Concured has already brought artificial intelligence to augment the creative creative stories brands tell through content marketing. Its next chapter will focus on sales enablement.
Based in London, Concured uses AI to address a lot of the unknown questions that make the creative process in content marketing so difficult. Its technology ingests data to help assess what topics an organization should focus on, for example, and how they can differentiate their content from that being produced by competitors.
According to Peter Loibl, who became president of Concured in May after a stint as vice-president of the Content Marketing Institute earlier this year, the company can take any brand’s content library and read, tag and index it to produce a 360-degree audit.
Besides white papers, blog posts and infographics that tend to drive top-of-funnel awareness and engagement, however, Concured is seeing an opportunity to assist brands in a similar way with sales enablement materials that lead to actual purchases.
“What brands want is not only to engage with audience but move them into the buying cycle,” he told B2B News Network. “We’re going to help them get a better understanding of not only how much of the content is resonating but the ‘who.’”
Concured also offers what Loibl described as a sort of “Pinterest for content marketers” where they can change ideas and inspire new topics. This is all part of building a community of content marketers who see the value in what AI can offer them. Some of the B2B sectors showing the most uptake so far include insurance, pharmaceuticals and agencies who want to help their clients deliver better results for the content they’re helping produce or manage.
“They want to pitch our services,” he said.
Some brands want to use AI to offer a deeper analysis across their entire library, while others want to hone in on specific kinds of assets or channels, like the performance of their blog posts, for instance. Concured is also able to work with multimedia content such as videos, Loibl said, by listening to the audio, transcribing and then reading and tagging the text.
AI in content marketing is not necessarily new, of course. Loibl admitted he walked the show floor at the recent Content Marketing World in Cleveland to look at technologies such as IBM’s Watson. However he insisted Concured has no direct competitors so far.
“I haven’t seen anyone that can create full-scale audits in seconds,” he said.
On the other hand, helping marketers get comfortable with the thought of using AI in an area that’s focused on somewhat subjective choices on topics, themes and the telling of stories is still an uphill battle, Loibl added.
“In essence, if we can have a brand marketer for one hour to sit and earn our platform, we’re convinced they’re going to buy,” he said. “The question is how to get even 30 seconds of of their attention first.”
