creating branded content, a publishing system that can push this content to a wide range of platforms, and analytics system’s for tracking the content’s success. (The company previously billed itself as a way for publishers to manage a large group of contributors.)
Kapost says it has more than 100 customers, including Intel, AT&T, Oracle, Allstate, General Mills and Lenovo.
Update: An earlier version of the headline said $5.4 million. Apparently, I have $5.4 million on the brain. Also, I asked co-founder and CEO Toby Murdock about his future plans, and this is what he said (via email):
Content-specifically buyer-focused (as opposed to product-focused) content–is not some passing fad, but more and more the fuel that drives all marketing and demand generation success. Thus Kapost will go further to connect the dots between content and the leads and customers it generate. This insight is critical for modern marketers to understand what content is working and what is not and continuously improve their efforts.