45+ Best Content Marketing Tools That You Must Use
If the content is king, the content marketing tools are the kingmakers. Companies are increasingly relying on content marketing tools and strategies to boost their businesses going forward.
If you own a business, especially a small business, it can be very difficult to place your footing in the world of content marketing at first. The competition is very tough. Everyone wants to reach their customer base as much as they can. So if you don't make things right and plan a perfect content marketing strategy, your whole business may fail.
This is where content marketing tools can help you around.
In this article, I have picked some of the best content marketing tools - based on my years of experience, which you can use to optimize and perfect your content marketing strategies.
I have covered everything a content marketing strategy may need - from SEO to content management to photos and videos. So be sure to check out all the tools and benefit from those tools that your competitors may be using.
Table of Contents
Canva
Canva is much more than what you have heard of "just an online photo editor". It is a wholesome marketing suite. With it, you can plan things with your team (using their new whiteboard template) and create photos, animations, documents, infographics, brochures and videos by collaborating with your team in real-time. But that is not it.
You can now schedule your creations to be published on social media directly from the Canva editor.
Canva offers hundreds of templates to help you create customized images that fit your company's brand and image perfectly in minutes. With a simple drag-and-drop interface, you can add shapes, animated videos, stock photos, backgrounds, text, and more.
Canva is especially useful if your time and budget for graphic design are limited. It is loved by professional marketers worldwide due to its ease of use and huge library of assets.
I have an exclusive 45-day free trial for Canva if you are interested.
🔥Fire Note: If Canva doesn't fit your needs and budgets, you can try an alternative like FlexClip or WePik. Some of these may be cheaper or costlier than Canva, but overall they work the same.
SEMrush
With around 2 billion websites on the internet, it's no surprise that the internet is a heavily competitive landscape. It's hard to think about how to get your audience's attention when there are thousands of other brands out there trying to do the same.
But knowing about your competitors can help you strategize your content marketing plan, and in this SEMrush can help. SEMrush helps you understand how your competitors' websites work so well. With its array of tools, you get analytics and activity about your competitors' sites, offering information from their monthly website traffic to their best SEO keywords. You can even find referral pages and websites that help your competitor gain traffic.
SEMrush can also help you optimize your content for online exposure. This all-in-one SEO tool helps you track content ranking and keywords and offers other services like checking backlinks and analyzing competing websites.
SEMrush offers extra content marketing features to improve your PPC efforts, social media, and content creation. It can help you monitor competitors' ad copies and landing pages, find keywords for PPC campaigns, create and manage social media ads, manage social media campaigns, manage your editorial plan for your web content, and much more.
SEMrush is available for a 7-day trial, which you can redeem on account creation.
🔥Fire Note: One of the best alternatives to SEMrush is Ahrefs.
While Ahrefs doesn't offer content marketing features, you can use it for backlink analysis, link building and keyword research. It also offers other features such as a site audit to optimize your website, competitor analysis and a rank tracker to rank your website's ranking progress on search engines.
If your needs are solely to find keyword ideas to market upon, StoryBase is another great choice. StoryBase helps you find what your audience is searching for.
ActiveCampaign
Email marketing is one of the best ways to reach out to your audience directly and ensure they engage with your content via newsletters, blog digests and personalized content recommendations. That's why it's important to ensure your email marketing efforts are aligned with your content strategy.
As the gold standard for email marketing software, ActiveCampaign can help you maximize the power of your email marketing campaigns.
ActiveCampaign offers all-in-one marketing services and not just sending newsletters. It has features like drag-and-drop email templates, a huge integration library, and extensive analytics and reporting capabilities, giving you great insight into how your audience engages with your content via email. With ActiveCampaign, you can also sell your products online.
🔥Fire Note: If ActiveCampaign doesn't work well for you, you can see other email marketing tools here.
Videvo
Videvo is a library of HD stock videos, stock music, sound effects and video templates, offering various topics and themes. If you don't want to hire a videographer or buy a camera, Videvo is a great alternative to make videos quickly and easily – and put videos at the center of your content strategy.
Canva has some videos too, but the library of Videvo is better.
🔥Fire Note: If you have different budgets and requirements, you can also try Shutterstock videos, iStock, Alamy and WeVideo.
Envato Elements
If you need more than just photos and videos, say a bundle of creative assets like photos, videos, illustrations, audio files, templates, themes, plugins, mobile apps and way more than that, then you should look no further than Envato Elements.
"Elements" has everything a business or content marketer needs to visually power a content marketing campaign. And the best part is that there are flat monthly and yearly prices, no matter what your needs are.
BuzzSumo
Termed as the world's #1 content marketing platform, BuzzSumo should be listed in the first position in this article as well if I went per reputation instead of reader needs.
BuzzSumo is an online content marketing tool that offers content insights to generate ideas, create high-performing content, monitor your performance and identify influencers. Just by searching for a keyword or competition URL, you get to see which articles are performing well and which ones you can choose to compete with.
🔥Fire Note: BuzzSumo also has this content ideas generator which I loved. You can use this to find dozens of blog post ideas. Learn here how you can do that.
If you are interested, you can subscribe to BuzzSumo for a free 30 days trial.
HubSpot
HubSpot's Marketing Hub helps you organize your efforts on blogging, social media, ads, landing pages and more, aiming to help you attract a wider audience and maximize your conversion rates.
In addition, HubSpot's CMS Hub helps you manage your website content. It's built with both web developers and marketers in mind to streamline the creation, maintenance and optimization of your website.
Swipe-Worthy / SwipeFile.com
Both Swipe-Worthy & SwipeFile offer a collection of top Swipe files curated by the best of the content marketers and copywriting professionals that you may reuse in your content marketing strategies.
Swipe-Worthy is the better option of the two and has a collection of the top swipe files from the 80s to now. SwipeFile is brilliant as well and features the best of current landing pages, sorted by different tags.
Trello
Trello helps businesses organize and manage projects easily and transparently, increasing collaboration between team members.
You can get set up with Trello in minutes, organizing your tasks in different lists and adding due dates, assigned people and labels. You can use it to plan your content marketing campaigns and share them with your team to take collaboration even further.
Trello is free forever to use, and their premium plans can be signed up for a free 30-day trial.
🔥Fire Note: Other alternatives to Trello include Clickup, Productboard, Asana & Basecamp.
Google Analytics
Once your content marketing plans are in action, you need to understand how it works. Analytics tools like Google Analytics can help in this. It can help you keep track of data such as conversion rates, website visitors, clicks and SEO performance of your website.
Google Analytics provides valuable data about how visitors interact with your websites, such as traffic, session duration, bounce rate, conversions, and more. By keeping an eye on your data, you'll be on the right track to adjust and pivot your content marketing strategy to ensure it works.
🔥Fire Note: If Google Analytics isn't of your flavor and too complex to get through, you can try other Google Analytics alternatives like Microsoft Clarity, Fathom Analytics, Hotjar, and Cloudflare Analytics on your website.
PathFactory
You can use PathFactory if you are focusing on B2B marketing in your content marketing plan.
PathFactory is a content intelligence platform that uses artificial intelligence to provide content-related insights and helps you deliver customized content to your customers.
I love how it can help you deliver personalized content for each customer and help managers identify which channels and content have the best performance.
Sapling.ai
Written content plays a big role in your content marketing strategy. So it is important to make sure it's correct and well-written. Bad writing and bad grammar can reflect badly on your brand.
Sapling is made exclusively for content marketers in general and businesses for being specific. You can ask your content writers to check their grammar, spelling, vocabulary, punctuation mistakes and more. It not only helps with the writing process but also cuts down on manual editing and proofreading time.
Markup Hero
Markup Hero is a screenshot and annotation tool sporting all important features to boost productivity and collaboration.
It allows you to take desktop, application or selected area screenshots using free apps & extensions for Mac, Windows, Linux and Chrome. You can capture webpages using the scrolling screenshot feature to provide comprehensive feedback on full page designs.
Markup Hero also allows you to upload and share images, websites, PDFs, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Slides. You can add and edit annotations at any time using text, arrows, highlighters, icons and more from any device with a web browser.
This is not it, Markup Hero also allows you to collaborate with anyone by allowing them to add their own annotations to your shared markup. You can quickly sign PDFs, permanently blur sensitive information and crop files to the perfect size using Markup Hero’s advanced toolset.
You can instantly share your markups in email, Slack, SMS, social media and anywhere else you communicate using built-in share-links with thumbnail previews.
Markup Hero is free to begin with and the premium plans cost just $4 per month.
Buffer
Buffer is a social media scheduling tool that automates the posting process on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. You can create time slots to post on each platform daily and create a queue that allows you to schedule posts for months in advance.
You can also create campaigns across all platforms, follow their performance, and check important data from individual posts, such as click-through rates, views and reach. Keeping an eye on this data will help you fine-tune your social media strategy to have the widest possible reach. You can signup for Buffer here.
🔥Fire Note: Other alternatives to Buffer include SocialPilot, ContentStudio and HootSuite.
Clearscope
Clearscope is a content optimization platform that helps you write clear and targeted copies. You can use it to create highly relevant content for your audience, combining advanced SEO practices with readability and relevancy.
Bonus Content Marketing Tools
u003cLoop type=tool taxonomy=tool_type terms=content-marketing count=-1 orderby=name order=DESCu003en u003cdiv class=u0022mt-single mb-singleu0022u003en u003ch3 class=u0022med-titleu0022 id=u0022{Field slug}u0022u003eu003cField titleu003eu003c/Fieldu003eu003c/h3u003en u003cimg src=u0022{Field image_url size=md-banner-retina}u0022 alt=u0022{Field image_alt}u0022 width=u00221200u0022 class=u0022mb-singleu0022u003eu003cbru003en u003cField excerpt auto=falseu003eu003c/Fieldu003eu003cbru003en u003ca href=u0022{Field url}u0022 class=u0022mt-singleu0022 rel=u0022nofollow sponsoredu0022u003eLearn more about u003cField titleu003eu003c/Fieldu003e → u003c/au003en u003c/divu003en u003c/Loopu003eHere are some other content marketing tools that you can try based on your needs as they may arrive:
- Pixabay, Pexels and Unsplash - for free photos and videos available for commercial use.
- Sendfox for your email marketing campaigns if your budget is tight. Available only for a $49 one-time.
- CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer can help you write awesome headlines.
- SimilarWeb can give you insights into your competitor's traffic.
- AddToAny, ShareThis, Shareaholic and uSocial to add social sharing and follow icons to your website and landing pages.
- Exploding Topics can help you find the trending topics around which you can plan your content marketing strategies.
- Here are some AI content writing tools that can help you in the way.
So, this is for now. I wanted to add just 10 of my favorite content marketing tools here, but the list has grown to be large, and this article now has a total of 45 content marketing tools listed. (Plenty is good, right?)
Be sure to check out these tools while you are planning or running your content marketing strategies and I am sure that these tools will help you around.