Contently is a SaaS content marketing platform from the company of the same name headquartered in New York, containing features a collaboration space, calendar, and workflow controls, engagement metrics, and rapid access to a high volume of original content from freelance creative talent, researchers, and journalists.
Contently has received approximately $12.3 million in funding since its founding in 2010.
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Kapost
Score 7.1 out of 10
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Upland Kapost helps you create and distribute meaningful content to support the buyer journey for B2B companies.
It's helpful for top of marketing funnel writing that we can sometimes lose sight of because we are so ingrained in the product day to day. Contently is also helpful for long written pieces and ebooks that will take a significant amount of employee time to put together. I avoid using Contently for mid to bottom funnel marketing writing because my team will often have greater insight into the product function or use-case or product release, making them more adroit to the tone of the written piece and able to produce the content quickly.
Kapost has potential to be a great asset in small and large orgs. If you're not producing a great deal of content, or coordinating across a large team, there's still tremendous value, but it scales as your org scales because it makes it easier to coordinate and manage large teams and large content archives.
Consolidating my work in one place to make my work life easier
Contently is unique from other content marketing organizational tools in one key way. It hands you a network of freelance professionals eager for delegated work.
You can search through a database of professionals to find the perfect person for your given project. Find individuals in your budget offering the exact skills and experience you need.
Filtering: If you make the most out of your custom details and custom fields, you can gain newfound access to materials that may have long been lost in the ether. It's really easy for us, for instance, to see all of our videos at once. Or everything targeting a certain buying stage. Or you can keyword search to see everything on one topic.
Workflows: It's really nice to lay out "who sees what when" in a digital way, because everyone involved on an asset can easily see what stage things are at. You can also set deadlines to tasks, which seems a bit more firm than a casual email, because you can visually see how meeting your deadline fits within the whole timeline.
Calendars: The calendar feature is nice for us because we have a blog, so we can see when everything is (supposed) to go live. It's easy to see when I, as a copy editor, should be expecting work, so I can align my day accordingly. Way better than the old-fashioned "mental note" system.
Social media distribution needs improvement. Specifically a calendar for planned Tweets and a better way to schedule multiple shares of the same content.
System performance is somewhat slow.
Should be an easier way to make changes, like adding custom fields or publication destinations, to all content types, rather than one at a time.
We are using some other systems that might have replaced Kapost, but none of them had the workflow functionality we were looking for. So, we're sticking with Kapost for now.
The calendar view is a great feature and so are the custom views. It is relatively easy to see a clear view of what content the user is responsible for and then the due dates associated to it. The ability to create and update workflows for the team is easy to navigate and keeps us on track.
I'm giving them a 10, but honestly, I've never reached out to them. I do see them putting out regular content on social media, so they might be responsive to questions there as well as regular customer support. In their posts and communication, they do seem to value their community, so hopefully, they have good customer support. And I've seen them asking for pitches from their community to publish well-paid articles during this stressful coronavirus time, and I really appreciate that.
The reputation of the product matches up to its reputation as one of the leaders in the space. I love that you can share and access content at your fingertips from anywhere. The downside is that it does not have the prettiest interface but you can get over this with its functionality.
I also opened an account with Skyword in 2019, which is a similar service. The person that recommended it was a travel writer, and since I've done that as well, I thought it might be a better fit. To this point, I've received no work from it either, and don't hold out a lot of hope. As previously mentioned, where I think Contently does well is by giving you an online portfolio, additional resources like a blog for learning, and a rates database for publications.
Workfront has a lot of great features, but Kapost was the right tool for what we needed at the time. With a team of our size, we had to make sure we weren't biting off more than we could chew and the project never got off the ground. We had to be thoughtful with how we rolled it out.
Contently contributors have produced some great inbound marking posts and creative materials saving our marketing team significant time allowing them to focus on more strategic plans for the business.
The amount of time Contently has saved our internal creative writing staff has more than paid for itself!
