With that said, many beginner marketers struggle with content marketing because, in order to succeed, it takes a solid content strategy, good project management skills, and the best tools.
Want to beat the competition by having an efficient content marketing process? Check out these content marketing tools and software that can help you get the most out of your content marketing.
Customer Research Tools
Wufoo (Surveys)
Wufoo allows users to build awesome forms without any knowledge of coding using the drag and drop method.
With its custom branding features, you can add your logo and brand elements straight into your form.
The free version of Wufoo allows you to create basic forms and collect limited information, including creating up to 5 forms with up to 10 fields. It is also limited to 100 entries each month.
The paid versions allow you to add your own branding and collect more data.
Answer the Public
Answer The Public uses data from search engines such as Google and then exposes every useful question or phrase asked by users that include your keyword.
Answer The Public has a free version that allows you to search a few keywords a day. However, they do have premium plans for the more advanced marketer.
Topic / Keyword Research Tools
The HOTH’s Google Keyword Planner Tool
The HOTH Google Keyword Planner Tool is a free keyword research tool that is powered by SEMrush. It helps you find high-volume terms and phrases that are directly related to your target keywords. All you need to do is enter your keyword or phrase and get started with your research.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs can be used to analyze your competitors and do keyword research to find topics to write about.
Their content index contains over 1 billion pages and they discover 1.8 million new pages each day. Their content explorer (which is similar to Buzzsumo) allows you to quickly discover competitor content by typing in keyword phrases. The results include social share counts, backlinks, and organic traffic data for each article.
Ahrefs also has a keyword explorer that marketers can use to conduct keyword research for their marketing platform. Their crawler has indexed over 7.5 billion keywords and their tool shows estimated search volume and other suggested keyword phrases.
Buzzsumo
Using Buzzsumo, allows you to enter a keyword phrase and pull up a list of articles that got shared heavily on social media. You can dig into each article’s data and see who linked to it and shared it. You can then use article topics that you found on Buzzsumo as inspiration for your own article ideas.
Spyfu
With SpyFu you can search for any domain and see every place they are registered on Google. Every keyword that they are associated with or bought on Google Ads. You can also see every organic rank and every ad variation within the last 15 years!
By using SpyFu you can search through your competition, and download their PPC keywords with no download limits. You can also see how many clicks they get and how much they pay for each keyword.
You can also keep track of every domain bidding on your Google Ads. You can catch changes in ad spend over time and watch for emerging competitors as well as shifts in content marketing strategies.
SpyFu has a free version if you sign up, you can also purchase a basic, premium, or team member version for access to more data.
HOTH Topic Generator
If you need some quick influencer content ideas, then you may want to try out the HOTH’s Topic Generator. Simply answer a few questions and submit the form and the HOTH will send you enough content ideas for the next few weeks.
Content Planning Tools
Planning tools can help you schedule and manage your content creation so that you can stay consistent and organized. A whopping 90% of marketers use a content marketing plan or will continue to invest in the same amount in the channel during 2022.
CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a project management tool designed specifically for content creators and digital marketers. Their marketing calendar allows users to see the status of all projects at a glance and it also comes with useful analytics so that you can track the effectiveness of your content campaigns.
CoSchedule also integrates with various other applications like Google Docs, WordPress, MailChimp, Zapier, and more. This integration allows writers to create their content in Google Docs and publish directly to WordPress, as well as streamlining social sharing and email marketing.
CoSchedule has a free version, a paid version, and a business version to help meet your needs as a company.
Asana
Asana is an easy-to-use project management tool that works well for managing content creation and marketing. With Asana, users can create checklists and add due dates to tasks. You can also work inside timeline and calendar views, making it easier to see how projects are progressing.
Asana is free to start with for startup businesses; however, there is a premium and business version.
Content Marketing Tools for Content Creation
Content creation tools can help writers produce better content and streamline the process so that they create it quicker. Here are a few content creation tools that writers can use.
Grammarly
Grammarly is a freemium tool that checks your content for spelling and grammatical errors. You can install the Chrome extension if you are using Google Docs or GMail or you can download and install the application on your computer.
Even if you are using Microsoft Word, Grammarly will catch mistakes that Word’s built-in grammar checker will miss.
Canva
Canva is a fantastic website and app that allows anyone to create beautiful graphic design templates for high-quality infographics, social media posts, Facebook banners, YouTube thumbnails, and other forms of visual content.
You can use their premade templates or create your own from scratch. You can design logos, videos, and just so much more.
Many of Canva’s features are free, but there is also a paid version that offers more options.
Hemingway App
Another useful tool to improve your writing is the Hemingway App. Hemmingway detects when you are using long sentences that are too hard to read.
It also shows when you are using passive voice or using other words that you don’t need. Hemmingway can help you improve the readability of your writing.
Hemingway Editor is totally free, however, there is a desktop app that you can buy for a one-time payment.
HOTH Blogger
HOTH Blogger is our affordable blog writing service that can get you highly relevant, researched, and professionally written content for your blog!
We handle keyword research, topic creation, writing, and editing. Book a call with one of our experts to learn more about how Blogger can help improve your content strategy.
Google Docs
One popular tool that many content creators use is Google Docs, which is free and similar to Microsoft Word. With Google Docs, multiple people can collaborate on the same piece of content. Editors can make suggestions and writers can implement those suggestions in future revisions of the article.
Google Docs is totally free and available to anyone with a Gmail account!
Content Optimization Tools
For content marketers, creating great content is not enough. Marketers should also optimize their content to rank well in search or encourage social media sharing.
Here are some tools that marketers can use to optimize content:
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is one of the most well-known and most widely used analytics tools that can help you in real-time with your content management workflow and other marketing campaigns.
Google also has a ton of other SEO tools that are amazing for marketing, such as Google Search Console, ThinkWithGoogle, and Google Docs (as I mentioned above.)
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a popular free SEO WordPress plugin site that allows marketing content creators to add title tags and metadata to their articles. It also sets up websites to be search engine friendly by taking care of all the technical stuff for you.
Yoast also offers a paid version of their plugin which offers other features, like suggesting internal pages to link to and a redirect manager so that you can redirect traffic from pages you deleted to other relevant pages on your site.
Content Insight
Taking a content inventory is a good step to help marketers improve their content performance and get a clear picture of how past content is performed.
Content Insight is a tool that allows marketers to quickly create a content inventory. The inventory also includes analytics data and page-level details so that you can optimize your content and adjust your content strategy for future articles.
Conversion Optimization Tools
Many content marketers have conversion goals, like getting more subscribers for their email newsletter or getting more leads. Here are some conversion optimization tools that may help improve your content marketing results.
OptinMonster
One popular tool that can help you get more subscribers on your email list is OptinMonster. It features a drag-and-drop interface so that anyone can create nice-looking email opt-in forms and pop-ups without coding.
Popups can significantly increase the number of people who sign up for your email newsletter. WP Beginner experienced around 600% more sign-ups from using a popup form to collect emails and Backlinko’s conversion rate jumped from 1.7% to around 4.8% when they added email popup forms to their site.
OptinMonster can trigger email popups when people scroll past a certain point if they are inactive for a period of time, or on exit intent.
Hello Bar
Another tool to increase lead conversion rates is Hello Bar, which can be easily installed by copying the javascript code onto your website.
The bar sits on top of your website and allows people to enter their email address or click a button to take them to another page. It also has other functionality, like exit intent pop-up boxes that increase conversion rates.
Hello Bar has a free version but also provides premium and elite versions of its features for companies and personal use.
Email Marketing Tools
Here are some tools you can use for email marketing:
MailChimp
One of the easiest things writers can do to promote their content is to send an email to their subscribers to let them know about it.
MailChimp is a popular tool for new blogs and to assist you with lead generation because it is free to use if you have less than 2,000 subscribers.
MailChimp also allows you to split test different headlines or body copy and provides data like email open and click-through rates of your target audience so you can measure engagement and improve future campaigns.
ActiveCampaign
If you are looking for a more powerful CRM with email marketing software and automation, then consider a tool like ActiveCampaign. With ActiveCampaign, you can segment your visitors based on their interests and send them more personalized content.
Actually, email collection forms were the most successful at converting viewers with a 15% conversion rate in 2020, and email visitors are the most likely to convert on marketing automation forms — and people coming from search advertisements are the least likely
As an additional tip, It’s a great idea to use surveys to collect data on your subscribers or use metrics like what links they clicked on to automatically determine what they are interested in.
You have the option of trying ActiveCampaign for free, however, after a trial period you would need to pick a plan between Lite (for personal or small business use) and Enterprise (best for a marketing team).
Social Media Tools
Sharing content on social media is another way to drive traffic to it.
Here are some tools you can use to promote on social media:
Buffer
Buffer is a social sharing tool that you can use to share your content on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and other social media sites. With Buffer, you can schedule content to be shared in advance so that you can easily stay consistent with your content promotion.
Buffer is free to begin; however, they do offer a ton of different plans with different features to match your needs as a business.
Link Building
Getting links to your content can improve SEO results and drive more search traffic to your site.
HOTH Guest Post
Guest posting is a great way to get inbound links to your site while gaining valuable exposure on other blogs. HOTH Guest Post offers guest posting services for businesses that want to get featured on high-domain authority sites.
Streamline Your Content Marketing with Tools and Automation
As you just saw, content marketing has a ton of pieces to it and is a challenge for most businesses.
But with the right content marketing tools, just about any business can get results with content marketing.
What tools do you like to use for your content marketing? Let us know in the comments.
Also, don’t forget to check out our other tools. The HOTH offers a ton of different free SEO tools and resources to help get you on track!
