The demand for the best content intelligence platforms is set to rise as brands across the globe recognize the power of content marketing.
Even though your content strategy largely depends on your unique business needs, using the right content intelligence tools, alongside your AI SEO tools, can help you get to where you want to be quick.
These content intelligence tools leverage the power of artificial intelligence, big data, machine learning, and natural language processing to conduct market research into content strategy effectiveness and deliver valuable insights into the target audience.
You can use the data obtained from market research to develop and center your content to revolve around your users and what the typical buyer persona loves to consume.
While it is still possible to undertake competitive content intelligence manually by yourself, the software automates and streamlines the process, generating results quickly.
In this article, I have selected the best content intelligence platforms based on the main capabilities, features, who’s best for, pricing, and more. Read on to learn more and find the best tool for your business.
Contents
What are the Best Content Intelligence Platforms?
Here are the seven best content intelligence platforms you use in your business content marketing process.
1. Outranking
Best content intelligence platform for content strategy, execution, and optimization.
Outranking enables you to combine AI guidance and data to develop a complete SEO strategy and stay on top of any niche. Its advanced topic clustering automation with related keywords and semantic terms lets you locate each corner of the user intent and areas to generate organic presence.
With the Outranking’s authority gaps, you can accurately highlight those areas of the customer journey that lack supporting content. Besides, the feature allows you to determine what’s working, areas of improvement, and the amount of effort required to attain the desired organic traffic goals.
You can even blend authority gaps with content strategy to prioritize new content while optimizing existing content to drive the much-needed traffic to your website. This content intelligence tool further features an AI-powered keyword strategy, which allows you to focus on your win zone and accurately identify easy target keywords.
Outranking is best for writers who need to incorporate all the required data into their work to generate winning SEO content with top-notch organic ranking potential. It is also a perfect choice for businesses and entrepreneurs who need performance acceleration and creation tools in one place.
Key Features
- Seamless Integration – Outranking integrates with WordPress, Google Docs, Grammarly, and Google Search Console.
- Automated SEO Content Briefs – You can use the software’s artificial intelligence to automate your brief creation process and generate outlines and content descriptions.
- Automatic Content Strategy Prioritization – The software automatically determines areas to exert more of your efforts and the keywords to target.
- State-of-the-art SEO Outline Builder – Uses automatic infusion of topic and keyword to create comprehensive and intent-matching SEO outlines.
- Keyword Position Tracking – It lets you track and boost your keyword rankings.
- AI First Drafts – Outranking’s proprietary technology lets you complete 80% of the first copy within 15 minutes.
- Automatic Templates – The features allow you to develop all types of web content within the shortest time possible. These include service pages, press releases, featured snippets, product pages, and more.
- Internal Link Suggestions – The platform provides AI-based internal link suggestions to boost organic position and PageRank.
- FAQ Generator – Uses AI to produce complete questions and answers.
- Top-quality SERP Data – The software analyzes the top-ranking pages for a particular keyword query. You can use the insights to develop a content plan to outrank your competitors.
Pricing
- Solo ($79/mo) – Allows you to write and SEO optimize 10 articles with unlimited AI words.
- Pro ($149/mo) – Write and SEO optimize 20 articles with unlimited AI words.
- Company ($219/mo) – Write and SEO optimize 30 articles with unlimited AI words.
If you choose a yearly billing cycle, you get a 30% discount on all plans.
2. NeuronWriter
An advanced content intelligence tool for optimizing content based on user intent.
NeuronWriter makes it easy to plan, create, and optimize your content for better ranking. This advanced content editor tool features Google SERP, semantic models (NLP), and competition data to enable you to generate meaningful insights into your content marketing efforts.
It can help you search for articles that relate to your niche and provides easy-to-follow recommendations to enable you to produce the type of content you want. Moreover, it scrutinizes competitors’ highly ranking content or Google SERP, which puts you in a better position to answer the user query.
The software’s content repository enables you to develop priorities depending on the market trends, group, and tag analyses and easily share the information with other copywriters. Once you have finished working on your content, you can use custom columns and filters to mark it as done and undertake export analyses for easy reporting.
NeuronWriter is ideal for copywriters, business owners, and individuals seeking to invest in effective content performance. With this tool, you can easily rely on one platform to power all your content creation process.
Key Features
- Competitor Analyses – The software sifts through the competitors’ successful content to determine what makes them rank and the number of clicks the content gets. You can use the data obtained to understand better and answer the user query.
- Multi-language Support – NeuronWriter supports 170+ languages.
- Content Analyses – The platform offers more than 100,000 content analyses.
- Easy Document Management – You can easily plan and generate priorities through a content repository.
- Custom Columns – This lets you perform export analyses for easy reporting.
- Easy-to-follow Recommendations – It makes generating the type of content you want straightforward.
- Document Drafts – The software allows you to develop a document draft, which includes popular topics and questions.
- Internal Linking – NeuronWriter provides recommendations about similar pages of a particular domain, enabling you to organize for internal linking to boost new articles’ potential.
- Content Planner – The feature allows you to make an initial plan of what you will write.
- Content Sharing – The software provides options to share your content with external copywriters, customers, and teams.
- Integrations – NeuronWriter integrates with Google Search Console, which allows you to know how your content is performing.
- Schema Data explorer – Let’s you transfer rich information to Google.
Pricing
- The Bronze plan is €19/month.
- Its Silver plan is €37/month.
- The Gold plan is €57/month.
- The Platinum plan is €77/month.
- The Diamond plan is €97/month.
3. Surfer SEO
Best content intelligence software for revolutionizing SEO content marketing.
Boasting 20+ years of experience, Surfer SEO started its journey as an in-house tool for streamlining daily happenings at a specific agency.
But that’s in the past, as it’s currently a household name in the international marketing community and trusted by thousands of businesses and individuals.
You can use the full power of Surfer to research, optimize, write, and audit your SEO content to yield well-researched and engaging articles.
Through post-publishing optimization, Surfer SEO provides new weekly suggestions on the best ways to enhance and optimize published content. It further automates all your SEO efforts to enable you to save energy and time.
Using Surfer AI, you can now effortlessly create a highly SEO-optimized article in approximately 20 minutes based solely on your input keyword.
The best part is that it integrates with your preferred apps, such as WordPress, for a seamless experience across platforms. You can also connect your Surfer account to Google Search Console to receive up-to-date and accurate metrics for your domain or website.
Again, instead of shifting to a new platform or website, you can link your Surfer with Semrush to receive pertinent backlink insights from leading competitors.
Surfer SEO is best for businesses and content creators seeking to optimize their new and existing content.
Read my comprehensive Surfer SEO review.
Key Features
- Free Content Outline Generator – Gives a unique AI-generated outline within simple steps.
- Keyword Surfer – The feature quickly reveals your keywords’ content guidelines and search data.
- Post-publishing Optimization – Surfer SEO provides new suggestions to enable you to optimize your already published content.
- Content Editor Extension – You can install the Surfer content editor extension and integrate it with Google Docs and WordPress.
- Surfer AI – This 1-click blog post generator will help you optimize your workflow.
- Instant Feedback – This helps you identify your areas of improvement.
- Content Planner – Helps you to arrange numerous search terms into various groups to enable you easily target them with one single piece.
- Content Editor – Once you click on the Content Editor feature, Surfer enables you to generate compelling data-driven content with high visibility and ranking.
- SEO Audit Tool – The tool provides step-by-step instructions to help you optimize your content. It also offers insights on content length, page speed, keyword density, number of headings, meta tag structure, and missing backlinks, to mention but a few.
- Automatic Internal Link Suggestions – Surfer SEO suggests those pages with audited URLs to link to.
- Multi-language Support – Surfer works in nearly all languages.
- Chat Support – The feature enables you to obtain feedback.
Pricing
- The Lite plan is $19/ month.
- The Essential plan is $69/month.
- The Advanced plan goes for $149/mo.
- Its Max plan goes for $249/month.
4. BuzzSumo
Best all-in-one content intelligence tool for content marketers.
Since its founding in 2014, BuzzSumo has remained a premium global go-to content marketing tool for businesses. Thousands of companies and entrepreneurs currently use this platform to generate top-tier content, discover growth opportunities, and closely monitor their industry and brand.
BuzzSumo sifts through billions of articles and social engagements and integrates them into a single easy-to-search app. This will help you understand your audience while tapping into timeless classics and viral trends.
With the data ranging from 24 hours to five years, you can get the insights needed to develop a traffic-attracting, competitor-beating, and reader-pleasing piece of content. The data also provides SEO insights to determine high-demand keywords while analyzing top-ranking headlines’ structure, subheadings, and content.
Besides, this content intelligence tool offers real-time updates, giving you access to new links. The good thing is that you receive instant notifications when new links are generated on the platform, which enables you to act fast.
BuzzSumo is best suited for content creators and marketers seeking to generate brilliant content to sell their brand and drive much-needed traffic. It helps content marketers in determining the topics important to their target audience.
Key Features
- Comprehensive Benchmarking – You can conduct a domain search to unearth your competitor’s top content.
- Instant Alerts – You receive notifications when new links are generated on the platform.
- Geographic Filtering – The feature enables you to pay more attention to relevant regions and drive meaningful insights.
- Seamless Exports – You can quickly transfer your reports into Excel sheets.
- Real-time Updates – The platform offers new link updates in real-time.
- Custom Feeds – The feature lets you generate and share feeds based on domains, key topics, and locations.
- Viral Hits Predictions – Check trending scores to highlight emerging viral hits.
- Real-time Results – BuzzSumo provides instant performance data for all the content you release.
- Content Examples – The platform gives you question examples and accurate content to enable you to generate ideas quickly.
- Customer Voice – It lets you hear your audience’s questions, enabling you to adapt to their language and tone.
- Domain Analysis – You can feed into a domain to uncover the most successful authors.
- Chrome Extension – It is easy to install BuzzSumo’s Chrome extension. All you need to do is visit the Chrome extension store and click on the tool’s logo.
Pricing
- Basic ($95/mo)
- Content Creation ($199/mo)
- PR & Comms ($199/mo)
- Suite ($319/mo)
- Enterprise ($999/mo)
These prices reflect a yearly billing cycle (20% off). Moreover, they offer a 30-day free trial for you to test drive the software.
5. SpyFU
The number #1 content intelligence software with the industry’s top features.
SpyFU is here to help you eliminate all the guesswork of your content marketing campaigns and SEO and dominate your competition. This software spans about 7 billion results, cutting across 109 million domains to generate data that leads to insights and visibility into the top strategies of industry leaders.
Through SpyFU’s PPC and SEO competitor research, you can uncover your top competitors’ search marketing secret formula, enabling you to learn from their successes. All you need to do is to search for domains of your choice, check their presence on Google, keywords purchased on Google Ads, ad variation, and every organic rank in the previous 16 years.
What’s more intriguing about this software is that it offers quality backlink recommendations that are 100% safe and indexed by Google. You simply feed in the keyword and check the backlinks and sites that can enable you to rank on the specific keyword.
Besides, the software’s in-depth SEO and PPC SERP analysis let you determine the exact ranking factors for every keyword. Through that, you may unearth those weak sites that still manage to rank and master their secrets.
SpyFU is best for website owners and writers looking to uncover all the secrets of excelling in content marketing and learning from their competitors.
Key Features
- Custom Reports – The software provides custom-branded SEO reports highlighting opportunities, proving your value, and showing competitor action.
- SERP Analysis – SpyFU conducts SEO and PPC SERP analysis to enable you to determine the ranking factors for your keywords.
- Backlinks Builder – Generates quality and indexed backlinks for specified keywords.
- Keyword Bulk Upload and Groups – You can paste to the platform a list of keywords, and it will arrange them into groups and include CPC and search volume data to them.
- Rank Tracking – You can track the SEO keyword ranking impression and progress.
- Competitor Analysis – Tracks websites within your SEO niche, sifts through their keywords, and lets you learn from their successes.
- Keyword Research – You can research competitors’ SEO keywords and download them to see what makes them rank and the number of clicks they receive.
- Domains Top Lists and Leads – SpyFU allows you to generate your custom list of domains through filtering by location, industry, social media, search traffic, and technologies.
- Multi-competitor Keyword Tool – The tool lets you determine those keywords that are not ranking.
Pricing
- SpyFU Basic plan is $33/month billed annually or $39/month billed monthly.
- Its Professional plan is $58/month, billed annually or $79/month.
- The Team plan goes for $199/month billed annually or $299/month billed monthly.
6. SparkToro
Uniquely powerful content intelligence tool for researching audiences.
Founded by Casey Henry and Rand Fishkin in Washington state, USA, SparkToro is an outstanding audience research tool that details the most visited websites by customers, hashtags used, and social accounts followed. The aim is to enable you to generate a marketing strategy that works.
The software closely monitors customer demographics, behaviors, and text data to enable you to find better customer insights. It crawls through more than 80 million anonymized and aggregated public profiles, which include social media profiles, YouTube channels, and web pages, offering data you can trust.
Besides, SparkToro helps you establish your marketing priorities by allowing you to include data-backed insights into your reports. It further helps you to develop a robust outreach strategy, get in touch with sources of influence, and boost your ad targeting.
SparkToro is best for content marketers, agencies, marketing teams, and consultants.
Key Features
- Audience Demographics – The software provides information on audience age, gender, employment data, education, political leanings, and geography.
- Text Insights – SparkToro offers in-depth data on hashtags, phrases, and words used publicly online.
- Lists and Data Exports – You can manage and generate lists within the tool and transfer spreadsheets to enhance team collaboration.
- Customer Support – The software’s customer support team responds to all queries within 24 hours.
- Contact Info – SparkToro partners with Hunter.io to provide publicly available social media accounts and email addresses. You can access the contact information directly in the dashboard.
- Lets You Engage with Sources of Influence – They include Press Publications, social accounts, websites, YouTube channels, and podcasts.
- Audience Research – The platform provides data on hashtag trends, compelling content, bio attributes, and demographics.
Pricing
SparkToro operates on four pricing plans:
- The Free plan is available to all its users.
- Its Basic plan is $38/month and billed yearly at $450/month.
- The Standard plan is $112/month, billed yearly at $1344.
- The Agency plan stands at $225/month, billed yearly at $2700.
7. Clearscope
Best AI-powered content intelligence platform for streamlining your SEO process.
Clearscope not only produces clickable, shareable, and readable content but is also highly relevant to what the audience is searching for. This content intelligence software is designed to enhance quick adoption with usability. It also gives all its customers free live onboarding and training to enhance customer success.
One of its best features is unlimited sharing and exporting. By exporting and liking, you can share your content and collaborate with everyone, regardless of location. Clearscope further offers quality recommendations to enable you to generate the best results.
Another good thing is that the software provides flexible plan changes enabling you to switch between plans seamlessly as the need arises or changes. No negotiations or signing of contracts are necessary.
This platform seamlessly integrates with your favorite tools, such as Google Docs and WordPress, for better workflows.
Clearscope is ideal for individuals, businesses, and enterprises, seeking to drive traffic for their content and generate sales.
Key Features
- Content Reports – Gives you meaningful data and deeper insights into your content marketing strategies and target audience.
- Multi-language Support – The platform supports up to five different languages.
- Easy-to-use Integrations – You can connect Clearscope to those tools you already use, including WordPress and Google Docs.
- Keyword Discovery – Clearscope conducts a keyword search to identify those keywords competitors are ranking for and what makes them rank. The software then helps to develop a content strategy to outshine them.
- Custom Onboarding and Training – The feature enhances customer success.
- Unlimited Exporting and Sharing – It enhances collaboration and sharing of content globally.
- Quality Recommendations – They enable you to drive the best results.
- Priority Support – Clearscope’s support team reverts to your queries in less than 12 hours. You can contact them by filling out the form provided or through email.
- Content Inventory Pages – The software provides over 200 content inventory pages for the Business and Enterprise plans.
Pricing
- The Essentials plan is $170/month.
- Its Business plan starts at $1200/month.
- The custom pricing for the Enterprise plan is provided upon request.
What is Content Intelligence?
Content intelligence refers to a marketing technique through software that blends artificial intelligence and machine learning to undertake market research on the effectiveness of specified types of content. The aim is often to assist marketers in generating great content strategies that yields conversions, leads, and revenue.
By reducing time and costs and improving ROI, this translates into direct and indirect improvements to the financial results related to content marketing efforts.
This marketing technique relies on the latest discoveries and technological tools and combines them into a unique marketing tool. These technologies include:
- Artificial intelligence.
- Machine learning.
- Big Data.
- Natural language processing.
These tools will help you create content that your audience will find interesting and ensure that it is found when they look up topics related to your business.
The entire process of content intelligence involves three decisive steps:
- Data collection – The content intelligence software gathers extensive information, statistics, and trends from your social media, website, and eCommerce platforms.
- Data analytics – The collected data is analyzed to create connections.
- Shared insights – You can now read through the analytic reports to gain meaningful insights, draw conclusions from them, and finally act.
What are the Benefits of Content Intelligence?
You can benefit from content intelligence in numerous ways, as discussed below.
1. Meaningful Customer Data
Customers who interact with your brand tend to leave a vast amount of data, including clicks, comments, likes, conversion, and even deleted emails. Content intelligence enables you to gather those traces and clues left by the customers on a deeper level.
You can use the data to understand the customer behavior on your social platforms and website and their content preferences. Besides, the data will help you tell their engagement and interaction with particular content types and, most notably, their likes, dislikes, and motivation.
Using customer data will enable you to generate content that resonates with them and focuses on the specific aspects of their profiles.
2. Competition Analysis
Every marketer aims to stay ahead of the competition by outperforming competitors. However, you must know what they do best for you to develop a better strategy to achieve that. The good thing is that content intelligence platforms let you spy and uncover what the competitors are doing.
You can check their best working strategies, target audience, content feedback, type of content they create, the keywords they want to rank for, and how their content compares to yours. By keeping a closer eye on the competition, you can strategize how to beat them with uniqueness and creativity.
3. Content Analysis
Most content intelligence platforms use natural language processing to analyze individual content pieces and highlight characteristics like the tone of voice and style. They also provide recommendations based on data on the improvements you can make to your content for it to rank. It enables you to smoothen your content creation process.
With the best data-driven insights, content intelligence helps in content optimization.
4. Real-time Metrics and Reporting
Content intelligence software utilizes data analysis to evaluate all the generated content in real-time. Through that, it enables content marketers to access valuable data on various aspects, such as the best content created, content reach, and the impact, enabling them to make better and wiser decisions on the type of content to put more effort on.
5. Time-Saving
Content marketers have a lot of things to handle within a single day, which can be overwhelming. As a result, the chances of generating content or launching a content campaign that’s not impressive become high.
Content intelligence saves you valuable time and effort by automating tasks like content analysis and data gathering. Additionally, it provides in-depth insights and removes the content testing phase.
6. Content Personalization
Those brands that personalize their website content and recommendations to the preferences, characteristics, and needs of the target customer stand a better chance of driving more traffic and leads. Content intelligence tools give you a better understanding of each customer, enabling you to track their:
- Content consumption.
- Customer journey.
- Interaction with your brand.
- Product preferences.
- Shopping habits.
Having such valuable data collected and analyzed, you can easily target and link specific content to a specific set of audiences, which enhances the user experience.
You can use these data-driven tools to generate content your audience will want to read and make sure it shows up when they search for topics related to your sector.
7. Improves Content Ideas
Most content marketers face difficulty determining what to write and the best way to articulate the points. Luckily, you can save yourself the trouble by using content intelligence software to:
- Pinpoint current trends in your niche.
- Locate the ideal topics for each set of the target audience.
- Determine the best way to articulate your content ideas.
- Select key phrases and keywords.
With such, there will be no room for guesswork, which will significantly upgrade and improve your content ideas.
What to Look for in a Content Intelligence Platform
Though dozens of content intelligence platforms exist today, they all differ in their principal capabilities and functionality. Be on the lookout for these five essential characteristics to ensure that you choose the best.
1. Content Management Tools
Your content intelligence platform needs management tools to help you generate, edit, store, and publish high-quality content. Some tools even allow you to collaborate with multiple team members and assign them content. Through that, you can draft consistent content within a single, convenient location.
2. Real-time Data Collection
You need access to real-time data collection to remain relevant and enable your marketing strategies to move swiftly. It enables you to respond quickly to any change in customer behavior, enhancing their overall experience.
The total amount of data captured, created, and consumed worldwide keeps increasing daily. The year 2020 alone recorded a global data creation reaching 64.2 zettabytes, and the amount is projected to rise to more than 180 zettabytes over the coming five years up to 2025.
That’s an enormous amount of extensive and valuable actionable insights into your target audience that you can utilize with real-time updates. Using agency analytics alternative solutions can help you tap this potential in terms of better analytics.
3. Automation
Artificial intelligence dramatically enhances productivity changing how businesses perform their processes across industries.
For instance, rather than undertaking numerous and time-consuming repetitive manual tasks, you can use your content intelligence platform to complete such tasks. By doing that, you will have enough time to focus on those high-value tasks that necessitate human intervention.
Besides, software with advanced automation reduces the errors that mostly happen when the tasks are performed manually. It further enables you and the entire marketing team to deliver a speedy and personalized experience to customers.
As you select the best content intelligence platform, consider those tasks you perform manually and find a tool that can complete the tasks for you.
4. Content Creation Streamlining
Content creation is a lengthy process that can consume a few hours to several days, depending on the content format and complexity. For instance, three-minute video content may take longer to generate compared to a 1200-word blog post.
The content intelligence tool you choose should help streamline the content creation process, leading to less creating time and more remarkable results. A few features to determine if it is ideal include keyword generators, AI-assisted writing tools, and SEO research tools.
5. Business and Audience Insights
Content creation banks on concrete numbers to help you determine and understand how your already published content impacts the target audience and business. Simply seeing 200 views on your video or blog post is not enough to tell if your content strategy is successful.
You might need a content intelligence platform that uses automated content analytics to dig deeper into your target audience and business to create complex connections. As a result, you will get insights enabling you to measure your existing content against your business goals.
Best Content Intelligence Platforms: Conclusion
With the best content intelligence platforms, you will build the most effective marketing strategy and generate relevant and data-based content that moves the needle. The platform you choose should solely depend on your individual and business needs, but don’t hesitate to go for a robust option with more features.
If you need a robust content intelligence tool to help you produce high-ranking SEO-optimized content for your business, you might consider Outranking.
The platform has competitive packages for small, growing, and advanced businesses, agencies, and marketing teams. It also presents many features, including content generators and analysis tools, making your content marketing efforts seamless.
Nonetheless, if you are a copywriter in need of a tool to help you research, optimize, write, and audit your SEO content, you may opt for NeuronWriter or Surfer SEO.
Other content intelligence companies not listed in this article are Curata, Ceralytics, and Knotch.
I believe this information will make it easy to pick the right software for you and start building your influence.