A lot of enterprise software is a black box. To get a full picture of what it can do for you, you have to schedule a demo and get connected with a salesperson. But your content schedule can’t wait. So we’ve decided to make a little mini demo to show how CONCURED can help your business out.
In case you’re completely cold to CONCURED, our product helps content marketers with tracking content performance and generating relevant ideas for future content pieces based on the market. The goal is to reduce the time needed to come up with new topic ideas and show how those ideas improve engagement over time.
We’re a fan of eating our own dogfood, so we will show how our own content creators use CONCURED to come up with article ideas. This description is current as of 12 August 2019. Expect updates to this article in the future as we continue to advance!
The Four Tools
CONCURED is made up of four sections:
iPerform – The main dashboard that shows your 30-day performance, an overview of your competitor’s article counts and engagements, benchmarking tools, keyword performance, and more.
iAudit – Our competition analysis tool. Think of it as a mini search engine on everything that you, your competition, and other major publishers in your niche are doing. You can find out the number of engagements on articles, which keywords have the most traction, and run searches on your competitor’s articles to see which keywords they are and aren’t using.
iCreate – This is where our AI does the work of finding the most engaging topics for your audience. Once it runs its assessment, you can see which of your competitors talks about those topics the most, see a topic analysis for ideas on how to use the keyword, identify the best text length and channels to publish on, and previous pieces published on the topic by your competitors.
iPlan – A planning board where you can pin up ideas for your team to talk about. You can link previous pieces of content and topics from iAudit to your idea cards for analysis over time.
Benchmarking
We schedule our content calendar monthly, so the first thing we look at is the iPerform dashboard to see how we did over the last month. We’ll compare how many shares we got on our social media channels compared to last month and our competitor’s average, then look at how many engagements we’re getting relative to our competitors.
It’s good to have a mix of both high-performing competitors and low-performing competitors in your CONCURED account to get a clear picture of the entire space, but you have to be a little wary of the high-performers. They can throw off the averages. The Competitor’s Overview chart does make it easy to see which sites have more articles per month and engagements per month so you can detect outliers.
We also like to look at the topic analysis section to see what our competitor’s top-performing keywords are as a starting point for idea generation. We can look them up in iAudit right then or send the keyword to the iPlan board for later analysis.
Competitor Research
Now that we have an overview, we’ll go to iAudit to see what our competitors have been up to and to see which articles are getting the most traction. We can enter some of the keywords we saw in our benchmarking as well as keyword suggestions from our AI to narrow down the list of what was published that month.
We then read some of the most popular articles and think about how we could respond to them. We look for where we can have a voice. For instance, where could CONCURED be used to help with a trending content marketing topic?
This is where we do a lot of brainstorming based on what the current topic weather is like. We can also use this tool to study why certain articles got more traction than others on the same topic. Is it reputation? A new marketing strategy? Did an influencer pick it up?
When we’re reading the articles, we’re not just looking for topics. We’re also looking for the opinions of our competitors and publishers that we track. We’re trying to look at the articles with a critical eye. If we believe that an article is incorrect or has a wrong prediction, we can respond to it with an article of our own then see how it performs over the next month.
Refining Topics
Then we go to the heart of CONCURED, the iCreate panel. From here, we can use the comparison tool for each of our keywords and see how our audience and competitors are approaching that keyword, as well as get related keyword on the topic to further spark content ideation.
There’s quite a lot that can be done in this tool, so let’s go through the major components:
Share Of Voice – If your goal is engagements, this graph will show you who is getting the most engagements over time and, if you use the comparison tool, which competitors are capitalizing on your keywords the most. It’s a measure of how much you’re controlling the conversation. If your goal is to become the top-of-mind source for a keyword, this is the tool to track that and who you need to fight to get there.
Topic Analysis – This section does the heavy work of asking how your audience uses your keywords. What sort of questions and related searches are they asking about? Depending on the keyword and the data we’ve gathered, we can also find related keywords that might not be obvious from your previous data.
Suggested Publishing Strategy – Here is where we recommend how long your article should be and where you should promote it, based on prior performance of the keyword. We also recommend how often to talk about the topic. A highly popular topic may need more mentions to get noticed.
Top Performing Content – Finally, we bring up a list of all the top performing content for that keyword based on C-score. C-score is our internal metric for how well an article performs relative to other articles based on content engagement and overall brand performance across social media channels relative to the industry. While the iAudit reveals what’s happening lately, this section gives the overall best articles for a keyword over a longer period.
Where To Go From Here
Our main goal is to increase engagement and stay on the radar since we are such a new company, but our clients cross the entire range of content marketing success. We’ve created our tools so that anyone along that spectrum can find use from CONCURED. If you want to directly compete with someone, you can do that. If you just want to join the conversation and avoid irrelevant topics, we can help you with that as well.
This flexibility is why we’re so keen on content strategy documents. There’s quite a lot of data in CONCURED and it keeps growing. Good strategies guide how to use the data and insights in an effective way for your business goals.
This is a high-level overview of what CONCURED can do, but the best way to see what we can do is to schedule a demo with us. If what we’ve said here has enticed you, take the chance and let our team show you how CONCURED can make your content ideation problems a thing of the past with our state-of-the-art content marketing platform.