One of the biggest challenges bloggers and brands face is consistently creating content that resonates with their audience. Many still focus on keyword density, which we're realizing is not the be-all and end-all of SEO content creation. The growing solution backed by research and statistics is to know your audience and craft client-first, high-quality, and engaging content.
In Brafton's latest infographic, 99 percent of B2B decision makers said content has an effect on their purchase decisions, according to Netline research. Also, 27 percent said content has a major influence on their choice to buy or not. B2C statistics are even more telling.
While the proof is in the numbers, unfailingly creating quality content that gets engagement is not always easy. "When you understand who your audience is and the kind of content they read, it's a lot easier to consistently write content that will connect with them. Until now, I'd argue, there is no one tool that can reveal who your audience is and provide you with a tool to write for them," asserted Ira Haberman, director of marketing for Atomic Reach, the Toronto-based social startup that unlocks the code to audience connection. "Our algorithm-and by extension the Atomic Insights product-really uncovers a substantive amount about the way in which audience's ingest content. As someone who has been in the content creation game, that is a very powerful tool."
It catches everthing from spelling and grammatical errors to whether the language is too sophisticated for your audience. Atomic Reach suggests when you should make your content more unique. It also shows how to fix or improve under-performing links. If your headline could be made better to capture readers' attention, it lets you know. When your content lacks enough emotion to connect with readers, Atomic Reach points this out, too.
"There are all kinds of post-analytic tools that perhaps offer insight from a demographic, search analytics, and traffic point of view like Chartbeat or KISSmetrics. There are as many great content creation tools like Grammarly or Hemingway App, but there are none that put the two pieces together like we do," Haberman said. "Sure you can understand how a piece of content performed or ensure the grammar is correct, but can you do both every single time and produce a quality piece of content that connects with your audience? Only Atomic Reach can help you do both. The truth is, we don't compete against other tools like ours-we compete with other content marketing tools in the marketplace."
Atomic Reach grades your content just like a traditional school report. You aim to reach 60 for optimal impact. A score of 75 is ideal. When I spoke with Haberman over the telephone for a demo of the platform, he scored one of my blog articles. It received a 72. Not bad, but when we changed "Three" in the headline to "3," my score went up a point. Studies do show number headlines, in numeral format, resonate most.
The platform is free for bloggers with one author and one feed. Pro bloggers can pay $25 a month to add a dashboard and support. Business pricing starts at $250 and $20 an author monthly, going up to $1,250 and $20 an author. You just set up your Atomic Insights account, download the plug-in for your favorite blogging platform, and start creating content. Engager Lite lets you see how the platform works, allowing you to paste your headline and article. It scores it based on the audience you choose-from General and Knowledgeable to Specialist and Academic. Then you receive Atomic Reach's feedback, apply it, and re-score until you're happy with your article (or you score well in all areas, including title, audience, structure, and linguistics). I rescored this post until it reached 74 for the specialist audience, and I was excited to close down my computer for the night.
"When Atomic Reach launched in 2011, it was a content curation platform, pairing publishers and brands with bloggers. While the company had some success, I think our CEO Bradley Silver, a technology entrepreneur, wanted to solve a bigger problem than just filling content gaps," said Haberman, who came to the company from Corus Entertainment. "He began to think about why some of the content Atomic Reach provided to our clients performed well, while some fell flat."
Haberman explained Atomic Reach spent about 18 months researching content and its relationship with audiences. Then they set out to build an algorithm that analyzes 21 measures of content with the goal to understand the relationship between content and audiences. "With so many post-publishing analytics tools in the marketplace, there was nothing to help content creators be truly predictive about their results. Coupled with the notion that there aren't tools that help you write consistently great content for your audience, we believed Atomic Reach's new platform launched in the summer of 2013 could serve a void in the content marketing and publishing sphere."
Long-term, the team has aspirations to use Atomic Reach's scoring engine on every piece of published content. Think that is far fetched? The startup is talking to some pretty big players who create thousands of pieces of content every day. "I think our tool is a lot like match.com. It matches the right content with the right audiences."