Jeff Coyle is a data-driven search engine marketing executive with more than 20 years of experience in the search industry managing products and website networks. Jeff is the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer for MarketMuse, where he is focused on helping content marketers, search engine marketers, agencies and e-commerce managers build topical authority, improve content quality and turn semantic research into actionable insights. Before joining as Co-founder at MarketMuse, Jeff owned and operated his own inbound marketing consultancy and managed the Traffic, Search and Engagement team for TechTarget, a leader in B2B technology publishing and lead generation.
Hello, I’m Jeff Coyle from MarketMuse and this is our Tech Talk. MarketMuse is a content intelligence solution that sets the standard for content quality. I’m MarketMuse’s co-founder and chief product officer and while MarketMuse has been solving content strategy of challenges for six years, I’ve been working on content marketing, search engine optimization and content quality problems for over 20 years.
The development of high quality trustworthy and truly effective content is the most significant challenge that marketing teams face today.
MarketMuse drives the cost of content creation and optimization down while increasing the effectiveness by many multipliers. MarketMuse tells you where you are today and provides clear insights and paths to achieve content goals successfully.
The average content team produces less than 20% of content that hits on the business core KPIs. And they do this with wasteful inefficient processes for research, planning, briefing, writing, editing, publishing and optimization.
At the same time, in a study by Content Science founded 65% of readers think web content is hit or miss anyway. So content teams are building low quality failing content as their normal and they’re spending too much money to research, write and optimize it. It’s billions of dollars of waste the readers really don’t even trust.
MarketMuse is a venture capital-backed private 50 person company with over 500 customers based in Boston’s leather district. We focus on enabling content teams through data insights, prioritization and implementation to level of all aspects of content creation and optimization. MarketMuse’s data science team is based in Montreal at our M4 lab where we pioneer AI solutions in the fields of natural language processing, topic modeling and natural language generation. Our team has been recognized for excellence by many scientific and entrepreneurial bodies, including the Creative Destruction Lab for AI innovation.
MarketMuse’s solution is focused on content marketing, editorial and search engine marketing teams. And while we have immediate success with teams that already work together and have cultivated a culture of content, we also have customer success and a constant advisory team that can jumpstart any growth path or trajectory, or even support organizational dynamics that may be slowing down content success.
Enterprise companies, publishers, B2B technology companies, e-commerce, agencies, even affiliate marketers all have a place at MarketMuse. The main question to ask is do you know the value of content? And do you want more of yours to be successful?
MarketMuse’s patented NLP technology is able to process 10’s of thousands to hundreds of thousands of content items in seconds to provide an objective lens on content quality and comprehensiveness.
By using that model for what it means to be an expert on any topic we can apply it to common workflows during content research planning authoring, editing and optimization.
MarketMuse is the only in market solution that tells you how difficult it will be for you to rank on a topic, how much authority you have on that topic and we can combine things like breadth and depth of coverage, quality comprehensiveness and even momentum to tell you how much investment is needed to succeed in any competitive landscape.
So imagine knowing how much content you need to create, how much content you need to optimize explicitly for a particular concept to win. We generate content briefs and high quality at scale that provide insights for target intent, internal and external linking, and cluster development. Our technology sets guidelines for an outline and narrative for those writers. Content briefs create a single source of truth for your writers, so they know what’s expected. They know what content performs consistently and your editors will have less feedback cycles with those same writers.
MarketMuse also is the only first-in-class solution for natural language generation for content marketers.
MarketMuse First Draft is able to process a validated content brief and build draft content that conforms to specifications for tone, voice, writing style and search engine optimization success.
It’s the most innovative solution in the NLP and NLG technology landscape specifically for marketers. The examples I’m going to show today cover workflow acceleration for content auditing and inventory content optimization competitive analysis and content briefing.
They connect to the four most common types of reasons why you plan content in the first place — to opportunistically create wins, surgical strikes of content. I’m going to drop in and look at this example to show you a quick win or what we commonly look at to find with data is what content should I create, what content should I update and what is going to have a meaningful impact on my business right now.
But also there’s goal-based planning that MarketMuse accelerates. Are there topics that you want to grow against? Or things that you have in 2021 you want to own? Maybe there are situations where you know you’ve lost ground against a particular topic and you need to recover.
Also risk based plans. You have a competitive situation where competitors increasing their effectiveness or increasing the amount of content they’re creating and optimizing. Or maybe you have a page that you haven’t updated in years, but you’re afraid to. You don’t know explicitly what you should do, how you should create it, how you should support it with a cluster of content or whether it just needs to be updated.
Maybe you’re just taking orders. You’re a marketing services organization internally and you want to put your best foot forward, every time you hit the publish button.
No matter what the situation is, MarketMuse supports content planning that fits your organization.
Focusing on the full content process we accelerate research, planning, briefing, writing, editing, publishing, optimization and reporting insights as to what you should create and update every time.
Now, jumping into the demo, like I mentioned, I’m going to start with the content inventory and content auditing process. So in this scenario, I’m looking at the MarketMuse site.
MarketMuse has 447 pages on our blog and wey’re trying to analyze what we should do to improve our presence around all the concepts and intents about content briefs. We’re already ranking number one in organic search for content brief with our definition page “What is a content brief?”.
And we can dive in and look at this in our pages inventory application to understand more about the all the pages we have about content briefs.
In this case, it immediately surfaces our seven page cluster, lets us understand more about what those pages are about, how well they’re doing, their most relevant related topics and how much authority do they have. In this case, we have two real primary pages, one very powerful anchor. Are we doing the right things with interlinking? Are we doing the right things with optimization?
Quickly by looking at this page, I can identify there’s some information that I want to improve against. Content brief samples and examples are things that maybe I’m not covering with this definition that we want to focus on and improve this page. So we can bounce down into our topics inventory and do the same thing.
Looking at content briefs and typing that in to my search bar to dive in and look at all the content brief topics that matter, I can see I’ve got content brief, How to Write a Content Brief (the same pages ranking third in search), content brief samples, also social media content brief templates. Lots of ideas for things to consider. Now I want to see which ones are going to be competitive advantages for me. I can dive over and see, wow, this is the first in market application that shows you personalize difficulty.
How hard is it going to be for you to rank on organic search? I can see I have a huge competitive advantage in content brief samples and content brief examples are things that I definitely want to cover with my research.
And in this situation I dive into MarketMuse Compete, which gives me a view of the competitive landscape for any topic in organic search.
We build a topic model that tells the story of what it means to be an expert on any concept and we show you the things that everybody covers, but we also uniquely show you the things that are semantically related, expert-focused information that differentiates your content.
So when people are writing about content brief samples, no one’s talking about content brief templates, no one’s talking about design briefs, no one’s talking about influencers and marketing briefs.
These are common use cases for content briefs, but they’re not covered by the industry landscape. So when we write our article about content briefs samples and examples, we’re going to make sure we cover the basics like content marketing.
And briefs and content briefs are also going to include these other very semantically relevant concepts to differentiate our page against our competitors.
So now I want to analyze the page that I have to know, how do I level it up and expand it to build that extra section about content brief samples? I can dive into the MarketMuse Optimize solution and get explicit details of how to level up this page against the topic model that we go with MarketMuse. So in this case, we’re already at 32, a MarketMuse measure of quality and comprehensiveness and we need two more points ofcomprehensiveness to hit MarketMuse target for this specific term.
So we can dive in and immediately do a gap analysis and say, hmm, what are the most effective ways I could expand this page to focus on that content brief example?
Content brief templates, content briefs, and design briefs influencers and a brief template — by adding a section of content that covers those things, I’m going to immediately hit MarketMuse’s target score.
I can dive in and get another level of insight to compare myself to any one of my competitors to so I can say, What did Content Marketing Institute do that I did not? What did I do that they didn’t? What are the explicit head to head gap analyses that I can use to say I want to make sure that I put out content that’s equal to or better than my competitors every time.
And when I go to create that new content item I can order a content brief through MarketMuse Suite.
A content brief gives me an executive summary about the concept I’m covering. It shows me the target content score and the length that’s expected of the writer to cover it in. Who is the audience. What are the questions that need to be elegantly answered throughout the narrative of the piece? What are title suggestions and sub headings and section suggestions and even what are the topics and internal and external links that I expect to include and recommend to include? We take that one step further for writers and we build that into an outline so we actually cover the doc document and the narrative that we recommend.
Going through the beginning in the summary to sub section one — what tools you’ll need to get started, questions to answer, topics, internal and external links and walking through each recommended section of the article. And when that writer builds that draft, focuses on their expertise, focuses on production value, they can take that draft and paste it right into this view and compare it against the brief recommendations so that they know when they deliver that draft to you. It’s going to be on target. It’s going to meet all expectations. It’s going to set them up for more success.
When you have writers that are more successful and more confident you have less feedback cycles and more potential to win.
Clients typically see 3-4x increase in their efficiencies, fewer feedback cycles and more successful content more of the time.
We have teams that go from 5% efficiency rates, all the way up to 40 and 50%. That means for every hundred articles they published last year, they were only getting five that hit their expectations. Now they’re doing 40 or 50. They meet their expectations. They’re able to get more content published for less overall investment and have more success while they do it.
Search Google for MarketMuse use case studies or shoot me a note at [email protected] if you’d like some more specific examples.
We don’t yet integrate with CMS or analytics out of the box. These can be done in a case by case basis. And we’ve integrated with some huge custom CMS. But since we don’t integrate, we can often get teams live in a week and we can provide easy workflows for copy and paste that keep formatting in place for your most common CMS.
We don’t focus on fictional content and we don’t work with teams trying to produce low quality content spam or to game the system.
Our technology sits between content operations and management platforms and search engine optimization analytics platforms. It’s frequently cited as the missing piece of both of those types of platforms.
Pricing is closely connected to the number of sites, size of team and content creation and optimization cadence of our clients. Client annual investment ranges are between 6000 a year and a half a million.
But midsized teams invest 20-30,000 in their first year and expand after experiencing the efficiency gains and performance impacts that I mentioned.
Onboarding for specific and individual end users can be very quick, but we also cover team onboarding if it’s needed. So we can work it in to your common workflows. We do clear role based onboarding when teams need it.
You’ll want to bring your content marketers, your SEO team, your editorial team and your writers to these onboarding sessions as well as agency contacts, if that’s part of your team dynamic.
Well, thank you for joining me today on this Tech Talk and please contact me at [email protected] with any questions or inquiries about MarketMuse, the content intelligence solution. It sets the standard for content quality. Thanks again.