BrightEdge offers free plug-in access to its content data repository

Marketers are getting new tools to assess how well their content is doing.

Earlier this week, for instance, content marketing platform Uberflip released its Content Score, a single figure that summarizes how effective a piece of content is. Today, SEO platform provider BrightEdge is offering free access to its extensive data — and its resulting recommendations — about content marketing performance.

But the two companies have different expectations for content. BrightEdge is focused on search keywords, backlink management, and words on a Web page, while Uberflip looks at factors like leads, sharing, and landing page visits for such content as eBooks, white papers, and social media as well as blogs.

Through its Community Edition plug-in for the Chrome browser, BrightEdge is offering a look into the company’s huge data repository of information about what are the most popular content topics and search keywords on the Web. The repository itself is called the Data Cube, while the version accessible through the plug-in is dubbed the Data Cube To-Go.

The browser add-on also offers a To-Go version of the company’s Content Optimizer recommendation engine for search-oriented content optimization.

There’s “a need to treat content marketing like performance marketing,” BrightEdge CEO and co-founder Jim Yu told VentureBeat, referring to the kind of marketing and advertising where the client only pays when a specified goal is reached, like acquiring a lead or making a sale.

BrightEdge, Yu said, “takes Google search as a proxy for demand” for specific words, looking “at how many people are looking at what, how well the content is structured.” Users of the Community Edition can find which keywords on a given piece of content, for instance, have the highest volume.

“Before companies invest resources into content creation, they need to understand the pieces of content that perform, what’s relevant, and where the demand lies,” he told us. “This is necessary to connecting the dots between creation and business impact — and we believe the next phase in content marketing.”

The company says its content tools can help marketers estimate the likely success of a given set of words and compare its performance over time. The tools can also be used on competitors’ sites, so you can see what works for the other guys.

And there’s a lot of stuff out there. BrightEdge cites a finding by the Content Council: 42 percent of the over $43 billion spent on marketing last year was spent on some form of content marketing.