If you are concerned that you may not be doing enough content marketing to reach your target audience, we are here to help!
We have selected the best content marketing tools for marketers by taking a deep dive into what has worked for successful businesses across a range of industries.
From sharing written words to photos, infographics, and videos, your content needs to not only appeal to your buyer personas but reach as far across the digital landscape as possible.
The content marketing tools listed below will help you increase the quality of your content, potentially increase your conversion rate, and ensure that what you are producing reaches the widest market possible.
To make things simple, we have divided the list into free and paid tools.
Free Content Marketing Tools
If your business is new, or you are in the beginning stages of developing your brand, you are unlikely to have unlimited resources for promoting your content. Your budget may only allow for free marketing tools. And that is okay!
We have found some great free tools that you or your marketing team can use to plan, create, edit, organize and execute a killer content marketing strategy.
Here are our favorite free tools:
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is an easy and free way to monitor your businesses’ online presence. Using a basic tool like Google Alerts may seem too simple, but, we have found that there may be no such thing as a “bad” marketing tool.
Google Alerts is one of the easiest tools to use. You can set up alerts to keep track of your company name, the title of your page or blog post, and the website address. Essentially, Google sends an alert to your email every time your brand is mentioned. Additionally, you can perform searches of content to see what is trending.
If you have any specific products that you are marketing, you may also choose to set up links to be alerted for mentions of those. You can even comb the tool for content ideas.
You may also want to keep an eye on your competition, and a simple search on Google Alerts will let you stay up to date on what they are doing.
One great function of Google Alerts is ensuring that you are credited for any quotes or content that is mentioned on the web. If you find that you have not been linked to and/or quoted, you can easily identify where the issue lies and address it.
If you are looking for something basic, but thorough, Google Alerts is a great place to start.
Hemingway Editor
The Hemingway Editor is another free tool for content marketing. You may be considering how an editing app could be a great tool for content marketing campaigns, but, we like Hemingway because the editor helps your content shine.
As much as we may be tempted to write long, flowery phrases when creating content, we really should be stating our message in a clear and concise manner.
Simply copy and paste the draft of your text into the Hemingway app, and the app determines how readable your content is based on a US grade score.
You would like your content to be reached by as many people as possible, which also means that you will want to ensure that your content is readable to as many people as possible.
The Hemingway Editor also corrects grammar and spelling errors, which is an added bonus in terms of your marketing efforts.
Of course, you will want to use your own judgment when editing from the Hemingway Editor. You can always choose to adjust your language to fit your target audience. Sometimes, you will want an educational piece that may be read as too dense by the app.
Essentially, the Hemingway Editor highlights where you are too wordy, using the passive voice, complicating your language. With Hemingway Editor, your content, not the writing, becomes the message.
Pixabay
Securing great images to enhance your content pieces can be expensive. If you don’t have photography or graphic skills, creating appealing images for your content can be tricky. While your words are where you deliver the message you are trying to convey, a picture is worth a thousand of those words.
If you are working with a limited budget, you probably do not have the money to pay for unique images. At Pixabay, the copyright-free, royalty-free, high-quality images available are simply stunning,
Pixabay holds a license for the images, which means that you do not have to. Which also means that you don’t have to pay for the images that you find and you are free to download the images and modify them to suit your content needs.
The site is searchable, so you won’t have to spend a lot of time browsing through photos (unless you want to) and you can spend more time curating your content.
Using images on your site may be the edge you need to entice your audience and keep them engaged.
Link Explorer
Link Explorer is similar to Google Alerts- you are able to keep track of your brand’s web presence, or keep tabs on the competition.
You will have to create an account in order to use Link Explorer, but once you are in, you have access to a thorough analysis of any website you search. The analysis contains the link metrics for any website, including Page Authority and Domain Authority.
Link Explorer provides information on your website or page’s success metrics. You will be able to check if there are any broken links, check inbound links, and increase quality links to your site by decreasing spam links.
As for checking on your competition, Link Explorer is a bit like an inside look at what the competition is up to. You will be able to get an insight into your competitors’ backlinks and see what the top-performing content is- so you can fine-tune your own.
Infogram
Producing successful content marketing can sometimes mean taking the ordinary (words) and making them extraordinary. Creating infographics with creation tools like Infogram to display your data is a great way to create visually appealing additions to your page or blog post.
As we well know, the internet and social media platforms bombard users with information each and every day. In order to have a successful content marketing campaign, your content is going to have to stand out above the crowd. With infographics, you can be sure that your content will be, at the very least, eye-catching.
Infogram is a free (with a paid option) site that uses data input by the user to create maps, digital charts, and infographics for your marketing platform without any need to know how to write code.
Using infographics in your content marketing platform attracts the attention of your audience and provides a more palatable way to consume your content.
You can include your branding or business information, (even your contact information) in an infographic in a way that does not seem overly contrived- providing an instant reminder of your brand. Sharing your information in a graphic form can also generate backlinks that may not have occurred had your branding information not been shared in an infographic.
Your infographic can be carried beyond your website or social media platform, and be printed on products to help your branding go viral.
The free portion of the Infogram site has limited projects available for use, but the tool is a great starting point for free content marketing campaign options.
Paid Content Marketing Tools
As many great free content marketing tools as there are available to you, there are just as many great paid tools.
We have chosen our top paid content marketing tools to help you get the most from your content and reach your business and marketing goals.
MarketMuse
MarketMuse is a paid strategy and content platform that helps drive content creation by providing improved search engine rankings.
Content can be created directly on the MarketMuse platform, and AI directed insights provide content creators with feedback to create high quality, results-focused content. Once keywords are provided to the search engine on MarketMuse, AI provides an in-depth result of what words to use to convey topical authority and how to create content that surpasses that of your competitor.
The Content Brief tool available in the MarketMuse app gives content writers a guideline for creation, eliminating strategic edits and ensuring quality content.
MarketMuse also provides a Personalized Difficulty Score, Opportunity Score, a Content Score, and target scores for word count based on the specific search term you have selected.
The Personalized Difficulty Score grades your site and gives you feedback on how your site will rank for your chosen term. The Opportunity Score grades your chances for successful content. The Content Score measures how much your content is aligned for successful reach. Finally, your target scores and word counts are a guide for your content creation.
This app is relatively easy to use and delivers results quickly. You can also get rank tracking if you are interested in your SERP score.
On MarketMuse, you can determine if your content needs to be optimized and figure out how you can improve on any issues on your pages.
The best part: you, or your writers, will spend less time strategizing and optimizing content because of the many tools available in the software suite.
Your business strategy will improve by giving your content creators the license to review their own work and create high-quality content based on the results offered in the MarketMuse platform.
SEMrush
SEMrush is an SEO tool used in content marketing. It is great for creating engaging, quality content by capitalizing on your SEO and increasing your organic traffic.
SEMrush features a keyword tool that will generate many keyword suggestions- making way for great content that meets the needs of your audience.
Having an insight into your competitions’ content can help your brand or business get ahead of the game. SEMrush identifies your most similar (closest) competitors and analyzes data so that you can create an effective marketing scheme.
SEMrush is multi-functional for your content marketing needs. It works as an SEO management tool that will research your keywords and use a gapping tool to identify any keywords that you may be lacking that your organic competitors are using.
As SEMrush will perform an audit of your current content, including on any social media platform. It can be an immense time and money saver by letting you enhance your current content to better align with your marketing strategy.
This tool allows for scheduled scanning to check for any changes in your SEO position, backlinks, and ranking. An emailed report is also available.
It will also find opportunities to backlink, and identify those of your competitors.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a similar SEO tool to SEMrush. If you are looking for a tool that is great with keyword research, we suggest you stick with SEMrush, but if you are looking for backlink analysis for lead generation, Ahrefs reigns supreme.
Other features that make Ahrefs stand out are the site audit, which performs a full audit of your website to identify any SEO issues, a content tool that provides great content suggestions, and alerts that provide insight into backlinks and mentions so that you can keep an eye on your brand or business presence.
Ahrefs does not have quite as many features as SEMrush, but provides a simplified version of similar content and tools. The dashboard is a bit easier to use because there isn’t as much information to be processed which can often be a good thing.
Depending on your preferences, you may choose to go with Ahrefs because of the backlink opportunities, rank tracking and ease of use. Most of the features are simple and have easy to read results.
Link Whisper
Link Whisper quietly and quickly “whispers” contextual internal link suggestions that can both help your readers better find content on your site and helps Google rank your site better due to the improved link structure.
Linkwhisper tracks and suggests internal and external links for WordPress sites.
It’s really just that simple. And it works. We’ve been using it on this blog for the last several months, lots of updates and it’s removed the burden of tracking our internal linkage.
ClickUp
ClickUp is one of our favorite content marketing tools for organizing your content marketing. It is intuitive, very easy to use, and allows you to create teams.
We love ClickUp for a project management tool. On this platform, you are able to create lists, boards, projects, comment on tasks and, you and your team will have the ability to create deadlines.
ClickUp combines sales and marketing, along with other aspects of running your company on one simple platform using a hierarchical view.
You can customize ClickUp in a way that suits you and your team. You will see productivity skyrocket with the streamlined system of ClickUp.
The site allows you to create project boards by doing a drag and drop of information. You can also create lists to organize your content marketing enabling your team to complete tasks and move content while you can track these movements in real-time on your own board.
Once you have created a board, topics and comments can be added, files can be uploaded, due dates can be created, and checklists made. You can schedule your team to complete content writing tasks and strategize for current or future content marketing plans.
You can also create lists of trending topics to include in your campaigns, or lists of people to contact for paid influencer marketing. You can assign updates to your social media accounts, or keep tabs on your social media channels.
For content marketers, ClickUp is a tool that can be personally tailored for creating a virtual to-do list. This can help organizing clients and tasks, and creates a dashboard that can be changed to suit each team member- so your employees’ view may not be the same as yours.
Instead of jotting down your ideas in a notebook and guessing at influencers, you can take your ideas online, in one place. You will be pleased with the resulting organization and content promotion.
While you won’t be able to replace quality content and research done for your business by humans, you can certainly get ahead of the game by using some amazing tools to enhance your content marketing.
You can find different marketing tools for creating engaging content for your brand or business that generate emails, or schedule your social media platform postings, or send emails to your audience.
The most useful tools are the ones that save you time, energy, and money so that you can focus your efforts on creating a marketing strategy for your business.
Our list is evolving, but our solid core tools are listed above. Ones that we turn to every day, and have made our own content marketing a snap.
