Specifications
InPowered allows clients to find, share, and amplify trusted, third-party content, including news and product reviews, on any given topic. Features include the ability to amplify the most influential, relevant content across social media channels, which helps brands increase audience reach, educate audiences, and drive sales. Extensive analytics are delivered for each piece of content amplified, including the number of reads and shares and time spent reading.
Cost
No minimum spend is required for paid amplifications, but inPowered recommends $2,500 per story as a starting point.
Ownership
Privately held.
User
Shelley Risk, senior director of communications at Cotap, has been using inPowered since early May 2014.
How do you use it?
I log on almost every day and I’ve set it up so that it immediately searches for Cotap and then serves up all the articles that have mentioned Cotap in the past 30 days. It gives me a quick snapshot of all third-party coverage, including number of reads, shares, topics, and where coverage is coming from.
You can search by keywords or phrases. I can see who is writing about Cotap and our competitors, and which topics we are associated with in the media. I might search for “enterprise mobile messaging,” which is a phrase we want to associate with Cotap, and see who is writing on that topic so I can pitch them.
A couple of times inPowered has found articles that mention Cotap that Google News didn’t find. For example, inPowered found an Inc. article on the top three messaging apps for work that included Cotap, but Google News didn’t catch that story.
There are two buttons in the main dashboard – share and promote. I can use the share button to easily post an article about Cotap to Twitter or Facebook.
The promote button alerts inPowered that you want to get started on a paid campaign. After you click it, an account representative contacts you and walks you through the whole process. It’s very easy. You just identify the story or stories you want to promote, tell them how much you want to spend and how long you want the campaign to run, and give them some minimal copy. They handle everything from there.
For paid campaigns, the platform turns an article about your company into an in-stream native ad and. Links to your story then show up in a recommended reading list after related stories or content on various sites.
We’ve never had a problem with inPowered. Our account representative is very responsive. We also get weekly reports. ?
How does it serve your business needs?
Cotap is an enterprise mobile messaging app. Our goal is to get as many relevant people as possible reading about the app and downloading and using it. PR coverage has been a huge driver for downloads and user engagement.
With inPowered, I can pinpoint which reporters are writing about topics that are relevant,. This increases the likelihood that my pitches will be responded to and that we’re going to secure coverage.
We got nice coverage in April in Forbes, TechCrunch, and other outlets. Typically, when you get a story in one of these outlets, you will maybe get one or two hours on the front page before the story gets buried. By using inPowered’s platform, you can extend the life of your coverage and get your article in front of people who are reading similar stories.
The paid campaign we did for the April Forbes story gave us a tremendous lift. Within three weeks we had more than 600 additional reads, 33 social shares, and a 36% increase in consideration.
When people click on one of the paid links and read the Forbes article, there’s a “yes/no” pop up at the end that asks if they are likely to consider Cotap. From this we learned that the campaign reached 741 potential new customers.
PR is notoriously difficult to measure and put metrics against. I know I’ve struggled with it in the last 10 years. These was the first time I felt like I had solid metrics that I could put in front of my CEO, who is very numbers and metrics driven.
What are the main benefits?
Extending the lifetime of your coverage. You can make a story last one or two months rather than a couple of hours.
It leads to an increase in brand relevance and preference among relevant audiences.
It’s helping make me smarter in terms of knowing the right people to pitch. InPowered is easy to work with and the metrics are awesome.
What would you like to see improved/added?
The platform would be even faster to use if there were a self-service mode so you didn’t need to go through an account rep to set up paid campaigns.
Competitors
Outbrain: a recommendation platform that links earned and/or created content to premium publisher sites. A reporting suite helps clients measure and track content.
Taboola: a content discovery platform that predicts and surfaces what content online audiences are highly likely to be interested in and enables brand and publisher clients to distribute content to the most relevant audiences.
