Content marketing platform Contentoo has secured €1.2 million in growth capital and now plans to make its services available immediately for the entire German market. Contentoo is Europe’s largest digital marketplace for content marketing. It provides companies with convenient, easy access to professional content creators and strategists.

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The European market for content is growing fast. In 2020, analysts estimated the total market value to be $85 billion. This number is expected to grow steadily in the years ahead, reaching $140 billion by 2024. “What we are seeing is that content is quickly becoming more important to companies. And that also presents a lot of challenges for many of them,” says Onno Halsema, CEO of Contentoo. “It’s often difficult for them to find writers, translators and content marketing strategists who really understand their industry, product or service, and who know how to write using the correct tone of voice. The Contentoo platform solves all of that. Our platform lets companies scale their content creation quickly and efficiently, while also giving them the high quality that they need. It doesn’t matter if the client wants to target a local audience or an international audience spread out over multiple countries. That’s why our platform resonates so well with companies of all sizes, whether it’s a fast-growing scale-up or an established brand.”

Providing an alternative

In the past, companies that wanted to use content marketing could either hire new full-time employees or work with a marketing agency. There are disadvantages to both of these options: In-house content creation is not scalable, while agencies often lack the industry-specific talent and full range of language skills that a company might need. The Contentoo platform always connects companies with the best freelance professional for the job, no matter where in the world they are located.

Contentoo ensures the quality of its content by performing a specially developed assessment before allowing a new freelancer to join its platform. “Content creator, content marketing strategist, designer and other content-related professions are not protected job titles,” explains Halsema. “So, there are lots of content marketing marketplaces out there where you’ll find unprofessional freelancers who might just be writing texts as a side job, for example. And that means the quality suffers, and the company may have to go through multiple freelancers before they find one who’s up for the task.”

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The best of both worlds

Contentoo says that in addition to the quality of the freelancer’s work, it is also important to ensure that there is a good match between their clients and freelancers. So, the company has developed its own matching method, powered by machine learning and algorithms that can match freelancers and companies with each other based on the preferred tone of voice, branding and target groups.

Halsema says, “Our freelancers form an ongoing working relationship with our clients whom they work for on our platform. This ensures that the collaboration just keeps getting better over time, and the freelancers start to feel like part of the client’s team. Except they’re not on the payroll and they don’t work in the client’s office. That means Contentoo gives its clients the best of both worlds. And since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, this model of remote working has gained more and more acceptance.”

Growth in Germany

Contentoo has doubled its turnover every year for the past three years. This year, the company is on course to more than double the previous year’s earnings. Ten Cate Investeringsmaatschappij believes in Contentoo’s business model and its plans for further growth, and has therefore decided along with a group of other investors to invest €1.2 million in the company. Contentoo will use this investment to continue developing its platform. This also creates opportunities for the company to continue its growth by expanding into the German market. Halsema says, “When it comes to content marketing, Germany is not yet quite as developed as the Netherlands. It is traditionally more of an agency-driven market, which means there are lots of opportunities to introduce automation, efficiency and quality improvement. There is no other company like Contentoo there yet. So, we are ready to step in to fill that gap.”

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