Link
http://kapost.com
Specifications
Kapost is a content-marketing software platform that provides tools for managing all types of content, including blog posts, videos, eBooks, white papers, social media posts, presentations, infographics, emails, landing pages, and webinars.
Cost
Pricing starts at $1,000 per month for 10 users.
User
Sarah McGann, marketing specialist, social networking and online media at Thermo Fisher Scientific, has been using Kapost for about a year.
How do you use it?
Kapost is an enterprise tool, which means there’s an umbrella account for which I’m the administrator and within that we have set up different instances. Each instance is like it’s own version of Kapost. For us, each instance is a different blog that Thermo Fisher Scientific maintains.
My responsibilities have to do with maintenance and support of the tool more than the editorial side.
Once I log on, I usually go into each instance, look at the calendar, and make sure people are posting regularly. If they’re not, I might go into their content dashboard and see if there are any issues, check the settings, and send an email to the editor to make sure they’re not having any problems.
I was involved in setting up the instances. It was very easy and the support from Kapost was great. Our account representative worked with me to set up the first few, and then I easily set up the rest on my own.
If we have a problem, I usually email support. They always send confirmation that they’ve received my email, which is nice. Almost everything we’ve needed has been handled within a day. They’re very responsive.
How does it serve your business needs?
Internally, there’s a big push for digital content generation. We’re using Kapost to streamline that process and allow external writers to be connected with internal subject matter experts who don’t have time write.
We create ideas for content and Kapost allows us to flow them into a pool of our own highly qualified writers to create it for publication on our website.
Creating documents and trying to track all the changes through email is cumbersome and time consuming. With Kapost, everything in the content creation process is taken out of your email and kept in Kapost’s platform.
We’ve been using it for the last year for community-level blogs that we publish on our website. These include blogs about food safety and biobanking, which is a hugely important service we offer. When a blog post is created, the idea is to provide relevant and helpful information to our customers and give them a pathway to learn more on our core website.
We now have seven instances or blogs, which is quite a lot.
We’re starting to broaden the scope to use Kapost as a central hub for corporate level marketing activities and to create high-level company marketing materials. So we’re now getting corporate PR, corporate marketing, and corporate communications involved.
How does it integrate with your existing infrastructure from an IT standpoint?
It’s Web-based.
We have it connected to WordPress for our blog. Kapost also built a Brightcove interface for us.
Kapost also just released integration with Google Analytics, and we plan to integrate it with Eloqua.
What are the main benefits?
It’s an incredibly collaborative tool. It is also very helpful to have content stay in one place and to be able to have a conversation about the content in a sidebar with a colleague.
It’s also great to have the ability to make changes, see how they track, and get everyone involved in content creation on the same page. Kapost helped us build stronger relationships between people internally.
The system is easy to use and looks great. The team at Kapost clearly cares about keeping the tool up to date.
Customer service is fantastic. We’ve given them a lot of feedback. Most, if not all, of our feature requests have been incorporated to make the tool better for us.
What would you like to see improved/added?
I’d like to be able to create and edit visual content, such as infographics and memes. If I need to do a lot of editing on visual content, I might need to use another tool like Keynote.
I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Kapost has added this capability by our next monthly meeting.
Competitors
Email and spreadsheet software.
Compendium (acquired by Oracle in October 2013): provides tools for planning, producing, and delivering content across multiple channels
Brightpod: project, task, and content-management software.
