15 Useful Content Marketing Tools For Your Business

There are so many useful marketing tools available to your business, that can support your activities in many ways and across different marketing disciplines. In this article, we share a handful of useful tools for creating and implementing your content marketing strategy.

1. Grammarly

When writing any content, whether it be blog posts, website copy, social media posts, a document for a client detailing a new idea – we want to ensure that everything is grammatically correct. This is not only best practise in general when writing, but it is also very fair to say that users aren’t going to trust you (or engage with your content) if it has spelling and grammar mistakes, no matter how hard you market your writing.

Grammarly is the answer to this. It catches grammar mistakes such as word usage, overused words, and more.

What’s also great is that you can install Grammarly for Chrome so that whatever tab you are in, you can have your grammar monitored – this is ideal if you are creating content in Google Docs or when uploading content to a site.

Read more: What’s In A Typo?

2. Google Docs

Leading on from Grammarly, we move on to one of my favourite content marketing tools, Google Docs. It is the best platform for collaboration – it’s easy to use, free, accessible from anywhere, and you don’t have to store all of your work on your computer hard drive. 

Read more: What Can You Do With Docs?

3. Canva

Sometimes as part of your content marketing strategy, you will want to have some great imagery that is tailored to your goals and objectives, and a stock image just won’t cut it. Software such as Adobe Photoshop can be trickier to use and a more expensive option when you want a simpler design. Well, the answer here is to use Canva. 

Canva has pre-built templates and layouts that are designed for all kinds of content marketing imagery. You could create an infographic, GIFs, videos, an Instagram story, a Facebook header photo, an image for your blog post, and much more.

4. Lumen5 

Video is a widely consumed and highly popular form of content. And to stay on-trend, much like Canva, Lumen5 is a cloud-based video creation platform that allows total beginners to create amazing, highly engaging videos that can be used across social media and your blog.

Read more: Create Great Video Content With Lumen5

5. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a content marketing tool that helps you better understand what content performs best for any topic or your competitors.

You can find out the top-performing content based upon particular keywords across the internet and social media. You can also see metrics like social shares, backlinks, and which influencers are sharing a given piece of content – which is all insightful information to have as part of developing your content marketing strategy.

6. HubSpot Blog Ideas Generator

If you are in need of some new headlines for your blog posts, then the HubSpot Blog Ideas Generator is a great tool to try out. You just enter some key nouns relating to the topic areas you’d like to write about, and you are given some suggestions for titles. 

7. Answer The Public

Along similar lines, Answer The Public is a great website that enables you to find out what people are searching for, based around your keywords.

Need to write an article about exhausts? You will be provided ideas based around how people search on Google.

Just be careful, with their free service you only get a couple of searches per day!

Take a look at AnswerThePublic.

8. HubSpot

We are a HubSpot partner and find it to be an effective CRM across the board, as well as a useful content marketing tool. 

You can create ‘content clusters’ around a topic to link all of your existing content like case studies, blog posts and e-books, which can improve your SEO. Furthermore, you can also track your customers throughout their customer journey, to better understand which content was consumed before conversion.

Some other handy features to explore within HubSpot are:

• Webform creation
• Popup tools
• Chatbots and live chats

9. Excel 

Microsoft Excel is a classic that never fails to disappoint, especially when creating a content calendar. You can map out your planned upload dates, content week by week, target keywords for each piece of content, links to helpful resources – whatever information you need. Alternatively, Google Sheets is also useful for collaborative spreadsheet work.

Read more: How To Align Your Blog, Social Media and More With A Content Calendar

10. Washer

This HTML cleanup tool is so helpful when it comes to uploading your content to a site. 

If you write your content in a Word or Google document before you decide to upload it live to a website, then you can paste your content into the HTML Washer, and it reduces a HTML document (or fragment) to basic HTML tags and attributes. This is a vital tool to ensure that your content looks how you want it to when you make it live, without the formatting Word sometimes adds that can distort your work.

Try it out: HTML Washer

11. MailChimp

Email should be a part of your online marketing strategy, and MailChimp is the perfect platform to create one-off and automated emails.

With MailChimp, you can access your dashboard from both mobile and desktop.

There are countless features, but the most notable one lets you build an email list with subscribers who are truly engaged with your content. Plus, you can track them. You can also monitor metrics such as average open and click rate, as well as your average email subscribe and unsubscribe rates, and which links have been clicked the most or least.

Read more: 10 Tips for Successful Email Marketing

12. SEMRush

When using SEMRush you can view lots of important data, such as the keywords that your competitors are gaining organic rankings for, yours and your competitor's backlinks, which keywords your company is ranking for organically and the keywords that your competitors are bidding on.

13. Hootsuite

Having engaging content to share across your social channels is essential when marketing your business – but it can take a lot of time to do so manually. HootSuite allows you to manage multiple social media posts ahead of time and based on their peak engagement hours for different businesses and across a multitude of platforms – so is an essential tool to have, in our opinion. 

14. Google Analytics

Having a tool that provides extensive, useful and accurate tracking and measurement of your marketing efforts is a must, and Google Analytics is one of the most widely used platforms to do so.

You can track goals such as form submissions or product purchases, look at behaviours, bounce rate, in-depth analysis of sessions on your site, and more.

Read more: How Google Analytics Can Help You to Increase Leads and Sales

15. Ahrefs

Ahrefs allows you to track the rankings of your keywords, track your backlinks and shares on social, analyse your competitors’ keywords and traffic, look at the most valuable pages on a given site, or look into where your competitors rank for that you don’t. 

This is another great tool for conducting research before you write a piece of content.

Making Use Of Content Marketing Tools

These content marketing tools are extremely useful when creating and executing a successful content marketing strategy, but knowing how and when to use them can be a bit of a challenge if you haven’t before. Therefore, if you need help with any aspect of content marketing, get in touch with SilverDisc.