Prod­uct man­agers in the tech sec­tor might spare a thought for the plight of the con­tem­po­rary dig­i­tal mar­keter try­ing to make the best fist of con­tent mar­ket­ing. It’s not only grown in sig­nif­i­cance over the last few years through its abil­i­ty to tap new rev­enue chan­nels, it’s grown in com­plex­i­ty, too. The num­ber of chan­nels mar­keters must cre­ate engag­ing con­tent with­in has bur­geoned, climb­ing above 20 in the last three years alone. And this is exact­ly where com­pet­i­tive intel­li­gence start­up Track­Maven comes to the rescue.

Smart aggre­ga­tion

Found­ed by Acceleprise Gen­er­al Man­ag­er Allen Gan­net in Sep­tem­ber 2013, Track­Maven is designed to solve the com­plex­i­ty headache for dig­i­tal mar­keters with finite bud­gets, pulling togeth­er into one dash­board all the rel­e­vant data from earned, paid and owned media chan­nels. Dig­i­tal mar­keters get to see not only what their rivals are up to across 15 chan­nels, but what’s work­ing for them, too.

But prod­uct man­agers famil­iar with the com­pet­i­tive intel­li­gence mar­ket will be aware that there are plen­ty of tools out there crunch­ing first-par­ty ana­lyt­ics and social lis­ten­ing data (what peo­ple say about the brands they come across as opposed to what the brands say about them­selves). Track­Maven goes fur­ther: mar­keters not only actu­al­ly see what their audi­ences are inter­est­ed in, they can bench­mark against their rivals in all of the categories.

Impressed investors 

The startup’s client list sug­gests that some pret­ty big names think its tech­nol­o­gy is worth the invest­ment, among them Aol, Martha Stew­art Liv­ing, NBA, Eddie Bauer and Com­put­er Sci­ences Liv­ing. But they aren’t the only peo­ple to be impressed: so are investors. Track­Maven has just announced a suc­cess­ful $6.5 mil­lion Series B round, led by New Enter­prise Asso­ciates (with par­tic­i­pa­tion from Acceleprise Ven­tures and Bow­er Capital).

Gan­net says his startup’s val­ue lies in its cen­tral mis­sion: to estab­lish itself as the first gen­uine­ly com­pre­hen­sive com­pet­i­tive intel­li­gence plat­form for mar­keters, allow­ing cor­po­ra­tions and big brands to metic­u­lous­ly track and bench­mark all their dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing endeav­ors from one dashboard.

The new fund­ing will per­mit the addi­tion of new data sources (it already incor­po­rates tra­di­tion­al chan­nels like organ­ic search, site traf­fic, email, PR, text and dis­play adver­tis­ing, as well as new gen­er­a­tion chan­nels like YouTube, Insta­gram, Pin­ter­est, Face­book, Twit­ter and LinkedIn). Mon­ey will also be ploughed into improved export­ing and enhanced cus­tom visualizations.