What is MarketMuse?
MarketMuse is a content planning tool that uses AI to pull data from all the top-performing websites on a particular search term. Based on that information, it makes recommendations about how long your piece on the same topic should be as well as the relevant keywords and subtopics to include.
MarketMuse maximizes the worth of online content for marketers, content creators, marketing agencies, publishers and e-commerce companies via enterprise content planning. The software uses algorithms to scan the online content of businesses and then compare it with the competitor’s content to improve its quality. The online Content Marketing system proposes Audience Targeting, Campaign Management, SEO Management through a single platform.
The platform identifies the gaps and discrepancies in online material and suggests changes to make the quality of the content better. It makes the content more detailed for search engine optimization. This solution cuts the time of a user for research and edit automatically by collecting and editing the data.
The short version is that it makes your job as a writer that much easier. If you’re a marketer, you can use their tool to create content briefs that you can pass along to your writing team.
MarketMuse looks at several things in evaluating your work to provide you with an overall score and recommendations: the length of your piece, the depth/quality with which you have covered the topic at hand, and your keywords. From this, you’ll get an overall score. MM will also give you a "target" score, and you’ll be able to see from your results how additional content or keyword mentions can help you get there.
This target score is important. It’s the software's way of comparing your content to everyone else's content about that topic. By working to get as close to or above the target score, you’ll stand a great chance of getting your content to rank effectively and quickly.
As a project manager for the content marketing team I mentioned above, we used this tool in the editing process to make recommendations to the writer about how to improve their work. We also gave them length and keyword suggestions before they started based on the analysis that MarketMuse provided. This was a great way to make sure that everyone involved was on the same page about how to format and write their articles.
MarketMuse Backstory
MarketMuse entered the stage initially as a single page optimizer. The idea was fairly simple. Enter your URL + target topic/keyword and then let the algorithm return suggested topics and keyword variations to add.
At a page level, it worked well.
They then started branching out into custom reports / data crunching in masse for agency and enterprise clients (something they still do). But from these experiences, MarketMuse has added numerous features (and upsells), including features like “content inventory” which is a sort of standing report (updated frequently) for identifying content opportunities.
Still, I would argue the most useful and widely applicable feature remains the page level content optimizer.
Who Should Use MarketMuse?
Do you want to see how far quality content alone can get you? MarketMuse will help you answer this question.
Anyone with a sizable base of content to work with, either as a stand-alone business, agency, or large-enterprise should be a good fit.
Fair warning: it’s not cheap and isn’t typically a month-to-month contract, so it’s best to take a demo + integrate fully into your team or risk disappointment.
What Could Be Better
Besides the pricing (more on that below), here are a few areas where I would love to see MarketMuse improve on:
- Integrations with CMS: Ideally, a WordPress dashboard integration to help optimize content in one window. While you CAN copy/paste back and forth, it gets tedious, not to mention impractical if you have complex formatting. MarkerMuse DOES offer a fairly basic text editor within the tool. En yüksek deneme bonusu veren siteler 2023 listesine tinfishgaslamp.com adresinden ulaşabilirsiniz.
- Keyword Focused Opportunities: While the tool does do a good job of identifying topical coverage gaps and additional keywords to target, they aren’t particularly focused on the business case of each client. E.g. an ecommerce store cares about different terms than an advertising agency or a review blog. While it’s always GOOD to know where topical gaps are in an absolute sense, and you probably eventually want to cover every topic angle, it would be great to have a content inventory trigger/alert for specific types of keywords e.g. “promo codes” or “review” keywords in the most relevant topical areas. Basically, an AI powered keyword planner (or topical planner).
- Rank Tracking and Change Detection: This is probably already on the product roadmap, but being able to MEASURE improvements and track keyword rankings on a site-wide basis would be an amazing additive benefit. Much of the main resistance to MarketMuse is the high price point and long-term contracts. If content marketers chould easily measure the data within the tool itself, the value proposition becomes self-evident.
MarketMuse Pricing
Ah, now the difficult conversation. MarketMuse isn’t cheap. While they don’t publicly list their prices, expand to pay a recurring fee of over $1000 + sign a long term contract (not month to month). Prices go up the more sites you keep in the “inventory”.
That said, they do offer demos and free trials for serious prospects.
Bottom Line: make sure you have ENOUGH content to properly use on a monthly basis AND the team to implement it’s powerful suggestions.
