Good content is at the heart of an effective marketing campaign. Through high-quality content, a business can establish itself as a trustworthy expert in its field. In fact, content creation is considered the top priority for 80 percent of digital marketers.
Content marketing tools can help you save time and money by improving the quality of the content you produce and streamlining your overall content marketing strategy. They can offer you new topics to write about, help you reach your buyer personas, get visitors to engage with your content and even help them to make a buying decision. Your mastery over these content marketing tools will go a long way to determine your success as a digital marketer.
Hubspot is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and CRM suite that provides you with all the tools required to create actionable content, optimize it, and help it reach the right audience. It is also considered the most powerful marketing automation platform in the industry. HubSpot offers many features of which most are free to try. These include a powerful form builder, live chat and chatbots, popup tools, and an all-in-one WordPress plugin for marketing. In addition to these features, HubSpot also provides a world-class CMS that allows you to centralize everything within a free CRM.
Best used for: Consolidating multiple content marketing tools in a centralized location.
WordPress leads the market when it comes to content management systems. It offers marketers all the tools they need to create a blog or a website as well as an easy-to-use publishing platform. It also provides visitor tracking and a number of plugins to optimize your marketing process.
Best used for: Publishing content, blogging, and creating websites.
If you're looking for a way to make planning and collaboration fun, Trello is the answer. It uses boards to represent projects and cards to represent tasks. You can organize and keep track of all the tasks and projects in one place. It also supports integration with many other applications used for content marketing.
Best used for: Keeping track of tasks and project management.
Airtable is best used for storing huge amounts of data in one place and sorting them with customized filters. It is widely used as a project management tool but it serves a number of content marketing purposes - editorial calendars, marketing campaign tracking, influencer management, etc.
Best used for: Managing tasks and databases.
Google Analytics is another important content marketing tool used widely by most platforms online. Not only can you track product purchases and form submissions, but you can also set up behavioral events. The best part is that it is free and very easy to use. You only have to set up your Google Analytics account and copy the code to your website - it will automatically start tracking your data.
Best used for: Understanding your audience and tracking site metrics.
Buzzsumo is a multi-purpose content marketing and research tool. It helps you analyze what type of content will perform best for any topic. For basically anything, you will be able to find the top trending topics and the kinds of headlines generating the most buzz. You can also get insights into the key influencers in your industry and connect with them to grow your business.
Best used for: Tracking performance metrics and carrying out content research.
Yoast is one of the best content marketing tools for writing SEO-focused content. It is a WordPress plugin for SEO that can do pretty much all the work for you - optimize content for a keyword, preview and edit meta descriptions, suggest relevant internal links, or abstract away technical SEO tasks. There are colored indicators in red, yellow, and green that make it easy to figure out whether you have optimized your page correctly.
Best used for : Writing SEO Content.
Ahrefs is a powerful SEO tool that can also provide in-depth performance reports. It helps to track the rankings of your keywords, analyze competitors' keywords and traffic, and much more. There are some powerful reports on Ahrefs like "top pages" that help you analyze the most valuable pages on a website or "content gaps" that help you see what competitors rank for that you don't.
Best used for: Keyword research.
Google Optimize Google Optimize helps you find out which part of your website visitors engage with the most and hone in on the areas that need further improvement. It includes statistical modeling tools to simulate real-world performance for any test that you would like to perform. It is a good starter for A/B testing, especially because it is free. Best used for: A/B testing on changes made to your site's pages.
Canva
Anyone who does content marketing knows the importance of good visual elements. Canva allows both novice and experienced designers to easily create infographics, social media posts, blog cover photos, and other types of visual content. You can start from one of their templates or create your designs from scratch. Best used for: Designing your own content marketing materials.
Establishing yourself as an expert.
Improving your visibility in search engines.