Content marketing is essential for businesses that seek to succeed in digital marketing. It can connect your business to your target customers, draw traffic to your site, and give your audience meaningful content. Content marketing also helps you builds buzz around your products and establishes your brand as the leading voice in the industry.
Success in content marketing starts with a good strategy. This includes finding the right tools that can simplify the workflow and increase the impact of your marketing efforts. Here are some of the best content marketing tools that you should consider.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a research and monitoring tool that allows marketers to identify the best performing content in any niche. It features an advanced social media search engine that is used to find and analyze the most shared content for a certain topic and the best authors for a particular keyword. BuzzSumo has a content alert feature that gives notifications for links, authors, keywords, domains, brands, and more.
This tool helps you determine and create suitable content that will resonate well with your target audience. It also allows you to track and compare rival websites so that you can improve your marketing campaigns to gain a competitive edge. Most of its features are fully customizable.
Ahrefs
This is a web analysis tool that helps marketers with their marketing, SEO, and link building strategies. It features a site explorer, keyword and domain mentions tracker, and a backlink checker. The SEO toolbar provides social metrics for social media platforms and reports on link and domain ratings on search engines.
Ahrefs allows marketers to keep an eye on the competition by analyzing their URLs or domains and the websites that link to them. You can also identify who is sharing your competitors’ content on social media. With this information, it is easier to build backlinks and find new content ideas that will attract traffic to your sites.
Buffer
Buffer allows you to manage social media networks by providing a means to schedule posts on Facebook, Twitter, Google +, and Linkedin. You can create content on Buffer instead of posting directly to social media. The posts are added to a queue and posted according to a schedule. It analyzes the overall usage of social media and selects the best time based on when most retweets and clicks happen.
With Buffer, you can easily post to multiple networks at once with a click of a button. If you are not satisfied with the time suggestions, you can override them and input custom time for your posts. Its auto-complete feature on Twitter allows you to get your followers’ usernames, connect, and build a greater audience.
Contently
Creating meaningful content is one of the best ways to keep your followers engaged on social media. Contently is a tool that helps you create a unique brand story and content that will attract a new audience. The team at Contently will help you set up a content roadmap that will steer your digital marketing goals.
This platform gives you access to thousands of professional freelance writers and an editorial team. With these, your social media networks will never lack new ideas. Contently allows you to manage your editorial assets in one platform, review and approve content, and upload it to your sites directly from the platform.
CoSchedule
CoSchedule is an editorial calendar and social media marketing tool that allows you to plan, create, and promote your content all under one platform. It features a marketing calendar that is useful for organizing marketing activity, and you can revise and update it throughout the year. It has a WordPress plugin for direct posting to your site and analytics tools to track the performance of your marketing campaigns.
CoShedule makes it easy to connect all your social media accounts on one platform for easy sharing of content. You can also manage more than one blog on the platform and publish them at the same time. Additionally, there are team features and essential task and to-do tools that make social publishing easy and efficient.
Google Analytics
Marketing analytics are important to any content marketing campaign. With the help of Google Analytics, you can track and report website traffic, measure advertising ROI, and monitor your social networking sites and applications. It offers a set of features for analytics data analysis, funnel analysis, and traffic filtering and manipulation. Reports obtained through Google Analytics can be segmented and filtered to meet your business needs and help you to understand your customers at every stage of the funnel.
With this tool, you can seamlessly activate your data to create effective marketing campaigns and experiment with new content ideas. Google Analytics also provides SEO reports through Google Webmaster tools which will help you assess how your keywords perform on Google’s search rankings.
MailChimp
MailChimp is an email marketing tool which allows businesses to create, analyze, and send emails and ad campaigns, collect statistics, and improve the performance of their email marketing strategies.
It features analytics and reporting tools that allow analysis of marketing campaigns, email tracking, and generate reports. MailChimp allows you to manage your subscribers and send up to 12,000 emails every month without incurring additional costs.
You can customize integrations and plugins, connect your e-commerce store, and create custom widgets for social media sites. Its features also allow you to track leads and paying customers, and segment new clients who are still going through automation from newsletters and other campaigns mailing list.
You can even set up an RSS feed from your company blog directly into MailChimp, so that your latest blog entries are sent automatically to your mailing list.
Final Thoughts
A successful content marketing strategy requires tools that enable you to create unique content, engage your customers online, track, monitor, and analyze data. These tools have got you covered regardless of what strategy you are employing in digital marketing.
About the author: John Porter is a Southampton-based freelance writer and a tech head, so he enjoys writing about business and technology and is particularly interested in all types of productivity apps. Find him on Twitter @johnpourter.
