If you’re a marketer cranking out blog posts to promote your brand, BrightEdge has released new tools that should help you keep an eye on the competition while you’re at it.
When the company raised its $42.8 million Series D back in 2013, it was already expanding its focus beyond search engine optimization to content marketing. As CEO Jim Yu put it at the time, the goal was “understanding consumer engagement of organic content across all digital channels.”
To that end, BrightEdge created its Content Optimizer, which draws on the BrightEdge Data Cube (hey, it sounds futuristic at least) to become a writing coach of sorts. As the marketer goes along, the Content Optimizer provides recommendations on things such as blog post structure or when a post is too long.
With Content Optimizer 3.0, BrightEdge is adding data from a new source — competitors. That means marketers can see what kinds of content their competitors are publishing and how effective that content is, and they can get recommendations on how they can create content that can compete.
“As a marketer, you can get a lot of information about how your own content is doing from the solutions today,” Yu told me. “That’s good, but it leaves you in the dark about how it performs compared to all your competitors out there.”
Obviously, marketers could just visit their competitors’ blogs and YouTube pages or whatever, but this allows them to understand the landscape more systematically, rather than just copying whatever someone else is doing. Plus, Yu noted that BrightEdge isn’t just looking at direct competitors, but also “content competitors,” i.e. everyone competing for consumers’ attention.
This launch comes on the heels of other signs that content marketing is on the rise; AOL is building its own custom content team, while Conductor, another company that started in SEO and now focuses on content marketing (as part of what it calls “web presence management“), just raised another $27 million.
BrightEdge, meanwhile, says it currently works with 8,500 brands, including Microsoft, Netflix and Nike.