According to all the online digital experts, if you have a website for your business, you need to know how to market your content to your target audience.
However, knowing how to market content to your audience isn’t something that’s instinctive. Instead, it takes knowledge and experience to make the most out of content marketing.
The good news is that you don’t have to do it alone.
The best content marketing tools are available to you, and you don’t need to be that proverbial rocket scientist to use them.
With the right tools, you can improve your company’s process for content creation and your success rate in getting and maintaining clients.
But before we get started, we need to know how we benefit from using these resources.
What are the Advantages of Using Content Marketing Tools?
If you’re looking to find new ways to drive qualified visitors to content that is relevant to them, then content marketing is a powerful way to achieve that goal.
Content can be designed to provide answers to visitors’ questions, and by doing so, provide a business with highly qualified prospects that are ready to buy services or products.
And where do the tools fit into it all?
Well, they are a great way to use content marketing in an efficient manner.
These tools can save you time and money by streamlining the way you create your content and improving the quality of what you produce.
They can offer new topics to write about, and show you how to get website visitors to engage with those topics.
Besides that, tools can help you create content to reach your buyer personas, and help them wherever they are in making a buying decision.
The 18 Essential Content Marketing Tools
Here are some of our favorite tools that really contribute to the content marketing process.
1. Ion
Ion is the first tool on our list because it is a great place for your strategies to start.
After all, this platform can repurpose your old content and turn it into exciting interactive content.
It’s clear that content marketing has become more competitive than ever. Just creating a FAQ isn’t enough for visitors anymore.
Instead, people are becoming more sophisticated in how they use the internet, and they expect content to engage them more.
We’re talking about interactive white papers, graphics, posts, emails, assessments, quizzes and much more.
To help your visitors notice and engage more with your content, Ion helps repurpose it with the best interactive content platform to create data-driven results.
2. BuzzSumo
Knowing what your competitors are doing is important. And BuzzSumo is a tool that can help you do just that.
You can discover and leverage the top-performing content in your industry for specific keywords, and look at your existing content to see why it’s successful or unsuccessful.
Buzzsumo gives you the ability to scrape the internet for content ideas that are already performing well.
You can use popular topics to drive your own customer traffic and filter searches for types of posts, geography, and domain name.
It makes researching proven content ideas quick and easy.
3. ShareThis
When visitors share your content, they are helping your content marketing strategy by referring their friends to our site.
ShareThis is a WordPress plugin that encourages that action with its high-quality social sharing buttons.
Having prominent sharing buttons on your site that stand out will get you more shares on social media.
Many social buttons are ugly and can detract from the amazing visuals that you have worked so hard on.
But with ShareThis, you can easily customize buttons for your audience and content.
4. Pexels
Finding high-quality images for your site can be difficult.
After all, many images on the internet are under copyright or have expensive licensing fees.
Pexels offers you amazing professional images that you can use for your content for free.
It also has an excellent search mechanism that helps you find the best picture for your material.
Along with keyword search, you can also search curated lists for images.
5. WordPress
Search Engine Journal reported that the most widely used CMS in the world, WordPress, powers 39.5% of all websites.
These include small independent blogs, and large in-depth sites like The New Yorker.
WordPress is a powerful tool used by companies and organizations of every size, and one that can grow along with your content marketing needs.
An open-source for hosting and building a website, WordPress allows you to host your own site or host it at WordPress.com.
Using templates and plug-in architecture, you can easily customize your website to meet your content needs.
If you stick around in the content marketing world long enough, you’ll notice trends come and go—sometimes overnight, or you blink and suddenly everyone has a podcast. But oddly, a tool like WordPress just keeps showing up at the center of everything. I’ve seen businesses overthink design, panic-call agencies, only to find their best move was to use a straightforward plugin and keep things legible and simple. Seems obvious in hindsight, but the temptation to overcomplicate is always there.
There’s also an uncomfortable truth that you can have all the fanciest tools and still struggle if your strategy is fuzzy. People talk about platforms and automation and heatmaps, but no amount of hacking will fix unclear messaging or if you honestly don’t know what your audience cares about. It’s worth taking a breath sometimes, stepping back, and just listening—because all these tools, bells and whistles aside, work best when you actually understand your people. Kind of basic advice, but easy to skip when everyone’s shouting about the next big feature.
12. Constant Contact
If you’re looking for content marketing tools that can help you engage your audience and drive sales, then Constant Contact may be for you.
Constant Contact is an easy-to-use marketing platform with hundreds of predesigned templates and drag-and-drop editing features.
Whether you’re looking to create a social media campaign or keep your audience engaged with an email newsletter, Constant Contact makes it easy. The platform also offers thousands of integrations for other tools like Canva, WordPress, Shopify, and more.
Constant Contact has plenty of different features to explore, allowing you to track your campaign’s success, generate targeting landing pages, and keep up with social media marketing all in one place.
13. Hootsuite
Sick of having to log in and out of dozens of different social media profiles each day just to keep them all updated? Hootsuite can make such worries a thing of the past.
As a social media management platform, Hootsuite will allow you to manage all of your social media accounts from one place.
Simply log on and upload the posts you want to share, then specify the accounts you’d like to post them to and when. That’s it.
The platform will then automatically generate each post at the specified time, whether it’s the next day or a month down the line. Hootsuite is one of those content marketing tools that’s worth its weight in gold simply because of all the time it ends up saving.
14. Vidyard
Never underestimate the power of video when it comes to connecting with audiences and sales reps alike.
Vidyard offers two distinct services that make it stand out. The first allows you to create personalized videos using your screen or webcam, which can then be sent over email or LinkedIn.
If you’ve ever tried to infuse an email with your warm personality and enthusiasm, then we don’t have to tell you how valuable such an option can be.
Vinyard also offers a full suite of content marketing tools that allow you to host, share, and optimize your own video content.
Upload video content to your library, share it to a variety of platforms and watch as Vinyard provides you valuable insights into its performance.
15. Trello
With remote employment rates increasing like never before, it’s essential to find a way to keep your team connected. That’s where Trello comes in.
Trello is a workplace collaboration board and product manager that allows you to connect with each member of your team, no matter where they may be.
With Trello, you can break huge projects down into smaller goals and assign tasks to specific team members. Keep tabs on how each phase of the project is doing as it moves from your digital “to-do” pile to the “doing” and “done” columns.
Trello also allows you to integrate other handy workplace connectivity tools such as Slack, DropBox, Google Drive, and more.
16. Mutiny HQ
Over the past few years, online ads have pretty much nailed the art of personalization. Nowadays, it seems that many of the ads that pop up on your screen know what you’re in the market for before you do.
Mutiny basically offers marketers the chance to do the same thing with their websites. The service offers personalized content marketing tools for both inbound and outbound marketers with the goal of upping your conversion rates.
Best of all, the whole thing is not nearly as complicated as it sounds. Mutiny’s AI-driven platform can identify your site’s viewers by industry, location, funnel stage, and more.
It can then personalize each viewer’s experience on your site, right down to creating 1:1 personalized pages. Not only does this make for an impressively warm welcome, but it can also automatically direct each viewer to the parts of your site that are the most relevant for them.
17. ClickFunnels
Want to turn more leads into conversions? Sure, you do and ClickFunnels may be able to help by turning your website into a sales funnel.
ClickFunnels uses a simple drag-and-drop webpage editor that shows you how to guide visitors through a step-by-step sales process. But the funnel fun doesn’t end there.
You can also use it to create membership funnels, auto-webinar funnels, or hang-out funnels.
ClickFunnels can also help cut down on lost sales by quickly pointing each reader in the direction of the one product or service that best suits their needs.
It even offers automated email and Facebook content marketing tools, as well as the ability to follow up with visitors even after they’ve left your page.
18. Ahrefs
Ever wonder why your competitors keep consistently outranking you? Ahrefs knows and is ready to clue you in on how to fix it.
Ahrefs basically allows you to spy on the competition without doing anything particularly spy-like. It works by analyzing your competitors’ content with the goal of figuring out what’s working for them.
By revealing your industry’s top performing content and key words, Ahrefs can go a long way toward figuring out what it takes to get your content to the top.
It will even allow you to monitor your progress against that of the competition with scheduled email reports. Whether you’re looking to generate top-performing ideas or optimize the content you already have, Ahrefs is ready to help.
Wrap Up: You will Drive Real Measurable Results with These Content Marketing Tools
Each of these valuable tools will give you bottom-line results that you can track and measure.
You’ll learn what your visitors are interested in and how to give them exciting content.
Whether you are a for-profit business or a non-profit organization, you’ll find that using these tools will take your content marketing to a whole new level.
And since we talked about a tool that can help you build amazing interactive experiences, why don’t you check our guide on this topic?
It’s free and it can take your content strategy to the next level!
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