Instoried's Sharmin Ali expects 2022 to be the year of 'empathetic content'

Instoried founder & chief executive Sharmin Ali shares the story of Instoried, the need for AI-driven content marketing and the use of NLP

While the coronavirus pandemic changed the way we worked, it also made businesses realise the importance of right communication, more so as employees needed to feel connected to the place they were working at. Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence (AI) -driven content marketing firm Instoried, which has raised $10 million from VCs so far has seen an increase in the acceptance of emotionally engaging content. In an interview with Shivani Shinde, Instoried founder & chief executive SHARMIN ALI shared the story of Instoried, the need for AI-driven content marketing and the use of NLP. Edited excerpts…
 
There are several start-ups and established players in the text content marketing space. How is Instoried different and how did you start?

 
While there are several start-ups in the text content space, no other start-up is focused on end-to-end analysis and optimization of text. Instoried helps content writers with ideation to creation, and pre-publishing analysis of the content. Our tool offers 6 different types of content analyses – tonal analysis, emotional analysis, headline analysis, plagiarism check, spelling and grammar check, and panel analysis – that’s far more than the nearest competitor.
 

How did the pandemic impact you and what has been the business growth due to the pandemic for Instoried?
 
The pandemic has resulted in marketers focusing more on optimising content and marketing and working with tools that help generate more engagement for content. Instoried has thus become a top choice among over 200,000 users and more than 50 companies during the pandemic. Instoried’s customers have witnessed up to three times increase in incoming leads per post and two times rise in return on investment (RoI) in less than six months.

 
Instoried helps enterprises and individuals create emotionally engaging content, thereby improving RoI. Instoried is a deep-tech platform that analyses and optimises the emotional quotient, tonality and relevance of written content across formats like blogs, articles and social media posts.
 
How is AI being used to enhance content marketing? Please explain with an example.
 
We use AI to automatically identify the tone and emotion of the content, to analyse sentences for spelling and grammatical errors and suggest corrections. We also have another AI algorithm to generate headlines and analyse the impact of headlines. The tool is sophisticated enough to understand the nuances of the English language and how certain sentences that may sound negative may actually be positive. Take for example the news story of a terrorist being shot dead may sound negative on the face of it, but it may have positive connotations for most people.

 
How is predictive analysis being used to improve the content? How does this help companies?
 
We use predictive analyses to help understand the impact a given headline or content would have, and how likely it is to generate clicks from readers. This enables content writers to create highly impactful content that generates engagement. Predictive analysis also allows the tool to understand the impact of tone and emotion of sentences when sentences are edited with suggestions. Instoried provides word suggestions that can be used to improve the tone or emotion.
 
Marketing tools are changing fast. There is a shift towards video. How is Instoried adopting this? Also, how are you using natural language processing (NLP)? And how many languages do you support?

 
We will be exploring video and image content in the future but our immediate focus is to optimise textual content everywhere. Blogs, emails, text messages and ad copies still remain a major part of communication online and we wish to be the go-to app for all content needs. Instoried uses NLP to analyse and optimise tone, emotion, impact and spelling and grammar of the content. With NLP, the tool understands what the writer aims to convey and what is the core emotion of tone behind the written sentence. The tool helps writers send out the right message. We support only English at the moment.

 
What are you future plans and what trends do you see dominating the space in times to come?
 
We are working towards becoming the go-to content app for people in all spaces – be it marketers, content writers or students. Instoried will focus on optimising its tool to provide an even deeper analysis for content, including sear engine optimisation (SEO). We are also launching apps for WordPress, Shopify and Chrome extensions to help optimisation of content of all kinds. We expect 2022 to be the year of ‘empathetic content’ and see a rise of content that's tonally and emotionally optimised.

 
What has been your fundraising so far, and from which investors?
 
Instoried has raised $10 million so far from investors including Pritt Investment Partners, SOSV, Artesian Investments, Mumbai Angels, 9Unicorns, Venture Catalysts, Rockstud Capital, Jain Angel Network, London-based JPIN, and a US-based venture capitalist.