Item: Optimizely Content Marketing Platform
Rating: 10
Author: Mai Le

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our content marketing team uses Newscred with our content management system to create and edit blog posts and share social media related to those blog posts. We also work with NewsCred staff to contract with freelancers and get syndicated content to fill any gaps we might have in publishing content to our blog.

Pros and Cons

Customer Service: They'll contact you with a "we're looking at your issue" email within the hour, even on weekends and holidays. Beyond solving your issues/problems with the software, they'll also follow up later to make sure you don't have additional associated issues.
Live Analytics: You're given a snapshot of how your blog content is doing at any point in time, since they've been tracking your posts/content. You can compare this month's traffic to last year's trafffic during this same month. Other data points include: Unique Visitors, Average Attention Time, Pageviews, Engagement Rate, etc...and you'll even get referral traffic source. There's much more that I'm leaving out here.
CMP User Interface (UI): Love the easy to use interface to upload blog posts, to use for editing and publishing content, and broadcasting social shares. Besides easily identifiable icons, you can create/edit content in the WYSIWYG or use the html view to make sure everything looks exactly how you prefer. Another cool thing is that the CMP auto-embeds live links of social updates (like Youtube, Twitter, Instagram) for more dynamic blog posts.

Cutting and pasting into the CMP can bring in some weird html and spacing issues and sometimes even with the auto-embedded social shares. This is an issue with freelancers, more than with in-house writers, but needing how to read/handcode html means only a few people on our team can prep and "fix" weirdness in the content.
It'd be great if custom modules had the same WYSIWYG functionality. We had NewsCred create an area where we write an intro, to "personalize" each post to our brand voice. But, it requires the person writing the intro to know html, since the WYSIWYG feature is missing.

Return on Investment

Analytics show us the ROI on investing time in the blog content we're producing. For example: PAGEVIEWS over the last week
3k, +276 over prev. period, that tells us that we're moving in the right direction as far as topics and article length.
Now we're working with NewsCred to see how certain pieces of content lead to conversions and eventually SALs. So, our ongoing collaboration with NewsCred brings us even more justification to keep the relationship going. This can save us time, but also make us hesitant to leave/check out demos with competitors.

Alternatives Considered

Contently

NewsCred competes with Contently for content management and syndicated content/freelance writers. The interface for NewsCred is much prettier than Contently and they have a more robust platform for all things content marketing. I haven't delved much further into NewsCred competitors.

Other Software Used

Yoast Wordpress SEO Plugins, Meltwater Media Intelligence Platform, Canva

Likelihood to Recommend

Well-suited to large company blogs, like our company, a global SaaS. We have various blogs, in various languages, that use NewsCred to update to all our respective blogs. It's a great way to silo our different blog content, but also to peep at each other's content to repost to respective blogs. NewsCred is awesome in this context, but wouldn't be as useful to a one-person shop that only publishes original brand content. The platform is also great for organizations that need to supplement content with freelance writers and syndicated posts.

NewsCred's Content Marketing Solutions You Didn't Know You Need

Overall Satisfaction with NewsCred