The best content marketing tools can maximize your strategy’s effectiveness. Discover the top tools to streamline content creation and distribution and help track performance.
Content marketing’s ultimate goal is to drive more profitable customer actions. This is achieved by following the best content marketing practices. The practices include consistently creating and distributing high-quality, relevant, and valuable content.
The content attracts a clearly defined audience, keeps them engaged, builds brand awareness, and tips them in your business’s favor.
Consistent, high-quality content creation, let alone its distribution, is challenging. You need a strategic approach, which many digital marketers actualize by leveraging various content marketing tools. Content marketing tools help with aspects including:
- Content creation, including brainstorming ideas, writing, and editing
- Distribution, including promoting your content across social media platforms, email, and other channels
- Content analysis that helps track content performance and its impact on your marketing strategies
Content marketing tools are invaluable because they help improve your content marketing strategies’ effectiveness and efficiency. Nonetheless, they aren’t all made equal. Business owners must establish the pain points they want to address, examine their budgets, and weigh the tools to pick the best match.
Herein, we’ll look at 35 content marketing tools you should try.
1. Semrush
Semrush provides rich features, including:
- Backlink analysis
- Keyword research
- On-page SEO analysis
- Competitive analysis
- PPC campaigns analysis
- Technical SEO analysis, to name a few
It’s a robust all-in-one tool suite used by millions of marketers globally. Semrush can help improve your search engine ranking by tracking your competitors and establishing the gaps and issues affecting your SEO quests.
The contributions help optimize your content marketing strategies, rank better, and outrank the competitors. Semrush enables you to gain more organic traffic, translating to more qualified leads and better conversion rates. The downside is that unlocking all its features can be expensive.
2. Ahrefs
Ahrefs’ main tools are:
- Site audit, which analyses your site to uncover technical SEO issues
- A rank tracker that helps you keep tabs on specific keywords and their rank over time
- Content explorer that helps you gain content ideas and linking opportunities
- Site explorer that researches your competitors, including checking their organic traffic sources, backlinks, and other SEO metrics
- Keywords explorer that provides insightful keywords that you can target in your industry
The tools are designed to help your site rank higher. The rank enhances visibility and drives more organic traffic to your website. You can use the free webmaster tools limited to site exploration and audit. The premium version provides full access and more perks.
3. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is mainly a keyword research tool. It helps you find high-volume and low-competition keywords you can use to improve your ranking. You can also use the tool for topic ideation. Ubersuggest also provides competitor analysis to establish their ranking for given keywords.
Ubersuggest’s Keyword research helps identify gaps you need to bridge to improve ranking. You can also use the website auditing feature to check for concerns like poor title tags, duplicate content, and broken links that could affect your search engine ranking.
Ubbersuggest is described as a free content marketing tool. It is a great tool, especially for beginners looking to improve their SEO without breaking the bank. Nonetheless, the free version is limited, meaning you need a paid plan to get the most out of Ubersuggest.
4. Raven Tools
Raven Tools helps you optimize your content to improve organic site traffic. It provides SEO and analytic tools for:
- Competition research
- Backlinks analysis
- SERP analysis
- Keyword research, and
- SEO performance data
Raven Tools is easy to use and valuable, but it is a paid tool.
5. Surfer SEO
Creating and optimizing your content to rank higher takes work. Surfer SEO provides a content intelligence platform that lets you manage this task. The tool leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to analyze web signals. These signals include content length, keyword difficulty, and keyword density. The key features Surfer SEO offers are:
- Content analysis
- Keyword research
- Content editor, and
- Content planner
Surfer SEO is a powerful tool that can save you time and help improve content quality. The main limitation is that it is paid agency and a bit complex. You’ll need some time to learn the ropes and provide the tool with valuable data to generate high-quality content.
6. Frase.io
Creating relevant content is more manageable with Frase.io, a writing assistant at its core. The writing assistant helps in:
- Researching topics by analyzing top search results for a particular keyword. This provides you with issues, subtopics, and supporting content ideas.
- Generating content outlines with headings, subheadings, and bullet points saves content creators more time.
- Leveraging AI to write content based on the information from the top search results, providing more new content ideas
Frase.io also enriches your SERP data, provides content scoring that helps identify improvement areas, and facilitates collaboration for streamlined content creation processes. The main downside is that Frase.io is a paid tool, and it may take some time to get used to its complexities.
7. Yoast
Yoast is among the most popular WordPress plugins, but it isn’t limited to the platform. Yoast provides various tools to help optimize your site for search engines, with the most notable including:
- SEO writing tools like content editor, keyword checker, and readability analyzer for better content
- SEO analysis that provides insights like suitable keyword suggestions, meta descriptions, and title tags optimization, and creating structured data for better user experience and engagement
- Technical SEO help in areas like setting up a sitemap
Yoast is mainly a free content marketing tool. You can also use the premium version to access additional features like SEO training, advanced analysis, and support.
8. BuzzSumo
Content marketing requires you to stay on your toes. You need to know the trending topics to ensure you deliver relevant pieces of your content. This can be a tiresome task, which BuzzSumo simplifies. The tool provides insights into:
- Trending topics
- Most shared content on social media channels
- Influencers in your line of business, and
- Performance tracking, including when competitors upload a post or new content mentioning your keywords
The main drawback is that BuzzSumo is a paid tool, which can be pricey for some businesses.
9. Quora
Quora may not be at the top of most marketers’ minds when considering content marketing tools. Nonetheless, the social question-and-answer website provides resourceful data that you can use to improve your marketing strategies.
Quora tells you what your target audiences are asking. This lets you create pieces of content relevant to the top queries. Fulfilling informational intent helps you build credibility and authority, ranking factors that improve your ranking and visibility. This translates to enhanced content marketing performance as you gain more organic traffic and generate qualified leads.
10. Google Docs
Content marketing can only progress with content. You need to create and edit content and even collaborate with others in your team. Google Docs is a free web-based word processor that facilitates this.
Google Docs is the “kitchen” where you can combine all the ingredients and “cook “the content. Google Docs features include:
- Collaborative editing that allows multiple users to work on the same document simultaneously
- Real-time commenting
- Offline editing
- Version history, where you can access the previous version of your content
- Google Drive integration – allows you to store documents online and access them anywhere
11. Loom
Videos are a must-have in modern content marketing strategies. Loom provides a great tool to create, edit, and share videos. This includes recording your screen, which is invaluable in content marketing quests like making presentations and tutorial videos.
Loom is a free tool valuable for more than your content marketing needs.
12. GIMP
Besides video content, quality images are valuable to your content marketing strategies. Images spice up blocks of text, making them more engaging. GIMP is an image manipulation program that could be all you need to kick your marketing quests higher. GIMP helps you:
- Edit and manipulate images
- Manage free-form drawing and
- Transcode between varying image file formats
You can manage all your photo editing needs with GIMP, like adjusting color balance or removing imperfections. You can combine multiple images and create a vector, web, and 3D graphics. The best part is that GIMP is a free, open-source, cross-platform tool.
13. Issuu
Your static content doesn’t have to be boring, not when you can spice it up with Issuu. Visual content is more captivating than blocks of text. Issuu transforms static content with unique background colors, and you can even add logos, among other features that help improve your brand awareness quests.
You can easily create a visually appealing portfolio and turn PDFS, among other file formats, into flipbooks. Issuu is especially significant when looking to make your social media posts more attractive and sharable, including in forms like GIFs.
Issuu offers free and premium options, providing the flexibility you need for your content strategy.
14. Visually
Infographics are excellent marketing resources. They help you explain complex concepts in the simplest way possible. Combining text, images, charts, graphs, or diagrams is challenging. This is why digital marketers turn to Visually.
Visually helps bring content to life, whether you want to make eBooks, videos, photography, social media content, or reports and presentations.
Visually also provides a collaboration platform, allowing you to work with your team efficiently. The only hiccup is that Visually is a paid tool, meaning you must weigh if it aligns with your budget.
15. Canva
Canva is a graphic design platform with extensive templates, images, and fonts. The extensive library and its ease of use, even for beginners, allows you to spice up your content marketing by quickly creating:
- Social media graphics
- Presentations
- Posters and flyers, and
- Videos
Canva is a free platform, but you can choose the paid pro plan to access more features.
16. Inspectlet
Content marketing is an ongoing process. Your content could improve even when you’ve nailed search engine optimization. You can identify content gaps only by looking at performance metrics, which Inspectlet powers.
Inspectlet provides content analytics and performance insights. It also offers rich user behavior, including on-site time and engagement. This helps you better understand the traffic and improve your content marketing strategy.
Inpectlet is a paid content marketing tool, but you can use the demo to determine if it is the right fit for your business.
17. MailChimp
Email marketing is undoubtedly significant in your content marketing campaigns. MailChimp helps you enhance email marketing campaigns through features like:
- Email automation
- List management
- Designing and creating personalized emails
- Analytics and Reporting
- A/B testing
MailChip easily integrates with other marketing tools and is easy to use. Nonetheless, it can be expensive, especially for larger businesses.
18. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is a content marketing tool that helps you:
- Send emails
- Manage email contacts
- Track email marketing results, including open rates and engagements
- Manage SMS marketing, and
- Create social media campaigns
You can leverage the tool’s free listing to grow your user base, but you must pay to unlock additional features.
19. GetResponse
GetResponse’s platform helps marketers build and track their email marketing campaigns. It offers features including:
- Email list management
- Automated email replies
- Email newsletter builder
- Webinars and landing pages
- SMS marketing
- Web push notifications, and
- Results tracking tools
You’ll easily personalize your content marketing campaign with GetResponse for better performance. The tool provides both free and paid plans.
20. Leadfwd
Leadfwd uses AI-driven tech to help marketers capture and analyze website visitors’ data. You’ll gain real-time data about the content a visitor engages with, which makes it easier to personalize your lead generation campaigns.
Leadfwd provides B2B email marketing features that help streamline your lead follow-up strategies, including cold outreach via email, SMS, voice, and LinkedIn. The primary drawback is that Leadfwd only captures some of the visitor’s information and is a paid tool.
21. Hootsuite
Social media channels let you tap into active traffic. Nonetheless, managing social media activities can be overwhelming. Hootsuite makes the process easier with tools including:
- Social media posts scheduling and publishing
- Monitoring, including tracking brand mentions
- Detailed social media performance reports
Hootsuite also facilitates collaborations across your social media marketing team, streamlining the process. Hootsuite is a paid tool, but you can test it with a free trial.
22. MashShare
Successful social media marketing significantly relies on how you distribute your content. This is where Mashshare comes in, allowing you to manage:
- Share content across various social media channels
- Improve your targeting measures, such as to particular audiences or directing the users to specific posts/pages
- Customize share buttons for a fresh look and feel that matches your site’s branding
- Analytics detailing how the share buttons are performing and the traffic that’s driven to your site
The Mashshare WordPress plugin is free, but you can opt for paid plans for your content marketing needs.
23. Kred
How influential is your brand’s online presence? Who are the leading influencers in your business line you can partner with for link building and more exposure? Kred lets you identify such aspects. It measures your influence by considering factors like:
- Number of followers
- Quality and quantity of user engagements like shares, likes, comments, and mentions
- User’s content quality and engagement with their audience
Kred is more than a social scoring tool. You can also use the link.kred to create a custom link featuring your photo, bio, and social media channels link in one place. It is an inventive way to share your links on channels like Instagram, where you can only share a few links.
Kred provides an extensive free plan and premium plus and business options.
24. Basecamp
A significant part of effective content marketing is project management. This is more so when working as a team. You need to assign projects, organize people, and track their progress.
Basecamp provides the features you need to manage a team regardless of their location. This means you can easily work with remote employees and freelancers and stay on track. Basecamp also eases your document management with a drag-and-drop feature to store them.
Basecamp is a paid project management tool, but you can use the free trial to see if it fits your business.
25. Trello
Collaboration is at the heart of successful content marketing. Trello helps kick planning and collaboration a notch higher. The tool features intuitive boards that make collaboration fun.
You’ll quickly use the boards to create lists, categorize tasks, and track progress. This helps you organize your team and files in one place, enhancing efficiency. Trello also easily integrates with most apps in your ecosystem.
Trello offers free, standard, premium, and enterprise plans, providing the flexibility to find an option that best meets your needs.
26. Evernote
Content creation is a process. You can find great ideas, resourceful links, and fantastic web images, among other materials. They can’t be as helpful if you don’t note or store them somewhere since you can easily forget.
Evernote works across mobile devices and PCs, helping you capture, store, and organize such materials. You can sync notes across your devices and access them wherever you go. Evernote offers free, personal, and professional plans.
27. MindNode
Creating inspiring content takes time and the right strategy, from brainstorming ideas to adding context. MindNode helps you develop a clear mind map for practical creativity and content development. You can use the tool to:
- Brainstorm ideas
- Categorize and prioritize ideas
- Create mindmaps
- Avoid distractions with the Focus mode feature, and
- Track your content creation progress
The visual brainstorming, organization, and inspiration you get from MindNode help you create and track content. You’ll easily connect the dots and develop content that offers value to your audience.
MindNode basic features are free. You can also upgrade to MindNode Plus for additional features.
28. WordStream
How well are your Google and Facebook ads doing? Even if you are paying for the ads, they’ll still need to deliver better ROI. It would help if you optimized the ads with relevant keywords, titles, and images, among other aspects.
Wordstream provides advertising tools to evaluate performance, establish where to improve, and access recommendations to help improve engagement and ad effectiveness.
Wordstream helps optimize your PPC and SEO campaigns, ensuring you realize the value of what you pay for, not simply placing the ads. The tool offers free reports, but you pay a custom price to access more features.
29. ClickFunnels
Is your sales funnel solid? Content marketing helps you seal the gaps that could see the sales funnels leaking more leads. Creating marketing and sales funnels from scratch can be complex, which you can ease with ClickFunnels.
ClickFunnels provides extensive templates and prebuilt sales funnels. This helps you to fast-track the process and optimize your funnels for better user journeys, lead generation, and improved conversion rates.
ClickFunnels is a paid tool, but it offers a free trial.
30. HubSpot
How would you like to consolidate all your content marketing tools? HubSpot lets you centralize your content marketing and management, sales, and customer service. The consolidation helps you realize benefits, including:
- Better customer service
- Improved customer data visibility
- Streamlined content marketing processes
- Enhanced lead generation and conversion rates
HubSpot offers diverse features, including marketing, sales, CRM, CMS, service, and operations hub. The marketing hub is the most relevant to your content marketing strategies. The hub offers the resources to create and optimize content for a target audience.
HubSpot offers free and premium plans.
31. Salesforce
Salesforce is a CRM software that helps you tailor a more personalized and better experience for each customer. The primary features that can transform your content marketing strategies include:
- Contact management
- Leads and opportunity management
- Customer service
- Sales forecasting
- Marketing automation, and
- Analytics, to name a few
Salesforce leverages data, AI, and CRM to help you better engage your target audience. It is a paid tool with a free trial to help you test the waters.
32. Google Analytics
Tracking your content marketing campaign performance is critical. Google Analytics is a famous tool business owners and marketers must pay attention to. The freemium tool offers valuable features, including:
- Visitor analysis including the number, operating system and browser used, and their location
- Pages visited and the time spent by visitors engaging with a particular page
- Traffic sources such as organic/paid search or social media
- Visitor action considering your goals, such as tip them to sign up for an email list or make a purchase
Such analytics helps you make informed decisions to improve content gaps and other issues affecting your marketing campaigns.
33. Moz
Moz is synonymous with the free domain authority checker. This tells you your domain rating. The rating shows how authoritative your site is, and it is an important search engine ranking factor.
Besides the domain authority checker, Moz provides more SEO tools to help improve your marketing campaigns. They include:
- Site audits
- Keyword research
- Backlinks analysis
- Rank tracking
You can use Moz’s free tools or purchase the pro plan for more features.
34. Hemingway editor
You’re knowledgeable in your field, but this can get in your way of creating helpful content. Your audience may need to be more knowledgeable, hence the need to write concise and explicit content. This is where the Hemingway editor comes in, helping you identify concerns like:
- Complex sentences
- Passive voice
- Difficult words
- Adverbs, and
- Readability score
Easy-to-read content provides a better user experience, improving content marketing’s effectiveness. Hemingway editor helps you craft such content, and it is free. You can also opt for the paid version for additional perks like formatting and publishing features.
35. Grammarly
You can’t establish authority and credibility if your content is plagiarized or full of grammatical issues. Grammarly helps you write mistake-free and clear content. The tools help with aspects including:
- Plagiarism detection
- Grammar checks
- Tone detection for better delivery and engagement
- Sentence structure analysis for improved clarity and conciseness
- Word choice suggestions
- Contextual grammar checking
Grammarly offers a free online version, a premium desktop app, and a subscription plan.
Leveraging the top tools, as highlighted above, can help fast-track your content marketing progress. Nonetheless, success hinges on the quality of content created and how it is distributed to ensure the target audience is reached and engaged.
Content marketing wins on many fronts considering its measurable, scalable, and cost-effective nature. Such benefits are only realized if you employ high-quality, unique, relevant content. The content helps fulfill your target audience’s intent, which prompts them to keep visiting your site and eventually convert into active customers.
Besides the innovative tools, you can leverage professional services to help create top-notch content. ContentGo provides high-quality pieces of content you need for diverse content marketing strategies. This ranges from Meta, category, and product descriptions to blog content, to name a few.
ContentGo employs the latest technologies for innovative content creation processes. You’ll consistently receive well-written and thoroughly edited content that resonates with your target audience. The content is designed for maximum engagements, improved lead generation, and conversion rates.
Even with the best content marketing tools, you can only succeed if the most crucial piece of the puzzle is present. Let ContentGo help you fill those content gaps that often prove overwhelming. Register today and enjoy streamlined content creation for enhanced content marketing campaigns’ effectiveness and efficiency.
