Content marketing plays a critical role in marketing campaigns for businesses around the world. The statistics from Content Marketing Institute show that 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing to get in touch with customers, and 86% of B2C marketers mention content marketing as a key strategy.
What does content marketing mean? It involves creating and spreading high-quality content and aims to build a reputable brand image. Content marketing includes blog posts, newsletters, white papers, how-to guides, and videos. The content generated should be well-written and purposeful.
Top Content Marketing Tools for 2021
Every business should stay up-to-date with market trends, especially those that can propel their brand into the spotlight. These content marketing tools will be vital to leverage a successful and rewarding return. Another major benefit of these best tools for creating marketing content is that they require little to no hard costs to implement.
Content Creation Tools
Crello
With Crello, an easy-to-use design tool, everyone can feel like a professional designer. Create animated graphics, Instagram and Facebook posts, posters, ebook designs, infographics, and much more. Crello’s functionality includes:
- Photo editing (remove background, add frames to photos, etc.);
- Design objects (use various stickers, icons, labels, and shapes);
- Animation (resize and trim video, add animation effects);
- Audio (add music to images and videos).
That’s not all. Take a look at an extensive library of templates where you can find ready-made visual materials for your marketing ideas.
Grammarly
Whether you are developing content on your own or using an expert creator, you need to review any content for accuracy before you publish it. Otherwise, grammar errors can immediately raise red flags for readers and evoke feelings of doubt about your credibility.
Grammarly completely revamps the spell-check process for content marketers. This tool is free and very simple to use. Just upload your article, blog post, comments, or social captions to Grammarly and receive instant feedback on your text’s grammar, spelling, clarity, and correctness. Using Grammarly helps optimize your content’s clarity and fluidity.
Audacity
Audacity, a free, intuitive, multi-track audio editor, allows you to record live audio and computer playbacks and convert tapes into digital recordings. What is more, you can edit sound files in different formats with it. Cutting, splicing, mixing records, and adding specific effects (e.g., change the speed, pitch, or tempo of a record), you get customized audio files for your blog posts and newsletters to make them more vivid and attractive.
Vidyard
According to Social Media Today, more than 90% of customers say that video influences their desire to make a purchase. So, you need to include video content in your strategic content marketing plan. Once you created a video, you will want to use a tool like Vidyard to deliver or embed the file on your website. Vidyard offers subscribers a free option with the ability to share unlimited videos and premium options that allow you to create your original videos. Overall, this is one of the most valuable content marketing design tools to show your videography.
Content Management Tools
HubSpot
HubSpot is, in essence, a company growth resource. Every brand looking to take its digital marketing to the next level should spend time exploring HubSpot’s features. The platform offers both software and informational resources to maximize the company’s sales, marketing, and customer service strategies. HubSpot features numerous guides, infographics, articles, and video courses to improve your strategic approach to content marketing.
Upwork
Focus on strategic things and outsource content to freelance specialists. Here Upwork, the freelance marketplace, comes in handy. You can order social media content, marketing and tutorial videos, designs for ads, landing pages, and emails from freelance designers around the globe. Get in touch with independent copywriters and hire them to write content copies for your marketing campaigns, such as emails, white papers, manuals, guest posts, and so on.
Trello
Trello is a content marketing management tool to organize content development in one place. It can help you elevate your team’s effectiveness with calendar implementation, task assignments, to-do lists, progress tracker, and feedback hub. It will become your content or digital marketing manager’s right-hand tool.
Boxmode Website Builder
When professional developers create your website, it can be challenging for you to make some changes and edit its content, if necessary. With the Boxmode website builder, you can build different types of websites by yourself and have access to the pages’ content anytime. The builder has an intuitive interface, so you don’t need to have technical skills to customize your website. Using its basic elements and widgets, you can enrich your platform with specific blocks and fill them with relevant textual and visual content. Moreover, Boxmode allows you to tune SEO settings, and in such a way, improve your website’s position in search results.
Content Analytics & SEO Tools
Google Analytics
For any digital efforts, Google Analytics should go hand-in-hand with their implementation. With this content marketing analytics tool, your brand can measure the success of your content not only from an SEO perspective but also from a conversion one.
Through Google Analytics, you can track and measure visits to your website, on-page conversions, the amount of time your readers spend on each post, set up goals, and much more. It is known for being one of the most user-friendly content marketing tools and is also completely free! Does it get better than that?
Google Analytics can help you recognize what type of content resonates most with your target audience. You will also determine where the website traffic originates, which can help you narrow down the platforms to focus on.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is hands down one of the best content marketing tools. It is a keyword evaluation tool that allows you to monitor how your keywords are tracking in search engines and how your competitors are holding up. Optimizing your content to include the right keywords is fundamental in achieving better search engine visibility.
Ahrefs also offers various useful features that let you track your content marketing success against that of your competitors. With Ahrefs, you can eliminate possible gaps in your content and devise topics and strategic plans for further development.
Netpeak Software: Spider and Checker
SEO specialists and webmasters have to keep their fingers on the pulse, control a website’s performance, and use effective tools to improve its position in search results. Netpeak created products for your marketing needs. You can use Netpeak Spider to conduct in-depth SEO analysis of your website, monitor competitors’ promotional strategies, find SEO content issues, and create the site’s audit report.
Netpeak Checker allows for comparing a website’s URLs in detail, analyzing social media performance, and evaluating the site’s quality for link building. Based on this data, you can create content that will improve your website’s ranking in search results and attract more visitors.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is one of the top tools in SEO professionals’ arsenal. Discover what organic keywords and phrases are prevalent in your niche and generate a keyword list. You can also find out what content pieces get the most social shares and backlinks and create your content marketing strategy with specific topics in mind.
Social Media Content Tools
Canva
It has never been easier to design posts for social media platforms than with Canva. It’s a graphic design tool used to create visual content for different purposes. You don’t need to be an experienced graphic designer to make an eye-catching Instagram story, a Pinterest pin, or a Youtube thumbnail. Choose one of the pre-made templates or create a social media post with your unique design in no time. You will like Canva thanks to its convenient interface and a lot of options to get stylish visuals.
InShot
According to Oberlo’s statistics, 54% of customers expect to see more video content from a brand or business they are interested in. It means you need to post engaging videos to increase brand awareness and create a loyal audience. Use the InShot app, a video editor designed for Android and iOS users, to make attractive recordings for social media platforms. Trim and split video, set speed, remove certain parts of your clips, and add music and bright color effects to video pieces.
Missinglettr
Isn’t it great when you can automate processes and reach perfect results in your social media marketing? Missinglettr allows you to connect blog posts with automatically created social media posts, schedule your posts, and boost visibility in the social media environment. The last but not least benefit of this tool is that you can track the performance of your marketing campaigns and then easily calculate your SMM ROI.
Email Content Tools
Mailchimp
Email marketing is an effective way to reach customers. You can disseminate your content and inform users about your products or services, special offers, and so on. But it only works if you do your email marketing right. With such a tool as Mailchimp, an all-in-all marketing platform for creating and monitoring email campaigns, you can deliver the right message at the right moment. Collect user lists, create personalized emails, automate the delivery and get valuable statistics — all this in one place!
Sendinblue
Sendinblue offers a wide range of solutions to communicate with your customers via email, SMS, and chat, personalize content, and convert potential clients into real ones. With this tool, you can quickly create professional-designed letters in a drag and drop editor and easily send them to separate groups of people. Specify the delivery time, conduct A/B tests to find the best-performing emails, and more with the Sendinblue software.
Omnisend
If you own an online store, Omnisend is your best friend in the email marketing world. Create shoppable messages using dynamic content blocks designed specifically for ecommerce. Set filters and segment your customers based on their shopping history and profile data. What’s more, you can grow email opens with Campaign Booster by automatically resending unopened messages.
If your organization does not effectively use content marketing, 2021 is the year to change that. Content marketing is one of the most powerful options you can include in a digital marketing campaign (not to mention, it can carry with it little to no startup costs.) It truly sounds like the ideal combination!
Why should content marketing be on your radar as part of a well-rounded digital marketing mix? Many results-driven reasons include SEO traction, elevated credibility, greater audience awareness, and increased conversion rates.
Why Should Content Marketing Be a Focus?
According to HubSpot, content marketing has earned a significant place in marketing budgets, with almost one-third being allocated to content marketing tools. Innovation in this space is especially crucial to remain competitive and build a loyal following. Let’s think about why content marketing should be a focus for your brand. The top four benefits of implementing content marketing tools are listed below.
1. Improve SEO traction
Through content marketing, your organization can elevate its SEO efforts. You should craft content around topics that apply to a business and/or industry. It should also organically include relevant keywords you’re trying to rank. Whether you are writing blog posts for your site or hiring third-party content creators, content quality is of the utmost importance. The more high-quality content produced (optimized with the right keywords), the bigger impact on your search engine rankings it will make.
2. Show credibility
Your website and content published on it can help establish your brand as the authority on a particular topic or in a given field. By sharing valuable, relevant content, you can build trust with your target audience. Use content marketing to establish your brand as the go-to resource for information on a particular set of topics.
3. Grow audience awareness
A strategic content marketing plan can increase your chance to appear in various outlets, across numerous platforms, and, hopefully, in many respected publications. The more viewers see your content, the higher awareness you will generate within your target audience. A well-planned content marketing strategy can help you build an online reputation for your brand. You can also attract more traffic to your website if the content links back to it.
4. Increase conversion rates
Your content’s primary purpose should not be to sell your brand or a product. However, as a result of strategically using content marketing tools, you will see an overall increase in your conversion rates. The more your target audience sees your website and its content in SERPs, the more they will trust your brand. Naturally, consumers buy from brands they trust and feel a personal connection to. Content marketing helps you to establish the baseline for all of this, which will lead to conversions. There are also native ways to embed direct calls to action like email sign-up forms, social media share buttons, and affiliate products and service purchase links.
There are many reasons why content marketing should be a significant portion of your marketing strategy. These, however, are some of the fundamental reasons for investing time and resources. It is also the enjoyable part of marketing that allows you limitless creative freedom!
Success Starts with the Right Tools
If you are ready to revamp your content marketing toolset, then HubSpot, Google Analytics, Vidyard, Grammarly, Trello, and other tools mentioned above should be its central components. These tools allow you to take the content you’re producing to the next level. They also help you maximize your time by evaluating areas that would take hours to review on their own.