Fast Content Marketing Analysis with NLP: Pocket vs Evernote
The complete code can be found on this Colab, everybody can use it to analyze the content marketing of other companies as well. In this article, we will deal with the results of the analysis.
We scraped the blog section of both the Pocket and Evernote websites. The total number of articles found for each company is:
- Pocket: 360 articles, starting from the year 2009;
- Evernote: 327 articles, starting from the year 2014.
Pocket started strong publishing about four articles each month from 2009 to 2015 and then published about two articles per month since then. Evernote published on average two articles per month in years 2014 and 2015, then rose to seven articles per month from 2016 to 2018, and then went back to about two articles per month till today.
We see different content marketing publishing plans during the year. Pocket publishes a lot of articles in December and April, maybe because there are holidays and people have more time to read. Very few articles have been published in January and February. Evernote instead has a more common content marketing publishing plan, writing articles more or less on all the months with slight drops on December and July.
Both companies prefer to publish articles from Monday to Friday, with a preference for the central days of the week. Interestingly, Pocket still published a good number of articles on Sundays. Let’s see what are these articles.
Most of these articles have been published by Pocket in 2019. What are they about?
It looks like Pocket started a series called Sunday Reading Ritual, where they suggest cherry-picked articles to read on weekends.
Pocket vs Evernote: what topics do they publish about?
Pocket publishes many Tech, Mobile, and Media articles, whereas Evernote is more focused on Productivity, Business, and Communication. There are some more differences, but they are not easy to catch from the previous charts. The key question we must answer is:
What are the topics that are covered by Pocket and not by Evernote, and vice-versa?
To do this, we sort the topics by the percent difference between the coverage of each specific topic for both companies. For example:
- Pocket published 9 articles with the topic Productivity out of 360 total articles published, that is, Pocket coverage of Productivity is 2.5% of its published articles.
- Evernote published 184 articles with the topic Productivity out of 327 total articles published, that is, Evernote coverage of Productivity is 56.3% of its published articles.
Therefore, Evernote is (56.3 – 2.5) / 2.5= 21.5 times more likely to publish an article about Productivity than Pocket, exactly the kind of insight that we are looking for! Let’s now sort the topics by this percentage difference and see how many articles did Pocket and Evernote publish about them.
It is now much easier to notice the differences in their content marketing strategy. These are some topics that Pocket covers significantly more than Evernote:
- Mobile, Electronics, Consumer Electronics;
- Media;
- Apple, iOS.
These are instead some topics that Evernote covers significantly more than Pocket:
- Business, Organization;
- Productivity, Performance, Skills, Growth;
- Management.
Pocket vs Evernote: the Mobile topic
Pocket published 94 articles about Mobile, while Evernote published 11. Why is Pocket publishing this much about Mobile, especially in the first years from its foundation?
Pocket allows you to save content from anywhere, like desktop, tablets, and mobile. However, this was not probably true in their first years as they worked to make their mobile apps for iOS and Android. Evernote only recently started rolling out mobile versions of its products.
Pocket vs Evernote: the Media topic
Pocket wrote 31 articles on the topic Media and Evernote wrote six. Moreover, it looks like they wrote these articles in different periods.
When Pocket talked about Media from 2009 to 2015, usually it was because they explained how to save videos and other kinds of media with their product. Since 2016 Evernote wrote some articles about its new podcast Taking Note, and from 2018 Pocket partnered on a series of new Pocket Collections containing podcasts.
Pocket vs Evernote: the Apple topic
Pocket published 72 articles about the topic Apple, and Evernote published 11.
What we see here is the same as we saw with the topic Mobile. Pocket worked in its first years on its mobile apps for Apple devices, and Evernote started this path in about the year 2016.
Pocket vs Evernote: the Business topic
Evernote published 106 articles on the topic Business, and Pocket published only one.
This is a direct consequence of their business model: Evernote is focused on their product Evernote Teams, which is a version of Evernote tailored for business customers and has pricing plans for professionals. Instead, Pocket is intended for personal use and, even though there's a premium plan, it’s not meant for business.
Pocket vs Evernote: the Productivity topic
Evernote published a whopping 184 articles on the topic Productivity, while Evernote published nine.
Evernote tagline is “Tame your work, organize your life”, which makes clear that they build products that increase your productivity and that their customers are interested in everything around the Productivity topic. Pocket Productivity articles deal with new features that make specific actions easier for their users.
Pocket vs Evernote: the Management topic
Evernote wrote 41 articles about Management, while Pocket wrote only three. Why is Evernote writing articles about Management?
Evernote is publishing articles about Management for two reasons: the first is because they have Evernote Teams and they explain how to manage your work while using it; the second is because Evernote is also a product for time management for individuals.
What NLP can do for Content Marketing
If you’ll ever find yourself writing content for a company, you’ll probably:
- Study the customers of the company to find out what are their problems and their interests;
- Study your competitors’ content strategy to get further insights;
- Produce content that interests the customers, with the assumption that other people with similar interests may become your customers in the future.
As we have seen with this article, step (2) can be improved a lot with today’s Natural Language Processing technology.
An NLP approach to studying a company’s content marketing
The analysis was done using the Python programming language and following these high-level steps:
- Scrape all the articles from the “blog” section of the company website. We use requests to make HTTP requests, fake_useragent to get plausible user agents for our requests, BeautifulSoup to parse HTML, newspaper3k to extract structured data from articles HTML and langdetect to keep only English articles.
- Predict a list of topics for each article, using its title and text. We use the EasyTagger API.
- Analyze the results. We use pandas for data frames and plotly for charts.
The complete code can be found on this Colab.
Conclusion
From this analysis, it would seem that Pocket has fulfilled over time its mission to allow users to save content from anywhere, publishing communications about their mobile app and desktop updates, with premium plans for individuals. Instead, Evernote seems to focus more on the overall productivity at work of a professional or a team of professionals, with different plans for individuals and enterprises.
Would you like to see more marketing content analytics? If so, suggest in the comments which companies you would like me to analyze!
Have a look at other content marketing analyses!
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