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Best Content Marketing Tools And Platforms

August 5, 2021 Marketing

There are many platforms for content marketing. Not to mention free content marketing tools and resources. For a marketer, staying organized and following the latest trends can seem quite a challenge.

So, how can you become a content marketing leader? The answer is actually quite simple: by choosing the right tools and resources to help you achieve interactive posts and better results.

In this article, we’ll share some of the best platforms and tools to use in content marketing. Check them all and pick the ones that will best suit your business goals. Consider this your #1 catalog for a successful future.

What is a Content Marketing Platform?

A content marketing platform is a robust, all-in-one package that combines several features into one software tool.

Typically, multiple content marketing tasks can be performed with one of these platforms, from setting up workflows and content creation to managing analytics and improving ROI.

Quick Tip: CoSchedule gives you the ability to plan your marketing roadmap, manage team tasks, support content marketing, schedule social posts, and keep assets in one place.

What Can You Do with a Content Marketing Platform?

Content marketing becomes much easier and more successful when you have a one-stop-shop to manage your team and projects. Here are just a few of the things you can do with a high-quality content marketing platform:

  • Manage projects from start to finish;
  • Match content to your editorial calendar;
  • Create and publish your content;
  • Promote content across multiple channels;
  • Communicate on projects with team members;
  • Measure performance and analyze productivity.

Back to CoSchedule. This feature-rich service represents a great way to organize all your marketing functions in one place and create a successful content marketing plan You can get more things done in less time and keep your team happy. CoSchedule includes setting up post dates/times and working with analytics.

CoSchedule benefits:

  • Working with multiple sites simultaneously; 
  • Deep analytics; 
  • Advanced functionality for developing teams.

This Gartner-recommended platform allows you to use up to 5 platforms for promotion simultaneously and is definitely worth the money. With CoSchedule, your marketing team can really collaborate and successfully execute all of your projects.

Brief Content Marketing Channel Stats

  • In 2021, interest in Instagram as a platform for influencer marketing has dropped slightly, from 97% in 2020 to 93%. However, the platform still retains its leadership position; Instagram Stories are not losing popularity, with 83% of experts choosing this format;
  • In 2020, only 16% of companies chose TikTok to promote through bloggers. In 2021 – 68%;
  • Facebook lost its ground – from 79% in 2020 to 68% in 2021; 
  • YouTube has become more common for influencer marketing: 48% of professionals choose it in 2021. It’s 4% more, compared to 2020; 
  • Pinterest is another popular platform for collaborating with bloggers. 35% of marketers choose it in 2021, a year-over-year increase of 6%.

Monday

Monday is a convenient, beautiful, and intuitive content marketing platform and an email killer. Everything you do at work, you can do here – from running your personal business and shopping to managing your company and its projects.

Ready-made board templates make your job a lot easier because they already have an elaborate logistical management algorithm for a multitude of tasks. You don’t have to reinvent anything!

The task setting process in Monday is fast and has clear and varied settings from deadlines to task completion ratings. The real-time communication process within the team is instant.

This is a tool for a team that’s professional, fast in decision-making and implementation.

Monday Features:

  • Convenient interface and beautiful design;
  • Easy work process;
  • Great project management and communication features;
  • Extensive features for detailing and monitoring tasks;
  • Ability to create boards available to customers and partners;
  • Numerous board templates for different tasks.
  • Extended functionality for task handling – ratings, statuses, links, comments, etc.;
  • Mobile version.

StoryChief

StoryChief is a versatile content distribution and collaboration tool that allows you to co-create, plan, optimize, and distribute your articles across different publishing channels from one place. StoryChief lets you collaborate better, publish faster, and easily measure quality.

Review your colleagues’ work, get input from StoryChief’s powerful SEO tool, and gain approvals from clients and managers – all on a single platform. 

StoryChief lets you plan, schedule, and distribute multichannel with a single click. Connect your websites, social media accounts, AMP channels, newsletters, and external hubs to then easily promote your stories through your employees, press, and influencers.

You can track your performance across all channels, capture leads in your CRM, and measure actual reads, time spent on articles, views, and clicks on your content.

HubSpot Marketing Hub

This all-in-one software claims to give businesses everything they need to launch truly engaging marketing campaigns that drive brand awareness and conversions. Draw visitors to your funnel by publishing SEO-approved content with a blogging tool, collect leads from your landing page, and develop automated workflows with a free CRM.

HubSpot Marketing Hub features include:

  • SEO tools;
  • A/B testing;
  • Marketing automation;
  • Newsletters;
  • Forms;
  • Contact management;
  • Landing pages;
  • Live chat;
  • Professional landing page design;
  • Website creation and management; Recommended Cloudways WordPress hosting for better performanceSocial media tools;
  • Tools for creating blogs and content;
  • Deep analytics tools;
  • CTA support without coding;
  • Customer analytics tracking;
  • Lead management and deep analytics;
  • Advertising Facebook, Instagram, Google, and LinkedIn
  • Traffic and conversion analytics;
  • Video hosting and management.

By the way, Hubspot’s CRM is one of the most full-featured free solutions on the CRM market and there quite a few HubSpot CRM integrations to help you truly elevate your marketing efforts

Why You Need Content Marketing Tools

Have you ever wondered why one brand gets more of your attention compared to another, even if they both offer the same product? Just like one resume template gets more eyeballs than others.The truth is that every brand has a story, and how well it tells that story creates or destroys it. 

Spending money solely on advertising and logo creation won’t get you enough success. Of course your logo should be attractive to draw the audience’s attention. But instead of spending a hefty amount of money in hiring a professional designer, you can get one free of cost using a logo generator tool. You need more than that to connect with your customers. You have to create unique content that will convince customers of the value of your products and explain why they should choose your brand over others.

Implementing content marketing strategies can be a challenge. You have to be fully prepared before you get down to it. You are expected to have access to tools to help you find content that’s interesting and meaningful to your customers.

With that said, let’s briefly review the best content marketing tools separated in different categories. 

Top 5 Content Writing Tools

The importance of content marketing is obvious. You may wonder, though: “Yeah, it’s all great and all… But what if I’m not that good at writing?”

Well, there are terrific content writing services that can help you find the best solution. Even if you’re not very creative and have no outstanding talent. Maybe you just don’t know where to start (and how to finish)? Anyway, here are some helpful resources we’re happy to share:

  • Skyword offers help with content writing at various stages of the job. Attractive bonuses include partnerships with Bigstock Imagery and Thomson Reuters;
  • Feeling confused at the mere thought of the vast array of programs you have to combine? Oracle (formerly Compendium) has all the capabilities for organizing, designing, developing, advertising, and evaluating the content, all combined on a single virtual board;
  • Piksel Palette is a delightful place for those who like free automated services for content creation. Stunning new texts are added regularly. With more flexible management, you’ll develop a huge number of pages that can be efficiently updated;
  • Shareist is a terrific assistant for all phases of the content creation and advertising process. Here, you can easily integrate links, images, texts, and videos. You can then use that content anywhere, from email newsletters to e-books;
  • Brafton offers new methods of content marketing along with search engine optimization for your website. Here, you’ll find the benefits of content analysis and opportunities to promote your company on various social networks. Brafton helps make sure content finds its audience and looks its best.

Top 5 Tools for Content Creation

Sooner or later every writer is faced with a situation where they don’t know what to write about, where to start, how to continue, and finish. This popular problem is faced by many, so don’t think you’re the only one out there.

There is one trick, though…

There are many tools and ideas to help you explore content and find inspiration. And we have highlighted some of their most terrific features for you. With these tools, you can find the freshest and most popular topics and always be trending:

  • Quora is a great place to quickly produce content. You can find out which topics are trending by estimating the number of questions being asked. Quora will help you always keep the latest trends in mind when creating articles;
  • You can search for the hottest topics on Twitter to see what issues are trending around the world or in specific regions. Moreover, you can look at hashtags related to your industry. This will show which issues are of most interest to your potential customers;
  • If you’re an iPhone fan, SPUN is what you need. The site has a fantastic interface, and it gathers the most amazing content from a huge number of sites, blogs, online magazines, and YouTube channels;
  • Pulse is a LinkedIn-acquired service that works as an RSS feed. When LinkedIn bought Pulse, the site gained an audience of several million users in just a couple of months. Here you can search for specific information about your preferences or favorite topics;
  • Scribble is a content exploration app with a personalized feed, based on your interests and preferences. Developed specifically for iPad, the service explores user feedback to provide great content.

Top 5 Tools for Visualizing Content

In addition to writing great articles, you’ll have to use a variety of tools to visualize text and make it even more appealing to your audience. 

Working with images can seem daunting, but here’s the key: there are many services that guarantee outstanding results and are easy to learn. The most interesting ones are as follows:

  • Visual.ly is a great site for those who want to create unique images with statistics and stunning infographics. You can study thousands of existing examples, created by the company’s designers, and find inspiration for your own ideas in them. Or you can get an amazing infographic templates to customize your own infographics.
  • Embedded Tweets help make your content interactive and credible. Tweets complemented with videos, pictures, or reviews are an important part of social media. When you embed such posts, followers can easily find the author and share their post or ask any questions directly on the page;
  • Google Keyword Tool gives you the opportunity to review popular keyword combinations to include in your headlines and article text. You don’t necessarily have to use data suggested by the tool. However, remember that these are the most used keywords, so it’s worth considering at least a few options;
  • Can anything compare to Photoshop but still be easy to use? Yes, and that’s GIMP! With this program, you can make fantastic graphics without too much effort. Everyone knows how important it is to include images in digital content. After all, it’s a well-known fact that 40% of readers are more receptive to visuals than to text;
  • Resizeimage.net is another useful service for those who want to succeed but are not very tech-savvy. You can use it to effortlessly prepare pictures and embed them in PDFs or articles.

Top 5 Content Marketing Planning Tools

Once you learn how to create top-notch content, another challenge comes up: how to keep everything organized and on schedule, without putting inhuman effort. In this section, we’ve collected the best planning tools for content marketing. 

Whether you’re a seasoned content creator or just taking your first steps in the field, these following tools will help you systematize and logically organize your content, tasks, and projects:

  • Google Calendar. What could be better than a familiar tool from the most popular search engine? Google Calendar is a great way to remember everything! You can use it to quickly get your schedule in order and coordinate publications and posting plans;
  • Trello is a great planner for being productive and organizing content that allows you to manage big and small ideas with compact, visually pleasing cards. You can use the tool to easily share content ideas, goals, and questions with colleagues. Moreover, you can also vote on specific cards to see how team members react. The service will help choose the most successful content for future work;
  • Toggl Plan is a powerful service for planning team activities. It’s a web-based solution for planning tasks, planning projects, and managing a team. Toggl is available as a web version, browser extension, and app, all equally user-friendly and intuitive. Create tasks via a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface, build colorful work scales, and set deadlines. Toggle Plan will also help you track your progress, exchange graphs via generated URLs, set different access rights for certain team members, and increase accountability in your team;
  • Harvest is a useful tool that you can use to organize and streamline your content marketing tasks. With this clear and user-friendly tool, you will know how much time is spent on tasks – this will increase the speed of content production;
  • Of course, don’t forget about Pinterest, one of the best services for content planning. With it, you can share your resources as well as other people’s interesting content. You can also hide your boards, in case you don’t want to reveal your team’s ideas;
  • Finally, Remember The Milk is an awesome app that syncs with Twitter, Google Calendar, Outlook, Gmail, and many other services. The app is an advanced task list.

Top 5 Tools for Content Marketing

You can generate interesting content and fill it with awesome interactive details but never gain traction. 

Ever wonder why this happens?

The answer is simple: if you don’t promote your content well enough, even the most effective articles can go unnoticed. You need to actively share your posts to get great feedback and earn popularity with your readers. Here’s a list of platforms that most profitably distribute content. 

Use the following services and get promoted to become successful:

  • PRWeb is a platform for distributing news about your most important posts. Take advantage of it and your content will be seen by millions of visitors, 250,000 subscribers, and more than 30,000 journalists. PRWeb is easy to use and offers effective tools for generating press releases, distributing them, and tracking their progress;
  • With Buffer, you can save time organizing content and distributing it on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. The service will help you distribute posts on different channels fast and with no hassle;
  • Promoted posts on Facebook are not a free tool for content marketing, but you will definitely benefit from it. The tool guarantees your content views, allowing you to attract more people than through search engines. Your paid posts will be seen by a huge audience and your content will become more successful;
  • MailChimp is a great way to promote posts using your subscriber base. Don’t have one? MailChimp can help you generate one. Thanks to this platform, more and more subscribers show up on your list and get updates. MailChimp is one of the best tools for customer retention;
  • Yoast is a great SEO tool for WordPress. With it, you can improve your content and start ranking better in the top search engines.
  • Integrate with an SMS API to inform your audience directly via SMS and notify them as soon as new content is published. 

Popular Content Marketing Tools

Don’t forget about the following popular tools and apps that can make your content marketing efforts a success:

Poptin

Popups may surprise you, but they’re one of the most efficient content marketing tools to use. Show them to your blog readers at just the right time, with a value-packed offer, and you can successfully convert them into email subscribers, leads, and even customers. 

Poptin can help you create beautiful behavior-based popup campaigns for your website. Such campaigns can help you boost engagement, drive more email signups, generate qualified leads, and improve your sales performance. You can even create a “Thank You” and “Welcome” email autoresponder with Poptin for all your popup responses.

Poptin gives you the ability to optimize your popups for maximum conversions with the help of its advanced features: exit intent technology, smart triggers, targeting rules, device compatibility, native integrations, A/B testing, analytics, and more.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo will allow you to find topics you can write about and identify influencers who can promote your content on your behalf. This way, you can get an idea of what content has been most widely shared on most social networks. You can also find influencers in your industry and see what type of content they share. 

With BuzzSumo, you’ll get alerts every time content with your keywords is published. Every time an industry competitor publishes new content, you get a notification so you don’t miss a thing. Competitor content can also be tracked, and you can see how it works.

Evernote

Evernote is ideal if you want to brainstorm for future content. You might want a place where your entire team can express their ideas and discuss them with each other. Evernote is the best option, compatible with almost all devices. 

Evernote allows you to organize, record, and share notes. This note-taking app can be used online or downloaded. Thus, you can cut out site elements, create templates, scan documents, and attach them, as well as synchronize notes, etc. on many devices. 

Evernote is the right tool for those who want a virtual notebook. What you save in Evernote can be accessed at any time from any device, be it a smartphone or a laptop. You can also access your notebook offline or search for previously recorded text. Moreover, there’s an ability to sync notes across multiple devices and add annotations to images.

Kred

If you want your content to sell, you need to find influencers who share your content on social media. It’s not enough to just create new content, and this is where Kred can help. The app will assess your influence through evaluating Twitter and Facebook. This, in turn, will help you identify influencers. 

Unlike other social media management tools, Kred allows you to create your own individual “influencer” status. When your online presence becomes more active, the market for your content automatically improves. Credits can be very useful to gain credibility and trust, and when your viewers understand who you are, they are more willing to know what you offer.

GetResponse

GetResponse is a popular content marketing tool that allows you to trigger events and send emails. Email marketing is known for providing the highest ROI. It’s also believed to be the most effective tool for customer retention. Being able to satisfy your current customers is actually much cheaper than attracting new ones. 

However, many companies don’t understand the value of an email marketing tool to increase sales and conversions. This tool uses automation to trigger emails and events, based on actions taken by recipients or after a certain period of time. These are features that can give you great value at a nominal price. GetResponse offers CRM capabilities that allow you to track customer relationships. This helps increase brand awareness, which in turn increases customer engagement.

Leadpages

Leadpages is a content marketing app that helps you stay in touch with your site visitors by capturing their email addresses. With Leadpages, you can create your own landing pages, sign-up pages, pop-ups, and other forms where visitors can enter their emails in exchange for your offered perks/bonuses. Once signed up, your subscribers are immediately provided with your promised rewards. In addition, Leadpages will also sync with your email service provider so that subscribers are automatically added to your mailing list. 

With Leadpages, you can also use integrated payment systems to effectively manage your online store. Leadpages offers beautiful themes for tablets and mobile devices. You can also expect a handy drag-and-drop feature, A/B testing, unlimited integrations, and so on. Lastly, Leadpages also has SMS marketing features that allow you to attract even more leads.

Conclusion

In short, content marketing is much more than just deciding what to write about. It’s not enough to create interesting and relevant content – you also need to make sure it’s interesting and reaches your target audience. Only after that, your TA will be able to share that content on various social media platforms.

This task is not as easy as it sounds; it takes a lot of effort and hard work. However, with the aforementioned content marketing tools and apps, it all gets much easier.