Marketing software is typically only as good as the user implementing it. Except when it’s better than that. Machine learning and natural language processing can get many marketing tools close to being better. In fact, we’ve seen it with SEO plugins like Scribe. With it, you start writing or copy-paste your article into WordPress and, after scanning the content, it suggests SEO keyword improvements to help that article rank better in search.
Take that same thinking and apply it to content marketing … have a machine read what I have then suggest relevant links, other ideas to incorporate into the piece … and you’ve got something along the lines of Zemanta. It gives you easy-to-add images and relevant articles to enhance your copy.
Now take that a step further. Imagine a tool that, without any copy to analyze, automatically suggested topics for you to write about based on your past content and what’s trending online now. Imagine that you could load in rules for your content, even rules for different types — blog posts vs. landing pages — and the software would give you scores and guidelines to show you where your content is strong and where it needs help?
That would be Wriber, a new content marketing software from John Zupanic, who I caught up with recently.
Writer lets you open up a new creation page, then with just telling it what type of content you’re working on — a sales page, press release, blog post, landing page — scans the web and in about a minute, comes back with suggestions on what you should write about. It essentially removes writer’s block from your purview.
What’s more, you can set it up to know your ideal length, SEO keywords, brand guidelines, appropriate spellings, brand messaging, forbidden words, boilerplates and more, so it automatically checks these for you and suggests edits. Not only that, you can set its system to know your brand tone, sensory words, readability level and even tolerance for ambiguity in writing. Wriber can get deep on suggesting edits that only an English teacher would spot.
As you write, suggested links emerge as in Zemanta, but Writer has simple tools to allow you to go view the article, highlight a snippet of text, and automatically source that article in yours.
Have a great blog post that you think might be strong as a white paper? Wriber will make suggestions on a content roadmap to help you expand the copy and do just that. It also keeps content categorized in your library as an element in a certain stage of the buying process — so it has sales and marketing funnel framework built in.
And unlike a lot of content marketing tools, Wriber has a fair amount of analytics built into its system so you can see which content is meeting the standards you’ve set the tool to shoot for and which elements need work. The workflow management allows an editor or brand manager to jump in and see how on-message and on-brand each of his or her writers are as well, so you can even use it as a feedback mechanism for professional development.
I’ve seen some interesting plugins and softwares to help you create and enhance content before, but this one immediately caught my attention. It can help turn an average web writer into a dynamo who churns out specific content to drive sales and more. Certainly, yes, the user needs to know how to best apply the software. But this more than anything I’ve seen can take a relatively green web content writer and make them pretty darn good.
The tool works as an online repository. You compose in the cloud, optimize and save it. You can export or copy-paste into WordPress, HubSpot or any other content management system. There are roadmap plans to integrate directly with many popular platforms, too. The pricing model is still a bit TBA, but expect this to run around $500 per month for a set number of seat licenses for brands or agencies. Hopefully, they’ll land on an individual user plan for significantly less, but this kind of tool is more than likely going to have a bit of an enterprise focus.
The good news for us on a budget is they have just launched a free content ideation tool right on the site’s home page. Just head over to Wriber’s website, enter a topic an see what suggestions come up. They’re giving away a bit of the writer’s block fix to lure you in to try it out. And that’s not half bad.
Check out Wriber at wriber.com.