15 Content Marketing Tools You Can’t Live Without

Up to 88% of B2B marketers use content marketing as part of their marketing strategy.

Are you part of that 88%?

If you are, you probably know all the benefits.

If you are not, it is only a matter of time. You have probably already realized its importance and plan to make changes to include it in your overall marketing strategy as soon as possible.

But how do you get started if you’ve never done it before?

And how can you do it correctly and well?

The good news is that there are countless marketing tools at your disposal to make things easier and more successful for you.

So, whether you’re just starting to use content marketing or are using it for a while, these 15 tools will help you make the most of your time and energy.

1. Analyze topics and find influencers with BuzzSumo

Do you know what type of content is trending in your industry?

Do you know what your competition is writing about and how they promote it?

BuzzSumo is perfect for leveling the playing field, revealing the topics you should write about, and helping you find influencers in your industry to promote your content for you.

Get information about the content by discovering which content is shared the most on all social networks and running analytics reports.

Find influencers who are industry leaders in any area, review the content they have been sharing, and plan to promote with influencers from there.

You can receive content alerts to be the first to see content that mentions your keyword.

You can also get alerts when a competitor posts new content, so you never miss anything.

With competitor analysis, you can track how your competitor’s content performs and compare their results with your own performance.

When you search for any keywords, you will be shown a list of the highest-performing content.

And that makes this tool perfect for editorial planning and scheduling. Use it even before you start creating a blog post.

Then, from the following tool organize your findings.

2. Capture, organize, and share notes with Evernote

Would you like a better way to stay organized or brainstorm for future content?

Do you need a place to put your ideas where your entire team can access them and collaborate with each other?

To meet these needs, use Evernote. It is available on all devices and is an excellent place to store all the information you found in your research with the first resource, BuzzSumo.

If you save something in Evernote, you can access it at any time from your work computer or smartphone.

Share your notes in a place where you can always access them.

Crop web images, web pages, and PDF files.

Access your notebooks while offline, search for previously captured texts or images, add annotations to pictures, sync notes between devices, and more.

Evernote is an essential tool for your content marketing organization.

Now that you have a game plan in place, you will increase your online presence.

3. Measure your influence online with Kred

There is more work to be done than just producing the content and waiting for people to read it when it comes to content marketing.

You have to find and connect with influencers who can amplify your message on social media.

The platform measures your influence by analyzing Facebook and Twitter activity, so you can get closer to influencers who will impact your business the most.

And different from other influencers tools, this one allows you to create your own “influencer” status, to strengthen your online presence.

Once your presence gets a boost, so will your content.

Kred is the perfect resource for building credibility and trust. When people know who you are, they will be more willing to click on your content and interact with it.

But building your brand is teamwork. This brings us to Trello,
where you can manage a content marketing team effortlessly.

4. Collaborate with team members through Trello

Most companies approach content marketing with a dedicated team.

Trello takes teamwork to the next level with boards, lists, and cards.

This is an excellent organizational and productivity resource for scheduling content creation, publishing, and distribution.

You can leave messages for other team members and share content with each other, all in one place, so there are no doubts about your content marketing game plan.

There are many collaboration tools, but Trello is one of the best.

The layout makes it easy to get started and stays focused, so planning should be easy.

Next, we’ll talk about funnels and why they matter for content marketing.

5. Create funnels with ClickFunnels

Regardless of whether your company focuses on people online or not, you should create a sales funnel if you are present on the Internet.

A sales funnel shows the journey that takes visitors to become leads.

Leads turn into sales, and funnels can be used to increase the average value of your company’s orders.

You could spend hours creating a funnel from scratch, but since this article is about time-saving tools, you may want to use ClickFunnels.

ClickFunnels is great because of its easy drag-and-drop platform. You can create a sales funnel that converts in just a few minutes.

And templates make this process even faster. The best part? The templates are designed by the site based on what has actually worked in the past for other companies.

Features include, but are not limited to:

• Sales funnels
• Membership funnels
• Automatic webinar funnels
• Hangout funnels
• Email integrations
• A / B testing

And it gives you the best cost-benefit compared to other marketing automation tools.

Now your funnels are done, how do you know when your audience is paying attention to you? Discover with Tweriod.

6. Tweet when others are listening, thanks to Tweriod

If you use Twitter to promote content, which you should do, it is essential to share it when your audience is online and paying attention to you.

Thanks to Tweriod, you can find out when the best time to send tweets is.

You can also track when you get the most mentions and responses.

A graphical report will show you the best days and times to reach your audience on Twitter.

The free tool will analyze up to 1,000 of your followers.

Once you figure out the best time to post, you can make sure to do it during peak engagement hours so that more people click on your content.

That’s precisely why you’re promoting your content on Twitter in the first place, right?

Now that you know when to post, you may need some good images to share on Twitter. Here is a place to look.

7. Design beautiful images with Canva

When you share your most recent blog post, you want to make sure you have some high-quality images to go with it, so people really click.

But Photoshop isn’t always a fun (or cheap) way to do it. And it can take you forever to design something with this professional software.

Fortunately, Photoshop is not the only tool out there.

Enter Canva.

Canva has default templates and layouts, so it doesn’t take long to create something your readers will love.

Select different designs made for the platforms you want to publish them on.

For example, the template for a social media banner is sized to be a banner, while the template for an Instagram post is explicitly sized for Instagram.

You can drag and drop items onto the tool, and there are many options to choose from.

It’s a wonder they are all free.

At the very least, you can use Canva to create eye-catching images to post to your social media accounts and gain more exposure online.

But it is also perfect for creating images to add to all your content.

Once you’ve drawn people’s attention to your content with your images, you need to improve the functionality of your website.

8. Master the buyer’s journey with Uberflip

Uberflip is all about improving your website’s “content experience” and boosting your performance to dominate the buyer’s journey.

It’s basically a collection of valuable tools for content marketing, lead generation, account-based marketing, and sales enablement.

Use Uberflip to manage blogs, videos, e-books, and more, all from one central location, so your workflows are in one place.

In addition to these functions, Uberflip allows you to create content centers or sales flows so that “your visitor’s interaction with your brand is consistent and uninterrupted.”

Uberflip is the best tool to generate hype for your content and provide customers with a perfect experience with it.

But you should also be aware of your competitors.

9. SEMRush: An All-in-One Marketing Toolkit

SEMRush offers you a world of information on everything related to search engine marketing.

What keywords are your competitors betting on? How are your search engine ads?

Use SEMRush to find out.

With this tool, you can quickly see your competitors’ keywords to earn organic rankings. You can also see which keywords are ranking your business organically.

Just enter a URL into SEMRush, and you’ll get a lot of information about keywords that you may never have thought existed.

This is a valuable resource because you can discover keywords that your competitors may not yet know about.

And you can find out if you are already in a high position because of a keyword you have never imagined.

You can bring that already high ranking to the first page with a bit of work.

The tool also has several other functions. For example, you can check your competitors’ backlinks – or yours.

Try it for free, and you will see the value in minutes.

In the meantime, you can work on your email marketing strategy to deliver the content that you are improving based on your competitor’s keywords.

10. Email marketing on MailChimp

Email marketing is still the head of content marketing.

Emails should be part of your online marketing strategy, and the perfect solution for that is MailChimp.

With MailChimp, you can access your dashboard from mobile devices and computers.

What’s even more incredible is that it is free (up to a certain number of emails sent and the number of subscribers).

There are countless features, but the most notable allow you to create an email list of genuinely engaged subscribers with your content. Also, you can track them.

You can also monitor metrics like average open and click rates, as well as your average email subscription and cancellation rates.

Now, what if you want to send emails automatically? Take a look at GetResponse.

11. Send emails and events with GetResponse

As we just talked about, email marketing gives you the highest ROI of any channel.

Emails are also the key to customer retention. It is much more expensive to get a new customer than keep an existing customer, but many companies overlook this.

GetResponse has been making breakthroughs in the last year that put them ahead of other email software providers.

How? They offer more than just email tools.

GetResponse uses automation to trigger events or emails based on the actions taken by a recipient or a specific time that has passed.

This is extremely valuable because these functions are available for a reasonable price with GetResponse.

MailChimp also offers marketing automation, so other email services join GetResponse’s plans and features.

But GetResponse plans to take things one step further.

They will soon provide the CRM (customer relationship management) function, so you can monitor your relationship with your customers in the same place where you send the emails.

This is one of the best email marketing tools because it does many things.

You can also automate events and use CRM functionality, which will boost your brand in general.

And an empowered brand means empowered content.

But, another way to boost your content is with the use of share buttons on social networks.

12. Buttons to share on social networks with MashShare

You probably already know that social share buttons were a must in 2017.

MashShare lets you add eye-catching share buttons that readers won’t be able to ignore.

This plugin attracted attention because its buttons are similar to those of Mashable.com.

The idea is to get more people to share your posts because the buttons will provoke them.

So those readers’ friends will see the post and read your content (and hopefully share it, too).

The free version offers limited features, but you can purchase add-ons to expand your options.

MashShare is used by over 70,000 websites and has excellent reviews on the WordPress plugin site.

Plugins for MashShare include a “Select and Share” feature that displays share buttons when users highlight text on your site.

There is also a “Click to Tweet” widget that you can add.

Features include:

• Most shared posts widget
• Eye-catching stock counting animations
• Open Graph support
• Twitter card support
• Option to hide the share count less than a certain number
• Supports short URLs through Bitly
• A mobile-friendly feature is available as an add-on
• Supports only Twitter and Facebook (additional networks are available through plugins)

Boosting social actions is excellent, but organic rankings are the main thing. Here’s how you can “spy” on competitors to determine how and why they rank so high.

13. Outsmart competitors with Ahrefs

The Ahrefs home page explains what it’s all about:

Ahrefs helps you determine why your competitors rank so highly and what you need to do to outperform them.

Ahrefs allows you to keep an eye on your competitors while tracking your own progress.

Track mobile ranking, refresh rate, website placements, keywords, and more.

It is perfect for researching before writing content.

Plan it for great results based on what works for your competition.

Then, after creating content and promoting it, use it to measure how it performed.

Did you gain backlinks? How often was it shared on social media?

You will know that the information is up to date because Ahrefs crawls five billion web pages every day.

Now, if you need a way to empower social media by automating posts, give HootSuite a try.

14. Manage social networks thanks to HootSuite

Creating content and sharing it on various social platforms is impressive for your business. But it also takes a long time.

That’s why millions of people use HootSuite to manage social media posts in advance and based on their peak engagement hours.

With this tool, you can schedule your best content for the best time without manually sharing it at those times.

And you can connect HootSuite to more than 35 social media platforms, including Pinterest.

Post, schedule, check your social media calendar, and view your recent posts from your dashboard, so you never miss a beat when sharing content online.

Obviously, you do not want any spelling errors in your posts on social networks (or on your blog). The following resource offers a built-in spell checker that solves this problem for you.

15. Correct spelling and grammar with Grammarly

Users will not trust you (or interact with your content) if they find spelling and grammar errors, no matter how much you promote what you write.

And common spell checkers can’t always analyze your writing for grammatical errors or take context into account.

This is why you need Grammarly.

You won’t be able to catch all the typos you might make, but Grammarly is great at proofreading your content before you publish it.

He detects grammar mistakes like misplaced modifiers, word usage, overused words, and more.

And you can install Grammarly for Chrome to edit your writing from whatever window or tab you are in, without having to go out and go to the Grammarly site to copy and paste it.

conclusion

Most B2B marketers are using content marketing within their marketing strategy.

You probably are too.

If you’re not, you probably plan to start soon.

These 15 content marketing tools are the easiest ways to get the most out of your content without spending a lot of time and energy.

Just pick the ones you want to try and see which one gives the best results.

Each of these tools has to do with content marketing in one way or another.

Do you need a place to store and share editorial schedules? Try Evernote. Do you want to automate the growth of your website? Take a look at Uberflip. Do you need to design images? Create an account on Canva.

Whether you’re just starting out in the world of content marketing or you’re a professional, these resources are essential to taking your content engagement rates to the next level.

What content marketing tools are you most successful with?