A friend of mine, Miranda Tan, is launching what she calls the world’s first marketing product that maximizes reach by intelligently analyzing & understanding which journalists and influencers best fit your campaign.

The product, Robin8, is a smart content platform that helps marketers and PR professionals harness the power of artificial intelligence to more accurately target individual influencers and journalists who are likely to be interested in a specific piece of new content. Whether the content is a press release, the design specs on a new product, or an infographic, Robin8 analyzes the content, then matches it to its analysis of the preferences and publications history of potential targets.

Here’s how it works. Marketers upload a press release or other piece of marketing content to the system, and click on “analyze”. Then Robin8 matches the keywords in the content against its database, which as of today has read 15,353,522 articles and profiled 1,023,859 influencers. It takes only a few minutes for the system to suggest a target list of journalists, bloggers, and social media influencers that are likely to be interested in the content based on the system’s analysis of their past writings.

I tried it on three separate pieces of content, for three different companies.  In each case, I got a recommended target list of between 100 and 785 potential targets, with each target given a rank showing Robin8’s suggested interest percentage. The matches ranged from a high of 90.6% to a low of 66%.

For my first pitch using the tool, I decided to limit myself to those that the system rated at 75% or greater. That reduced the number from 265 potential targets to 78 targets. I sent each of them a pitch email, and 24 of them either booked time to speak with my client or asked for additional information — all within the first day after the pitch was sent. I didn’t make a single phone call.

To say that I was impressed would be an understatement. It’s too soon to tell how many of those 24 will turn into articles or coverage, but I’m very pleased with the initial response. I’ll be following up with the other 50 or so contacts the old fashioned way — some of them are likely out of town and didn’t see the email, or just haven’t had time to respond. Some, of course, won’t be interested at all.

But my client is thrilled, and so am I. The only other time I had almost a third of my targets respond on day one was when I was giving away diamonds (really) on behalf of a jewelry company.

If you’re a content marketer or PR person, and you’d like to try Robin8 for yourself, there’s a free 30-day trial available. Let me know what you think — I’m going to try it for some other clients over the next few weeks while I’m still in my free trial period.

Disclosure: I am a minor shareholder in the parent company that owns Robin8. However, I am using the same “free trial” product available to anyone.