Content Marketing Tools Every Business Owner Needs

Need a hand getting your marketing campaigns up and running? Most business owners do.

The internet is brimming with tools and platforms designed to heighten your content marketing. And because we know a thing or two about what separates the good from the bad, we’ve listed our favourite tools to maximise your content marketing efforts across these stages:

• Research and strategy
• Content production and project management
• Distribution (a.k.a. amplification)
• Reporting and analysis.

Effective content marketing is a must for increasing brand awareness and genuinely engaging with your audience. These tools can help you get it right.

Research & Strategy

Content marketing without research is like throwing darts in the dark. From determining your audience to targeting the right keywords, research is a crucial – and ongoing – stage in the content marketing process.

These research tools provide valuable insights into your market, audience and competitors to guide your content marketing strategies.

Google Analytics

Google’s free analytics suite is a lot more powerful than a lot of people give it credit for. From user demographics to content engagement, traffic sources and conversion data, Google Analytics is a great place to start when building a picture of your audience and prospective customers.

Facebook Audience Insights

Another free tool, Facebook Audience Insights gives you access to 2 billion users’ worth of interest-based information. It can show you what related (or unrelated) topics your target audience like to interact with.

Quora

This question-and-answer portal is a goldmine for seeing what people really want to find out. Unlike Google Search, Quora features real people asking and answering all kinds of questions – it’s primary market research, for free.

Ahrefs, Buzzsumo, SEMRush & Majestic SEO

These four tools are all powerful on their own, but when used together they can help you build a very comprehensive picture of users’ search and social habits, competitors’ performance, and content opportunities to pursue. Combine your findings with Google Analytics and Facebook data, and you’ll have a solid foundation upon which to build your audience profiles and content strategy.

Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator

This tool is similar to Quora, except it scrapes the internet for similar keywords and popular words to create titles and topics that could just turn into your next piece of hero content. If you find yourself drawing a blank when coming up with ideas, it’s worth a shot.

Answer the Public

Another keyword-based idea generator, Answer the Public is a free tool that helps uncover content ideas in the form of questions. Start with a broad query and see where it takes you; things can get interesting with this one.

Content Production & Project Management

Google Drive

Google offers a suite of tools for collaboration. This handy tool allows you to keep all your files in one centralised location, offering the ability for multiple people to work seamlessly on the same document, powerpoint, spreadsheet, etc. Collaboration has never been so easy – or organised.

Grammarly

Not only does Grammarly check your content for errors, this online proof-reader also checks for plagiarism to ensure your text is original.

Asana

Tools like Asana and Trello allow you to stay on top of all your projects in one easy-to-use place. Asana is our preferred tool for assigning tasks, building workflow calendars, sharing files, and tracking progress on projects. Plus, you’ll be rewarded with flying unicorns when you tick off a task. What’s not to love?

Copyscape

Similar to Grammarly, Copyscape compares your text to existing content on the internet to ensure your content is original. You can also opt to receive email updates if another site steals your content, which can impact your SEO rankings.

Distribution

The more your content is shared, the more exposure you will earn, and the more brand awareness you will receive. These tools help share your brilliant content to a wider audience.

Social Media Amplification

Organic and paid Facebook amplification should be on your list of distribution tactics; in fact industry best practices suggest you should be spending far more on distributing your content than on creating it. Organic reach on Facebook is pitifully low nowadays (think 1-2% of your actual audience) so be prepared to spend a little to boost your content to your audience.

SourceBottle

SourceBottle connects content creators with expert sources across every conceivable industry. If you’re after a credible reference for something you’re creating, it should be your go-to tool. Again, it’s free!

Native Content Discovery Platforms

Outbrain, Stumbleupon, Taboola, Plista… the list goes on. These platforms enable you to get your content seen on almost any site you can think of. But beware – targeting or quality placement aren’t their strong suit, so expect to see large volumes of traffic but fairly low clickthroughs or relevant, interested leads.

Mailchimp

Your goal should be to try to build your audience, and there’s no better audience than one that chooses to read your emails. Once you’ve started collecting a number of followers, it’s time to continue to nurture them until they decide to buy from you. There are many tools out there for managing email lists, but Mailchimp is perhaps the best known and easiest to use.

Reporting and Analysis

Google Analytics & Data Studio

Measure how your content’s performing, and how your users are transforming from one-time visitors into repeat visitors, email subscribers, or even paying customers. There are a million ways to measure the way your content is working towards your business goals, and Google Analytics and its companion dashboarding tool, Data Studio, make it easy to do so.

Your CRM

If your audience isn’t converting on your website but instead phones you, comes in-store to buy, or signs up to your email list, you’ll need a way to capture and store all this data. If you’re able to mate your CRM data to your Google Analytics, you’ll be able to paint an end-to-end picture of exactly how you’re acquiring customers and nurturing them.

Facebook Business Manager

If you’re serious about seeing how your content amplification and paid promotions are performing, Facebook Business Manager and its Ads Manager are a must. From building campaigns to creating reports and even optimisation tests on the fly, it’s a powerful tool that will give you much greater control over the way your content gets seen on Facebook.

If you don’t have the time to get familiar with these content marketing tools, get the pros in. Call Search Factory today: 1300 076 715.