Performance and intent - the content tracking goals for Contentgine's Content Indication Platform

Determining a person's intent to purchase is challenging. It's why there are so many technologies available that track a person's activities across the internet and then run some machine learning algorithms to determine intent.

But as we know, there are challenges with tracking people, including IP-based identity resolution. Contentgine thinks it has this intent challenge figured out, but that's only part of its pitch. I spoke with Ian Dix, Contentgine’s CMO and Tim Ribich, Chief Product Officer, to understand better how Contentgine works and why they decided to create the Top 5 most popular assets series.

Content use drives intent

I recently received a few PR pitches about Contentgine's Top 5 most popular content assets in different categories, such as CRM, Artificial Intelligence, and analytics. The articles are selected using Contentgine's Content Indication Platform (CIP), which uses AI and machine learning to analyze engagement metrics against a content library of over 500k case studies, whitepapers, and other business assets.

Contentgine acquired this content library, called ContentTree, in May of 2021. The library contains 400,000 assets spanning 2000 categories. The content itself comes from over 400 industries, including finance, healthcare, retail, etc. It has over 200,000 in the technology vertical alone.

The library is free on provision of a business email, your industry, and your functional area. A team of content writers sources the case studies and other content from the internet to include in the library, while users can also suggest content to include. The content is tagged and indexed by product type, industry, and challenge. As part of this library, you can subscribe to topic collections, create your own collections on content, and email notifications about new content.

Along with the content library, Contentgine also manages a series of micro-sites for specific product categories. You can find a list of these micro-sites on Contentreads.com, including this one for marketing automation. The micro-sites provide only case studies, which Contentgine views as one of the most important types of content to inform intent.

Contentgine also sends 153 vertical-specific newsletters weekly through ContentReads with content custom selected for that industry or topic.

Analyzing content use

Ribich explained that the CIP analyzes how the library is used to assist with research, buying, content performance, and pain points to solve. It also analyzes the content viewed from the newsletters. The CIP breaks this data down into actionable information around accounts and content insights that companies use to help them reach their target markets.

The platform gives you a view of intent by product category first. You can then drill down into a category and see the accounts researching content in that category. You can see the companies looking at the content, the departments, roles, product categories, and the specific assets. Each account has an intent score (0-100) assigned, determined by consumption across the library, emails, and micro-sites.

Working with the data, you can create views by company size, industry, region, and time frame (the default is 90 days) and export that data to import into your marketing automation or ABM platforms. There is no direct integration today, but Ribich said they are working on API integrations with HubSpot and Marketo.

Ribich suggested that you can use the CIP to help you keep Target Account Lists up to date by identifying new accounts or helping find dormant accounts that are showing signs of activity.

Keep in mind this is account-level data; there is no PII shared here. However, Contentgine also has a couple of additional offerings called Content Category Leads and Content Attributed Leads that give you access to specific lead data and help you target these leads through content syndication and other programs.

Analyzing content performance

You can also get a holistic view of the performance of all content in the library, newsletters, and micro-sites, to see what performs best with the CIP. This report can help companies understand how their content is performing overall and against competitor content. They could also use the data to determine what content and messages resonate to help them create or update content to meet those requirements.

Something Contentgine is working on, according to Ribich, is understanding why particular  content is performing. The platform doesn't currently provide that level of context, but when it does, a lot of companies will be interested in knowing why their content or their competitor's content is working, so they can replicate the performance in new content assets.

The top 5 articles on <insert topic here>

So what about these Top 5 articles Contentgine produces? It's a great marketing tool to get companies to want to work with them. Dix talked about how producing these reports is helping the company get the attention of technology companies to purchase their solutions and get their content into the library.

The more content in the library, the more people will sign up to do their research. And the higher potential for a company's content to get in front of the right people. The more people consuming the content, the better the analytics. It's essentially a win-win for both.

There is not only an article on the Top 5, but the company has also partnered with Robert Rose, an industry expert, to cover the top 5 in a video, speaking to the product category and why these content assets are ranking so well.

My take

Contentgine got my attention through its Top 5 Content Assets marketing campaign. It's a smart marketing tactic and a refreshing change from how most technology companies market their solutions.

But when I talked with Dix and Ribich, I became more interested in understanding what this platform was all about because I have often questioned the validity of intent data. I like Contentgine's approach to understanding intent through content consumption using email addresses (first-party data). I also like that intent is not determined by engaging with a single piece of content - there's much more to determining intent than one asset.

Contentgine is only three years old, so I'll give them a pass on not having the integrations to marketing automation and ABM solutions. But I believe they will need these integrations in place to find a place in the martech stack long term. I'd also like to see integrations with content management or content marketing platforms once they have deeper analytics on content performance.

For now, though, this is a unique view to understanding buying intent and content performance, and worth a closer look.