Content marketing is the ‘new age philosophy’ of digital marketing. [perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Today, over 88% of B2B marketers heavily leverage content marketing in their digital strategy.[/perfectpullquote]
In fact, estimates suggest that by 2019, the content marketing industry will reach $300 billion.
The reason behind this is pretty simple.
Content sells.
Content marketing does not mean just churning out articles and blogs – there is a strategy involved. You need to be aware of the right tools – ones that can help you create attractive and meaningful content.Let’s introduce you to some of the most resourceful content marketing tools!
Creating content is not enough- you need to keep track of how well your content is doing with your audience. BuzzSumo is the perfect tool to help you get this data. It provides analytics-driven insights to help marketers understand the latest content trends in the industry: what kind of content is being curated and marketed by your rivals, how you should design your content, and so on. Apart from that, BuzzSumo also helps you find influencers who can market your content within your industry.
BuzzSumo has both monthly and yearly pricing options under four plans: Pro, Plus, Large, and Custom.
HubSpot is an excellent inbound marketing platform, fully equipped with tools to cover all your content, marketing, sales, and customer service needs. The best feature of HubSpot is that its integrated CRM helps marketers organize, monitor, and boost sales leads while attracting potential customers. HubSpot’s content strategy tool allows you to track trending topics and create content accordingly – helping you bring in more customers to your site. To keep your customers engaged with your content, HubSpot also lets you choose a blueprint that optimizes the readability quotient of your content.
HubSpot offers a wide range of marketing, sales, and other professional services under differential pricing strategies including a free trial, starter, and professional packs.
Evernote is your one-stop-shop content marketing tool for organizing, enhancing, and brainstorming your website’s content. It allows you to jot down all your creative ideas in one place so that you and your teammates can access it anywhere (both from your PC and smartphone, anytime. You can share your notes easily for everyone on your team to see, so there always remains transparency.
And the best thing about it, Evernote is entirely free!
Trello is all about fostering collaboration and teamwork. It takes networking to the next level by allowing team members to share, schedule, write, and post content across a wide variety of boards, cards, and lists. This way everybody stays in the loop and updated about the brand’s content marketing strategy.
Like Evernote, Trello is also free.
- Canva
Content is not just about information, it’s about engagement. You cannot expect high click-through rates with boring and dull content – You have to include quirky images, infographics, and other visually appealing graphics to pull in your audience. While Photoshop is a great option, it requires a separate designer to use it well. Canva, on the other hand, is a free designing tool replete with a variety of pre-built templates and layouts as well as a drag-and-drop interface – so you can set up images for your blog posts, facebook, instagram, and much more!
As a freelancer or small business, you’ll probably never need the paid version of Canva. However, the paid version does offer some decent benefits.
SEMRush is the magic wand that lets you unravel the secrets of search marketing. It allows you to track and identify keywords that are trending on both organic and paid search campaigns, and also check out the keywords that your competitors are using to attract their customers. This single tool covers all the essentials such as SEO, social media, paid traffic, and content & PR.
SEMRush tends to be an expensive option unless you have multiple sites to track. However, the sheer amount of data and insight that it offers will get you your money back manifold! It has three different pricing plans: Pro, Guru, and Business.
Pocket was launched in 2007 to help people save engaging and informative articles, videos, and other kinds of online content with an aim to enhance content marketing strategies. Today, Pocket has over 30 million registered users and is integrated into the platforms of more than 1500 apps such as Twitter, Flipboard, Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Zite, and so much more.
Pocket is a free content marketing tool.
An excellent online marketing strategy always includes email marketing. MailChimp is the perfect tool to streamline your email marketing efforts. Whatever be your marketing needs – whether you want to announce news related to your brand or product offers or sell a new product – with MailChimp’s campaign builder you can create impressive email marketing campaigns to best fit your customer tastes and demands. The best feature of MailChimp is that it automates many mundane marketing tasks, thereby allowing marketers to focus on other aspects of online marketing and brand building.
While the free version of MailChimp allows you to send up to 12,000 emails, the Growing Business and Pro paid packs allow you to send unlimited emails.
Outbrain is one of the best content distribution platforms, be it text, infographic, or video content. Outbrain partners with reputed publishing channels (both local and international) and helps marketers connect with their target audience through data-driven targeting strategies. Outbrain segregates your target audience under subgroups such as demographics, tastes, and preference, location, etc., thereby helping you curate what kind of content you should design for your customer segments.
While creating engaging content is great, you also need to measure the readability factor of your content. It allows you to find influencers and connect with them to help spread your content on online and social media platforms. Kred analyzes your influence on social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook and helps identify the influencers who can positively impact your brand. As your “influencer” status is enhanced, so will the status of your content.
If you are not among the 88% of marketers who use content marketing to their advantage, then you better start now! These ten content marketing tools can help boost the credibility and impact of your content significantly. Try them out to see the change for yourself.
