San Francisco-based content marketing platform inPowered is releasing an updated version of its service which turns third party content into ads. Now, you only pay for that ad when someone actually reads the content.
Unlike other content marketing platforms, inPowered’s engine enables marketers and PR pros to find favorable articles written about their brands and promote that content instead of their own. For example, if a tech writer posts a favorable review of the new Samsung phone, Samsung would be able to take that review, package it into a display ad and promote it across other publications through the major ad exchanges.
InPowered’s CEO and co-founder Peyman Nilforoush says that while this method gets more exposure for the article, it doesn’t guarantee engagement, which is where the real value comes in. In the new inPowered 2.0 platform, brands will now only have to pay once a reader clicks on the ad for the article, and either shares it on social, or stays on the page for more than 15 seconds. Nilforoush says this is in direct contrast to click-bait type services such as Outbrain and Taboola which lure people in through attractive images and headlines, but don’t deliver on substance.
An additional measure of engagement comes through a pop-up question that inPowered generates when someone reads the article, asking them if they now have a better image of the brand they’re reading about. The inPowered dashboard collects and displays information about which of the promoted articles were the most engaging in terms of clicks, shares and time spent and allows marketers to double down on the ones they want to promote.
Another update to the inPowered platform is the addition of Streams. This new feature is especially useful for PR pros looking to monitor all articles about their brand or clients. Before, in order to discover the favorable articles you wanted to promote, the user had to manually search through publications and authors. In inPowered’s new streams, all the relevant articles about your brand automatically show up in a Twitter style feed. This allows the user to discover, rather than search for content. It can also be set up to send an email notification to the user, once a new article pops up in the stream. Through a single click, these discovered articles can be turned into promoted content for the brand.
