13 Essential Content Marketing Tools For Your Business
Content marketing tools are the several software available at our disposal for the smooth implementation of our content strategy and promotion for an effective business plan.
Content marketing has become extremely popular in recent times. With the increasing awareness regarding the benefits of marketing through focused goal-driven content, the need for tools to improve and expedite the process of content marketing has gained momentum.
People now realize how important it is to deliver high-quality content consistently for the overall growth of their business. With that realization software, experts have created many content marketing tools that make life easier and much more convenient for content writers and content marketers all across the globe.
According to the content marketing institute, around 88% of the b2b enterprises use content as a marketing strategy. Moreover, 32% have documented and thoroughly planned content marketing strategy and 48% have undocumented strategies. The most frequent use of content marketing tactics to attract leads is that of case studies, success reports on their clientele, blogs, and social media posts.
That’s a lot of b2b marketers putting content marketing to use. The reasons are, content is always an authentic and honest means of dissemination of information about a product or service. The credibility factor in content marketing is incredible, to say the least.
Why Do We Need Content Marketing Tools?
There are a vast number of content marketing tools that are available to us to ideate, create, and finally promote our content effectively through different communication channels available to us on the internet. Some are free, some come at a price and most of the tools have a few of its features free with some paid premium features.
Content marketing technology is ever-growing. Every day new and existing software come with more and more advanced features to make our lives a lot easier. When we stumble at some point in the content marketing strategy, we know that we have those tools to overcome the challenges that we face regularly.
The various content marketing tools are meant to ease your workload and strategize content for optimization. Whether you are a novice in the field just starting out or you are a seasoned professional on effective content marketing, every digital marketer needs these tools to improve and better their overall content performance.
Here Are 13 Content Marketing Tools That Are of Huge Help to Content Marketers Looking to Make a Mark in Their Respective Fields of Business.
1. Grammarly
Grammarly, one of the finest content marketing tools, as the name suggests is a writing tool used to optimize the quality of your content to meet the standards of search engines. It helps in correcting erroneous spellings and punctuations, scans the content for grammatical mistakes and contextual errors.
The advantage of Grammarly is that you can embed them in your web browser and prepare your content for teg different applications. Grammarly also works with social media and helps to improve your writing skills making your content more engaging.
The recent updates on Grammarly have incorporated a new feature whereby you can determine the tone you want your content to project based on your consumer demands.
It makes sure that your content is less wordy and more readable along with improving your concept of grammar: for eg… The verb-adjective agreement, the usage of adverbs, etc.
It comes with two versions free and a paid version. The free version is used for editing your copy on a basic level, making it ready for search engines. The premium version comes with enhanced editing tools and advanced features like plagiarism checker, proofreading by experts, determining the clarity of content. If you want your text to sound professional and crisp, do go for Grammarly.
2. Trello
Trello is a management software that helps the entire team members of content marketers in an organization remain connected and coordinated. It comes with a variety of options that help in managing your content better. The primary features of Trello are cards, lists, and boards that help to organize and manage content. They help in scheduling and posting content.
Whatever might be your requirement, Trello makes sure to prioritize and solve your issues. Client meeting, webinar planning, website launching, or podcast publishing you name it, Trello makes it easier for you to manage everything. It is a great productivity tool that helps in implementing your complex business module smoothly.
Deadline reminders, drag-drop feature, archiving cards based on chronological comments and attachments, in-line editing are features found in the basic version. Trello does the work of organizing and managing your content strategy with complete precision.
One of their most convenient features is the editorial calendar. Companies like National Geographic Channel, Google, KICKSTARTER are some of their noted clients. Trello keeps them up to date and caters to all their business needs.
It is your one-stop solution for organizing the various tasks pertaining to content marketing. Additionally, it comes with filtering, labels, and search features. They are extremely fast and give you relevant results in the quickest time possible.
3. HotJar
HotJar is a content marketing analytics tool that helps marketers and business enterprises especially SEMs and start-ups to have a better understanding of their prospective customers and visitors. It is a relatively new software created in 2014. It came into use in the year 2015. Therefore, the mere popularity of HotJar indicates the tremendous efficacy of the tool for budding and seasoned content marketers to comprehend market patterns better.
HotJar comes with extensive features all under one hood. From polls, surveys, and real-time feedback from visitors, CRO, and recruit testing, HotJar takes care of all our needs to better analyze the customer, to turn leads into clients. HotJar also helps in filtering relevant information from thousands of user interactions and carries out form analysis.
They also help in generating HeatMaps from traffic. Heatmap is a very interesting feature that helps you to find which part of a website the user interacts with most. These are hot areas where more interactions take place hence the name HeatMaps. Red areas indicate greater interaction and blue areas indicate cold spots that have less impact on your visitors.
4. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a content marketing tool that helps you to track your website performance as well as the performance of your key competition. Aherfs crawls more than 5 million pages every day and comes with features like SEO analysis and research on backlinks along with exploring content across the vast number of web pages.
Ahrefs enables you to check pages that are most visited, pages that are most linked and shared with. One of its primary features, as mentioned on its website page, is the careful monitoring of activity around your niche. Ahrefs tracks your niche and derives information regarding the web activity of your niche and the latest shares and trends in your niche.
Ahrefs has a keyword search tool for the most relevant list of keywords that you can use for effective Search Engine Optimization. Social shares, mentions, word count, referring domains are some of its other features.
5. Get-Response
Get Response is just like MailChimp is a content marketing tool to distribute emails to targets, leads, and existing clients. In other words, it is one of the most popular e-mail marketing tools.
It is a user-oriented tool that helps you create appealing engaging emails from its vast stock of email templates. GetResponse has some of the most beautiful email templates to select from. It optimizes them for any device that the prospective customer is on whether it is a smartphone, a tablet, or a laptop.
Target accuracy, developing subscriber lists, List booster, inbox preview, and drag and drop landing page creator, image editing, video integration, custom domain are some of its prominent features.
GetResponse has a free and paid version but remember, the paid version is cheaper than other email marketing tools. Moreover, it comes with attributes like A/B split testing on the premium version which is beneficial for marketers…
Get Response now comes with its efficient CRM feature that helps to build rapport with customers and attend to their grievances.
6. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free analysis tool from Google that helps analyze and measure your website’s performance over a period of time. It is an easy free application that helps you to gauge details about your business through the display of different metrics. The user interface is self-explanatory and can be used by a non-technical person as well to gather valuable data for your site.
Google Analytics provides thorough information regarding the number of visitors on your website, the pages your readers click on the most, the sources of traffic, and the bounce rate for your landing page and other pages. Scroll depth is a very useful and relevant element of Google Analytics.
What is Scroll Depth:
Scroll depth is a plug-in on Google Analytics that gives you an idea of exactly how much your visitors and leads are scrolling through your content on the page. It also measures which part of the content users are most interested in. 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100 % are designated scroll points on a page. It helps to analyze how far a reader has scrolled through your page before navigating away.
Every content marketer should employ the benefits of Google Analytics to collect data about their website performance in the vast pool of options available on the internet.
7. Yoast
Yoast is a search engine optimization plugin that offers comprehensive solutions to your website and content marketing needs. The Yoast plugin remains one of the most popular content focused plug-ins available for use on sites like WordPress. In fact, it is one of the most used plug-ins for websites…
Yoast comes with the necessary features that are essential for your content to do well on the SERP of a search engine. It encompasses all the vital features that help your content to remain crisp, succinct, and interesting.
Yoast has a distinct Readability and SEO category that optimizes content for keywords, edits, and suggests meta descriptions for ranking in search engines, multi-site compatibility, and breadcrumb navigation. Search engines have unique algorithms that have to be met with if you want your website to display on the first page of a customer’s search queries. Yoast makes sure you optimize your content and SEO needs to achieve that.
Features of Yoast:
They suggest adequate use of outbound links, inbound links, images, descriptions. It also recommends how to effectively use subheadings, to limit a paragraph by a certain number of words, to use variety in sentences for search engines to take notice of your content.
The Yoast interface is extremely easy to navigate. They come with features like XML sitemaps, page analysis, Readability score offering clear explanations and pointing out the flaws.
The Yoast website offers valuable information and in-depth analysis on SEO and content-related topics. Such content is of great help to beginners in grasping the concept of SEO. The what and how of the SEO module is explained with clarity. The basic version of the plugin is free and very convenient to use.
8. Canva
Canva has emerged as one of the most used design tools for content creation and content marketing. It is a popular tool for people from every profession be it a novelist, a content writer, a blogger, or a design specialist.
Canva boasts of an impressive variety of features that make designing for our content needs easier faster and much better. It offers more than 60000 templates that you have the option to choose from. Additionally, it comes with custom-sized pre-installed templates for different social channels like Facebook ads, Instagram posts, and Twitter feeds.
Starting from templates of postcards, flyers, cards, ebook to logos, book covers, photo collages, labels, business cards, Pinterest graphics you name it, Canva has the templates required.
You would want your content to be an attractive mix of different elements to impress your leads and retain your existing customers. More often than not, you require logos, brand designing, labels for the images. Canva solves all such requirements.
Canva allows you to upload images of your choice and customize them to fit your content. It has an array of intriguing fonts, sizes color schemes available to make your designs even more interesting. With a touch and share button, you can share your designs across all social media apps and communication mediums on the internet.
Canva helps to garner attention for your work and gives you and your content the required exposure to standing out from the crowd. It is definitely one of your best tools for content marketing.
Let me come to the most surprising part of it all. Canva is absolutely free!
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9. Evernote
Evernote is primarily a content writing tool that we employ to create, manage, organize and produce content. The premium features make it available for all devices. It is a great storing place for all-out notes, research and analysis points. You can feed reminders, attachments, handwriting, audio, video, images, voice note, and add annotations on the application. Moreover, it is accessible offline, and you can edit notebooks offline as well.
You can sift through information by creation date, note size, title, and recent work. It also comes in a free and premium paid version but the free version has a host of features to get your work done.
Evernote has OCR (Optical Character Recognition), cloud management services, and multiplatform support. For your convenience, it comes in dark mode. Thus, it enhances and compliments your writing efforts by making your experience on the app worthy enough to invest your time and money on.
All the distinctive features make EVERNOTE your prime marketing organization tool for content researching and writing.
10. Google Docs
Google Docs needs no introduction. It is by far the most used application and almost every marketer uses them to get their things done efficiently.
It is an interactive collaboration tool that helps to keep your team members and staff in the loop regarding your business calls. As you make changes, it becomes automatically updated and the information is shared through Google Drive. It has a neat clean interface with simple, concise, design and style and is pleasant to use. Whether it is a spreadsheet, a scheduler, or a document of research and content Google Docs has it all under one umbrella.
It is accessible 24*7 and is super easy and fun to use. Additionally, has import, export, copy, share, and privacy options and works offline with a Chrome extension.
It has a variety of fonts, typefaces, and images for formatting documents as per wish. It comes with voice typing and you can collaborate online in real-time as well. This is one app that is omnipresent in the daily life of a marketer and rightfully so. Give it a try! You will love it.
11. HootSuite
HootSuite is an SEO analysis tool used for tracking social media accounts to assess your performance on those sites. Its unique features render its absolute necessity for start-ups, small and medium businesses as well as large business enterprises.
You can manage multiple social media channels, can schedule posts in advance, view different useful analytics to measure and analyze data from social listening. You can also manage customer services on social media through Hootsuite and execute team collaboration with complete ease.
The free version helps you manage 3 social media profiles and for more, you have to buy the premium version.
It helps in responding to reviews, managing customer networks, and assess and manage marketing goals. HootSuite is a must if you want to achieve your marketing goals relating to your social media channels.
12. CoSchedule and Headline Analyzer
CoSchedule is a content marketing tool that concentrates on creating editorial calendars and managing social media and social media content. Some of its unique features are Task listing, blog ideas, and topics, social media post scheduling, cloud-based management. CoSchedule is recommended by professional bloggers who vouch for its features that help in collaborating, coordinating, scheduling, and managing content for blogs and websites.
It integrates with WordPress, Social media channels, and Google calendar to give you a comprehensive content creating and marketing experience.
CoSchedule comes with a very important tool called Headline Analyzer. It assists a user in creating scannable, relevant content for increased engagement and interaction. It scores you on your content headline and suggests adequate changes and optimizes your headline for improved SEO Ranking.
13. SlideShare
Slideshare is one of the most suitable as well as an advantageous content marketing tool available for marketers. It is software that isn’t much hyped up all the time. The utility of SlideShare is known by businesses everywhere.
The statistics speak for the immense popularity of SlideShare. According to a report, Slideshare enjoys around 130 million page views and more than 60 million visits each month.
It is a very convenient tool to work for and is ideal for making PowerPoint Presentations to businesses (B2B) and consumers (B2C) alike. It offers features just like MS-Powerpoint like transition time, effects, music, images.
Slideshare supports PDF formats and is actively used in Webinars and video sharing. It does not require any technical expertise to work with. Slideshare is very easy to set up for a web conference or seminar
It is categorized into different sections based on documents and presentations. Hence it becomes easier to locate a particular topic. SlideShare helps in lead generation and utilizing keywords for focussed content distribution.
Some Of The Other Notable Content Marketing Tools Are As Follows:
Stencil:
It is one of the content marketing tools similar to Canva and can be a substitute for the latter. It comes with easy customization features, google fonts, images, icons, and graphics.
MailChimp:
One of the most popular content marketing tools, MailChimp is widely used and has features similar to GetResponse
PureWriter:
Purewriter is a minimalistic writing tool that has gained popularity in recent times for its different useful features.
Google Optimize:
Helps in tracking social media performance, and managing Returns On Investments related to marketing and advertising. Also, It helps in A/B split testing for optimizing conversion rates.
SocialAnimal:
Helps to generate topics, evaluate new trends and influences, and create effective strategies for b2b marketing transactions.
ClickFunnels:
It is an online funnel builder for sales. It has preinstalled sales funnels that a marketer can use to sell and deliver their products online. It is quite a useful tool and saves time when trying to create an elaborate sales funnel for pitches.
Conclusion:
There are hundreds of content marketing tools available to improve your content and website performances. They are meant to make your daily needs of marketing easier and more effective. Do your research and decide on what’s best for your niche. Ultimately all these tools have something to offer for your business. Some work to your greater advantage. Identify those tools and work towards creating focussed content for your potential and existing consumers.
Frequently Asked Questions:
Q1. Which is the best content writing program?
IIM SKILLS ranks top list in offering the best online content writing program. The course covers all the topics under best economical price.
Q2. What is the scope of growth as content marketing?
There is a very good scope of career growth in content marketing. For better growth one has to keep upgrading.
Q3. Can I work as a freelancer?
Yes.
