Acrolinx’s new Content Marketing Platform tailors a writer’s work for your audience

If we writers thought we’re somehow immune to computer analysis, it’s time to wake up and smell the metaphorical coffee.

The latest case-in-point: the launch today by language optimization platform Acrolinx of its new Content Marketing Platform.

It builds on the company’s advanced linguistic analytics engine, an on-premise solution that is used by companies like Adobe and Boeing to hone the language of their in-house content creations.

The new cloud-based platform, CEO Kumar Vora told me, adds collaborative authoring, content marketing distribution, and the ability to automatically make real-time suggestions in a sidebar. These suggestions seek to hone the wording, style, terms used, readability, tone, and other factors to a message’s purpose and audience. The messages might be white papers, website and landing pages, emails, or other marketing.

In an example provided by Acrolinx, a “solution brief” from a systems integrator targeting an IT person might begin:

Your business is migrating to unified communications (UC). You are adding video collaboration to fully engage your customers, reduce travel and speed time-to-market.

The platform then recommends more tech jargon like “multi-vendor interoperability” at a later point in the first paragraph.

But when targeting a marketing buyer, it suggests that the solution brief begin:

Your business needs to talk. You are adding video collaboration to fully engage your customers, reduce travel and speed time-to-market.

Above: A screen in Acrolinx’s new platform, evaluating content for a specific reader type

Image Credit: Acrolinx

The cloud-based platform comes with hundreds of predefined rules, and users can add customized ones for a given business or need. Templates for specific messages or targets can be set up, a dashboard provides a single score as to how well the content meets the targeted criteria, and a terminology-watcher is designed to keep messaging consistent across departments.

Vora told me that, in terms of the platform’s intelligent suggestions to improve messaging and targeting of content marketing, “no one else is doing” what his company’s new platform can offer.

Such content marketing platforms as Idio, however, offer measurement and optimization of topics, and terminology consistency is not uncommon. New platforms like Persado even employ artificial intelligence to automatically generate what it considers the “most persuasive language to drive action.”

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In the announcement of Acrolinx’s new offering, Vora went further, saying it “helps content marketing organizations vastly improve results by consistently producing content that is engaging, enjoyable, and impactful.”

“Impactful” can be measured by results in generating leads and sales, and “engagement” can be defined as likes, shares, downloads, and actions taken.

But, unless I missed a press release, “enjoyable” is still undefinable.

What is consistently missing from computer-aided wordsmiths is verifiable evidence that the generated or optimized content intriguingly raises an eyebrow, eloquently answers a question, cleverly evokes a laugh, or happily tickles a fancy.

You know, whether it is … interesting.

When the Interesting Engine emerges, we can all retire our keyboards to some computer museum where they’ll become part of a massive diorama showing the days when humans wrote.