Tools and resources to aid your productivity and reach!
One big trend over the last few years is companies putting an increasing emphasis on content marketing as part of their overall strategy:
- Coca Cola was on top of this trend back in 2011.
- Spanish airline Iberia has been making hay with a bilingual content approach for a few years, as well.
- According to Curata, nearly three-quarters of marketers surveyed noted an increased focus on (and budget for) content marketing this year.
Consequently, an absolute wealth of powerful content marketing tools has grown up around this industry. Below are 50 such examples. You don’t need each one of these tools in your toolbox — many are designed specifically for small publishers or enterprise-level marketers, anyway — but a content marketing strategy that incorporates at least a handful of them could be like rocket fuel for your business.
Here are 50 content marketing tools to get your efforts going. We have grouped each according to where it best fits in the marketing process, so it should be easier for you to find the software or platform that meets your specific needs.
Tools for Collaboration
Slack removes a great deal of friction in team communication. The app syncs up across all your devices, hashtags topics and makes threads easily searchable.
Trello allows you to visually organize the steps or components of a project. This can be done at the individual user level, or other users can be invited on to collaborate.
Kapost is a collaborative platform specifically for content marketing teams. Users can work together on a project and assign specific tasks such as content promotion and split-testing within Kapost.
Tools for Research
Evernote is a couple of evolutionary steps beyond the sketch pad or wherever you might hand-write notes. The app lets you unbundle bits of content such as a quote or a photo, save it, and access that collection across any of your devices.
Feedly is a great place to dump and organize your RSS feeds. Millions of marketers, reporters and enthusiastic readers currently use Feedly.
Plan your keywords within the company whose search engine accounts for most of the searches on the English-speaking internet.
Majestic SEO is such a great way to explore the referring domains and backlinks for a blog post, infographic or anything with its own URL. This can help you quantify the interest around a certain topic or idea.
Likewise, BuzzSumo will list the most-shared content on a blog or site, which is especially useful for tracking publishers who post frequently. Working just with BuzzSumo, Majestic SEO and the Keyword Tool will give you a fairly clear indication of a market’s interest in a product, a service, a piece of news or an idea.
Little Bird offers powerful social media intelligence; specifically, it will help you identify influencers in a given field and let you follow their output across a number of media.
TrendSpottr gives you real-time data about what ideas are trending across social media, potentially allowing you to get out in front of a story that your audience would find interesting.
Like TrendSpottr above, Bottlenose lets you tap into real-time streams of big data on social networks. Both of these tools can be especially helpful in anticipating trends.
Tools for Content Creation
Contently is one of the best platforms out there for hiring freelance writers for ongoing or one-off work.
Create and publish infographics easily. The company also has a video infographic creator that is currently in the works.
Visual.ly is where to go when you need to hire a visual storyteller, be that an infographic creator or video specialist.
Content marketers (and their audiences) love lists. List.ly takes this to a new level by allowing users to create and share lists, embed them into other content and even invite crowdsourced list building.
Skyword is an entire platform that bigger publishers and brands can use to automate a lot of their content marketing. It is scaleable and relies on a big back end of available writers and editors.
Here is another place where you can hire writers. Scripted raised $4.5 million in 2013 to build up its talent base, which already includes tens of thousands of available freelancers.
Curata searches for content on its own, learns your preferences over time, and curates content elsewhere that you or your audience might find interesting. Then, it lets you post relevant shares into a widget or along social media.
Use Prezi to create engaging presentation that are orders of magnitude better than what PowerPoint can offer.
Save money on Photoshop by using a free web-based alternative. If you are only touching up images and not doing anything too intensive with your visuals, Pixlr can totally substitute for paid software.
Word2CleanHTML will convert the formatting in Word or whichever word processor your prefer to HTML that you can immediately paste into your CMS.
Canva is a user-friendly design tool that lets you create professional looking graphics for free.
Issuu is another tool that lets the average computer user create beautiful digital magazines or lookbooks.
Tools for Content Promotion
Buffer can queue up your social media posts and publish them at a specified time, allowing you to streamline your social outreach and get all of that done in big chunks rather than as a round-the-clock activity.
Buffer above will let you know the best times to publish across various social media, but Tweriod offers a Twitter-only alternative to that data.
MailChimp is one of the easiest platforms out there for creating newsletters and direct-response emails. It’s also free to sign up, though the price rises as your campaign grows.
Both PR Newswire an PR Web are huge platforms for publishing press releases that reach thousands of journalists and bloggers. If you use one, just go ahead and use the other, too.
If you have a presentation that is shareable, or even bite-sized chunks of content that can be repurposed as such, post it on SlideShare to potentially reach a whole new audience.
Content BLVD is a marketplace where brands can embed their messages in the content produced by others, potentially introducing themselves to a new, relevant audience (and making money for the content creators in the process).
Gravity tracks users’ reading and sharing habits on websites then shares with the reader targeted content within its network.
Outbrain works somewhat like Gravity above, putting content in front of new audiences via personalized recommendations. These are the posts you see below the discussion threads on big media sites such as Huffington Post or CNN.com.
OneSpot also turns your content into what are effectively ads, posted along social networks, within your own media, or on other publications.
BuzzStream lets you scrape related sites for contact information and save outreach email templates to make link building a much more streamlined, less tedious activity.
dlvr.it is essentially a syndication service, sharing your content in various social media to target users where the message lands best.
Click to Tweet lets you unbundle small, sharable pieces of content (i.e. “Tweet This!”) so users can share it on Twitter. Great for quotes and punchy bits of information.
If Facebook is a natural medium for your content, you can pay to promote it there, on the largest of all social networks.
Reporters, writers and bloggers all seek information on HelpAReporter.com, where sources and experts on a particular subject (which includes content marketers, right?) can deliver a quote or some bit of insight. This is a fairly direct way to get your message into mainstream media.
Tools for Optimization and Conversion
Optimizely makes split testing your content so very easy. Speaking of which: You are split testing, right? If not, just nod anyway and stealthily bookmark this site.
Uberflip lets you aggregate your content into a single landing area, where you can also collect email addresses and get readers into your sales funnel.
Webtrends has been doing digital analytics since 1993. Their Streams platform lets you measure and track audience engagement in real time on your site
TrackMaven is designed for enterprise-level marketers who want to keep tabs on their competitors. This tool combines all that data into one easily explorable place.
Mixpanel is another analytics tool, but its primary focus is not on page views but actions — searches and shares, for example — to get a more robust profile of each individual reader or user.
One more level of analytics: Woopra tracks users across devices and builds actual timelines of an individual’s activity on your site.
Big companies such as Samsung use Marketo to track audience members and prospects to see how their messages land across various media and campaigns.
ROI creates lifecycle maps of individual users to see where each person is in his or her journey or relationship with a brand.
Scribe was developed for the team at Copyblogger to allow marketers to mine their own audience for relevant data such as what topics resonate and get shared.
Data and analytics from the company that started as SEO experts and since moved on to work within the larger field of marketing, audience engagement and optimization.
Qualaroo creates software for on-page interaction that can help qualify a visitor as a prospect. Qualaroo Convert helps nudge those visitors who are close to taking action to engage a little further with you via chat or survey.
Create a custom landing page with Lander via drag-and-drop integration that includes email opt-ins and A/B testing.
Like Lander, LeadPages is a rich platform that lets users build optimized landing pages that compel visitors to take action.
images by:
Matt Biddulph / Flickr
Geof Wilson / Flickr
Loco Steve / Flickr
Mitchell Joyce / Flickr
Since then my team and I have published over 2,500 long-form articles for SaaS and HR Technology companies all over the world and engaged with over 20K influencers to promote this content.
I’d be happy to chat with you about anything and everything we have learned along that journey. Please don’t hesitate to reach out!
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