Content marketing is a big job. Content marketing tools make that job significantly easier. It is as simple as that.
Content marketing tools give you the data and capabilities to consistently produce high-quality pieces. They also allow for better collaboration, tracking, analysis, and communication. All of this can help bridge the sometimes difficult gap between marketing and sales, making both teams more effective.
Good content is at the heart of an effective marketing campaign. So, if you’re serious about your work, having the right tools is essential.
Key Takeaways
- Content marketing is a marketing strategy used to attract, engage, and retain an audience by creating and sharing relevant articles, videos, podcasts, and other media.
- This approach establishes expertise, promotes brand awareness, and keeps your business top of mind when it’s time to buy what you sell.
- When done right, an effective content marketing strategy can increase visibility, generate more leads, boost loyalty, and improve authority.
- Consistent use of content marketing establishes and nurtures relationships with your prospective and existing customers.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is the development and distribution of relevant, useful content—blogs, newsletters, white papers, social media posts, emails, videos, and the like—to current and potential customers. When it’s done right, this content conveys expertise and makes it clear that a company values the people to whom it sells.
Content marketing is a go-to tactic that’s proven to work. Also, it provides a competitive advantage. Take a look at what the data says about content marketing:
- Businesses with blogs get 67% more leads than other companies.
- 67% of business-to-business (B2B) marketers say B2B content marketing increases engagement and the number of leads they generate.
- 88% of people credit branded videos for convincing them to purchase a product or service.
The consistent use of content marketing establishes and nurtures relationships with your prospective and existing customers. When your audience thinks of your company as a partner interested in their success and a valuable source of advice and guidance, they’re more likely to choose you when it’s time to buy.
Strategies For Content Marketing
How can you effectively create and promote your content to have a chance of competing, and gain consistent, legitimate traffic?
Here are 8 priceless content marketing tips and strategies, which are the ideal starting point to get more value out of your blog content.
Strategies For Content Marketing
Benefits of Content Marketing
Content marketing benefits businesses in many ways. When done right, an effective content marketing strategy can:
- Increase online visibility. A content strategy can help you attract more customers and website visitors, especially when people are constantly looking for solutions to their pain points. Offering educational and informative content about a topic they’re interested in can help you increase visibility online through your website or social media accounts.
- Generate more leads. You can increase leads when content marketing is used to drive traffic. Since educating customers builds trust and helps them feel more comfortable purchasing from your business, you can generate more leads and start to develop relationships with potential shoppers.
- Boost loyalty. Loyalty is essential in marketing and business because the more loyal your customers are, the more repeat purchases they’ll make. Offering content that informs consumers can help them begin to build trust with your brand and see you as a thought leader.
- Improve authority. Developing content is ideal for improving authority and becoming a thought leader in your industry. Not only does content help you build trust, but it can position your brand as the most authoritative on a particular topic.
Content Marketing Tools
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 make a buying decision.
Your mastery of these content marketing tools will go a long way toward determining your success as a digital marketer.
Top 10 Content Marketing Tools
#1. HubSpot
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 to be the most powerful marketing automation platform in the industry.
HubSpot offers many features, most of which 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.
#2. Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) lets you measure and improve your content’s performance in organic search (unpaid search results).
After you set up the tool, you can track how much traffic (clicks) your content pieces receive, how many times your pages are viewed in search results (impressions), what each page’s average click-through rate (CTR) is, and what their average rankings are (average position).
Here are some other things you can do with GSC:
- Submit a sitemap (a file containing your important website pages) to Google so your content can be indexed (stored) and made available through search results
- Request new content for indexing
- Troubleshoot technical SEO issues that are hurting your website’s performance
- Find out who’s linking to your content so you can reach out to similar websites to attract more backlinks (links from other websites pointing to your own site)
#3. WordPress
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 several plugins to optimize your marketing process.
WordPress architecture is SEO-friendly, and plug-ins can help you maximize the SEO impact of your content. The platform is best used for publishing content, blogging, and creating websites.
#4. Trello
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.
#5. Lumen5
Lumen5 is a drag-and-drop tool for creating video content. One important feature for content marketers is that it uses AI to create videos directly from blog posts. You can then fine-tune the video using the detailed editing tools.
The built-in media library includes valuable content marketing resources like licensed photos, stock videos, and music to make your video content creation easier.
#6. Airtable
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 several content marketing purposes: editorial calendars, marketing campaign tracking, influencer management, etc.
It excels at managing tasks and databases.
#7. Semrush
SEMRush is another keyword and SEO tool to help ensure your content marketing assets connect with your audience. In addition to extensive keyword discovery and analysis tools, SEMRush helps you find popular topics and questions to address in your content marketing.
Once you get started creating, there’s an SEO content template to help you rank. There is also an SEO writing assistant to check your SEO score and improve readability.
#8. Google Analytics
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.
#9. Yoast
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.
It is best used for writing SEO content.
#10. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a content marketing tool that helps you build content addressing topics your customers are already looking for online. The keyword explorer helps you find new keyword ideas and then analyzes each option to determine how hard it will be to rank for that term. You can also use the tool to track and analyze existing keyword sets.
For video content marketers, take note that Ahrefs allows you to measure the popularity of search queries on YouTube as well as the major search engines.
There’s also a content search engine to help you analyze content that’s already working in your niche, especially on low-competition topics.
6 Tips For Making The Most Of Your Content Marketing Tools
#1. Develop a strategy
Less than half of B2B or B2C marketers have a documented content marketing strategy. Thinking strategically about your content marketing plan gives you an automatic head start. Digging into how your content marketing tools can support that strategy and open up new possibilities gives you even more advantages.
Strategic planning should be involved in every aspect of your content marketing, and the tools listed above are all designed to help.
#2. Focus on relationships
Content marketing allows you to connect with your audience so you can gain their trust and loyalty over time, rather than jumping in and trying to make a sale right off the bat.
The best content marketing tools offer detailed insights into your audience that help you understand how best to connect. Social media content marketing dashboards with advanced analytics tools (like Hootsuite) can help you understand the demographics of your audience, as well as where and when they spend their time online.
You can also learn what subject areas they’re most interested in, and what content types are most effective for sharing the content you create.
This all feeds back into the strategic planning outlined above. When you have tools that help you understand your audience, you can better hone your strategy for effective content marketing.
#3. Plan ahead
Once you have a strategy and your audience research in place, it becomes much easier to plan ahead.
Sure, every content person is always thinking about marketing campaigns for big annual events like back-to-school and the winter holidays. But what about all the smaller events throughout the year that could spark content ideas? Planning in advance allows you to peg your content to events that resonate with your audience, increasing the chances they’ll be reshared.
For example, Hootsuite’s calendar has holidays and events built in, so you’ll never miss an event like International Tea Day. And if you have no idea what to say about an event like International Tea Day, you can just click on the name of the holiday and OwlyWriterAI will create appropriate social media posts for you. The posts might even spark ideas for larger content pieces.
Planning ahead also ensures your content marketing strategy is aligned across platforms, from email to your blog to your social channels.
#4. Work in batches
Creating your content in batches allows you to stay focused on one task at a time, and then move on to the next. This is much more effective than constantly worrying in the back of your mind about the TikTok you absolutely must create at 12:05 p.m.
Working in batches also allows you to make the most of keyword research and content themes. As you uncover interesting new information relative to your next content marketing project, you can weave it into blog posts, email newsletters, and social media posts.
A content marketing tool allows you to frontload your effort by creating multiple pieces of content in one work session and then loading them into the appropriate time slots on your content calendar. Social media content management tools will post the social content at the pre-set times without any further input from you, so you can focus on getting out your blogs and drip campaigns.
#5. Set up team processes
When you’ve got multiple people creating content, things can get … complicated. Great content creation tools have built-in workflows that allow your team to create and collaborate more effectively.
Workflows that include appropriate approval systems mean that even the most junior team members can create content directly in the tool from which it will eventually be posted. Senior team members can review, provide feedback, and sign off when the post is ready. Everyone gets to do their best work without any copy-and-pasting, version control issues, or concerns about content going live before it’s approved.
This makes life easier for all content marketing teams, but it’s especially important for teams working in regulated industries. Content marketing tools like Hootsuite (which is FedRAMP-certified) allow you to build specific compliance requirements and principal approval into your workflow so everything is always done by the books.
#6. Centralize your brand assets
Content marketing tools can help ensure your team is always using the latest brand assets. For example, Hootsuite’s content library is a good repository for approved product and editorial images, logos, templates, and videos.
Once your content goes live, you can give employees access to the full approved posts through Hootsuite Amplify so they can share with their own networks in just a couple of clicks. This ensures that your content marketing efforts have an extended reach and your team is always on brand when they share about the brand on social media.
Recommended Articles
- Branded Content Marketing: The Powerful Strategy Big Brands Don’t Want You to Know
- How to Create Promotional Content That Drives Results for Your Brand(Plus Examples)
- Content Marketing for Startups: Growth Hacking Secrets for Explosive Traffic
- What is Branded Content? The Money-Making Strategy You Need to Know
- 13 Digital Storytelling Examples that Will Inspire You
- Top Content Marketing Books Every Entrepreneur Should Read in 2024
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