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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Olapic
Score 6.0 out of 10
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Olapic is a content marketing tool specifically focused on visual marketing content. It allows a brand to locate, curate and publish user or fan photos into its own marketing material and website, sourcing many sites (e.g. Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, etc.), and sending select material omni-channel, using it in emails, print, in-store, or elsewhere. Olapic also provides measures for judging how effective your curation and user-generated content were in boosting conversions. Olapic was…
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.
If your brand has a good amount of steady social content, and you like to show it on your site along with shoppable links at the catalog and also at the product level, Olapic is an easy to use utiilty and also allows you to render your Instagram feed shoppable. In our case, we had a very active social presence but did not leverage it directly for the customers to shop from it, so Olapic filled that need.
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.
It's a niche solution. If you're looking for niche, it's great. But if you're looking for an enterprise tool connected to many different systems and data solutions, it might not be for you.
The revenue analytics are not very reliable.
Price. This seems like it would be a great solution for medium size businesses, but the price is not feasible for the product.
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.
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.
We have not used many competitors, but we stick with Olapic because of the capabilities that it offers. We don't use much of the reporting functionality, but it is a great tool to allow for collaboration between team members. It also allows us options when it comes to sharing content on the website, as it has gallary-style plug ins to display UGC.
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!
In general, we are seeing customers react to the content and use the links for shopping on our site. Their analytics is perhaps more optimistic than I believe, but content is king, and customers like to see more images of the product in more sizes and situations
We are starting to make custom brand pages and landing pages for advertising campaigns, and it's always great to add believable UGC to those pages to showcase a brand's style and general feel.
Tracking our social content is a good way to get a more generalized feel of how the brand is tracking, and who is creating content regarding our brand, so that is a beneficial side effect of constantly monitoring our tags.
