Content Raven, a Massachusetts-based file storage company, has released a new marketing analytics tool geared towards content marketers – something of a departure from its original focus on file security.
Right now, Content Raven provides a cloud-based service allowing users to stash their files securely, as well as to perform analytics on them, showing who has opened their files, how long they’ve viewed them, and so on. Users can get their content from other popular, cloud-based storage apps like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and so on, but the company adds analytics and content control to protect sensitive data.
However, with its new Marketing Raven tool, Content Raven is now targeting sales and marketing professionals who want to see whether their audiences are engaging with their content. The tool works with common file types like the ones used for Microsoft Office, most video and audio file types, PDFs, e-books and whitepapers, HTML files, almost all image types, and so on, showing whether recipients have opened a document, how many times they looked at it, what device they used, and so on. If recipients forward a piece of content to their contacts, marketers will also be able to track that to help them find new leads.
The push towards marketing may seem like a shift away from Content Raven’s original, security-focused solution, but this was something the company’s marketing customers had been asking for, says Joe Moriarty, Content Raven’s vice-president of sales and marketing.
“We had a group of customers, all around the same time, start to ask us, can you strip off some of the security and give us the analytics? Because we’re finding a very interesting sales and marketing use case for this,” he says.
“Fundamentally, we were doing [analytics] as a security company, and people started to say, there’s a gap that we were missing … And that was the whole catalyst.”
Moriarty adds that Marketing Raven offers something a lot of marketing automation platforms don’t have – the ability to see not only whether someone has downloaded an e-book, for example, but if they’ve actually opened and read it.
“We’re able to tell if someone was viewing the content, and how long they were viewing it for, what page, all the documents people have viewed the longest, and also they’ve viewed a video,” he says, adding this could be critically useful information for sales and marketing teams looking to see what pieces of content are most successful.
The tool also gives marketers plug-in APIs with Hubspot, WordPress, and Salesforce to allow them to get more information about who is visiting their content marketing pages, and how often.
Nor is the sales team left out. Marketing Raven will send alerts to team members in real-time, letting them know whether a potential customer is checking out a content marketing piece. That allows the team to reach out to the lead at the right moment and to move closer to making a sale.
While Content Raven will still continue to serve customers with its security-focused solution, Moriarty says there’s a possibility the company may move more towards the marketing side of its business in the future.
“We certainly think that the sales and marketing use case is potentially a bigger opportunity, a bigger market … We’ll just continue to invest and monitor it and grow as quickly as we can.”
Marketing Raven is generally available today, with pricing being in the “hundreds of dollars” range. There will also be a user fee on top of that, ranging from $5 to $10 per user per month.