Established or up-and-coming businesses require regular content published online and offline to keep the masses informed and aware of their products. Since every business generates content, it brings out the obvious questions: What interests the audience, and how do you create such content? Because you could get away by just creating content if this was the 90s, but it’s not. In this era of cutthroat competition in the content space, you need to generate organic, relevant, regular, and exciting content that will also hit a chord with the viewers/ readers. Fortunately, many tools are available in the market that will undoubtedly help your business in its content journey. The experts have built these in the space after meticulously considering all the factors to create good content. But before we get into learning about these new tools and understanding how they function, let us first educate ourselves about the basics of content marketing and its nuances. Let us get familiar with the concept of content marketing and everything it encapsulates.
What is Content Marketing?
From its face value, the term is obvious, and it loosely explains the ways through which you can market your business through content generation. However, if you dig deeper inside, content marketing is so much more than just creating fresh content. Content Marketing includes content generation, content analytics, Social Media Optimization, Lead Generation, and so much more. An elemental part of Content Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, is an entire school to graduate from.
How does Content Marketing help businesses?
Everything on the internet is tagged to keywords; that’s how the web differentiates between beauty products and automobile parts and presents the most appropriate choices when you google your query. Businesses fight for that one little keyword, or maybe a few to be at the top of your search results referred to as SERP in the content space jargon. You’d be amazed to know that the first link in your google result has 31.9 % chances of being clicked, while the 2nd link has 15% chances of being visited. And to attain even that 15% spot means you need to be on the top of your game. This is one of the reasons you need content marketing for your business.
Challenges in Content Marketing
Content Marketing, like every other field out there, is not without challenges. With every business hustling its way to the top, there are many malpractices in the space, which might look like a shortcut at first sight but could be the reason for a permanent or temporary penalty to your website. Business owners must keep the guidelines for content marketing in mind to save their online business from such penalties. Luckily, all the tools discussed below will help remove spam links and bad SEO from your web pages. Let us learn more about these tools.
Semrush
Semrush is all about growing your online visibility on all critical channels with the help of a single platform. This means that you can manage all your tracks on different social media websites without any hassle of logging in and logging out from multiple platforms every day. Isn’t that wonderful? The portal’s got 50+ content marketing tools on SEO, competitor research, PPC, and social media marketing to attract and grow your businesses’ audience online faster. With the help of its Online SEO tool, you can uncover millions of national and local keywords specific to your audience, whether you are selling your product nationwide or locally in your city. You could also analyze your competitors’ backlinks profile, providing yourself with an immense and in-depth understanding of your competitor’s OFF SEO techniques, which you could emulate in your website. The benefits of using Semrush do not end at SEO tools. The portal also offers a range of content marketing tools. You can find topics that resonate with your audience and get actionable tips to create SEO-friendly content with regular audits and real-time reports to grow your content reach and convert the audience into customers. Other features that Semrush offers include market research, advertising, and social media insights.
Zoho Campaigns
Zoho is a powerful suite of software that will run your entire business. It offers a complete CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform, an end-to-end, fully customizable solution for growing businesses and enterprises. Zoho does more than manage your content. It also helps you in managing your engagement and audience. With its CRM, you will have access to smart HR management, the ability to build custom apps, access to the state-of-the-art financial platform that’ll grow your business, and an omnichannel customer service solution. And that’s not it. Zoho also offers an online workplace for teams providing seamless communication, file storage, and collaboration. Teams can now work cross-functionally, assisting each other in sprints and siloes. What sets Zoho apart is its Zoho One bundle feature. Zoho One offers massive 45+ integrated applications to manage, connect, and automate business processes across your organization. It includes CRM Plus, Finance Plus, Workplace, People Plus, IT Management, and Marketing Plus.
Canva
Canva has been one of the pioneers to notice the shift towards the visual content industry. And it goes all guns blazing to assist its users in creating the most creative, most content-friendly, and search engine optimized banners the internet has ever seen. And making them is super easy. Wish thousands on templates available in its arsenal; Canva has a sure lot to offer to every type of business. These templates have been made by professionals and creative experts that have been in the industry for over a long time. With such a range of creatives to choose from, users get a head start ahead of their peers in offering something unique to their clients. Collaborating across teams has never been so easy. Gone are the days when designers had to run behind their managers to get their approval on designs. Now, with just a click, designers can share banners, posters, invitations across multiple channels and get their feedback without leaving the platform for a moment. The premium version of Canva, which goes by the name Canva Pro, has been the torchbearer in visual content marketing by helping its client manage brand assets, leave and obtain feedback, get approval, and scale your visual content to the desired dimensions. Canva is trusted equally by solo artists and enterprises. Big names that trust Canva with almost all their visual content needs include Intel, Paypal, UCDavis, Baxter, Gucci, and Dannon.
HubSpot
HubSpot is yet another leading CRM platform through which you can answer all your content marketing needs, starting from the generation of fresh organic content to researching and studying your competitors’ content architecture. It is one of the most powerful CRM that is the most accurate yet easy to use. It has all the users’ tools and integrations for marketing, sales, content management, and customer service. HubSpot boasts that each device on its platform is powerful enough, but the real magic begins when they all come together for you. Primarily, HubSpot CRM offers its services in five major areas: Marketing, Sales, Services, CMS, and Operations. The marketing software provided by HubSpot helps you grow traffic, convert audience into customers, and run multiple inbound marketing campaigns on the website. The popular features of the Marketing hub include Lead Generation, Marketing automation, and analytics. Sales Hub of HubSpot assists you in getting deeper and underlying goals insights into prospects and thereby automate the repetitive tasks that do not require frequent intervention so that you can devote more of your time to aspects that do. Popular features of the Sales Hub of HubSpot include Advanced CRM, Meeting Scheduling, Quotes. Services Hub of HubSpot connects you with your customers as you have never before by surpassing their expectations and making them your promoters who grow your business. Popular features of the Services hub include Tickets, Customer Feedback, Knowledge Base. CMS Hub of HubSpot offers a unique blend of flexible software for marketers and powerful enough for developers, offering them room to create personalized and secure environments for the users. Popular features of CMS Hub include: Drag and Drop editor, SEO recommendations, and Website themes. Operations Hub does all the background work for you, like syncing your apps, cleaning and curating customer data, and automating processes- thereby making systems and teams work together. Popular features of Operations Hub include Data Sync, Programmable Automation, and Data Quality Automation. HubSpot has been around in this space for a long time. It has deeply understood marketers’ demands and requirements during these years and found a sweet spot where both meet. The CRM website is trusted by 128,000+ customers, with some of the leading being WWF, Trello, Suzuki, Survey Monkey, VMware, and so much more.
BigMailer
BigMailer is a fantastic tool to manage your email campaigns. You can manage unlimited brands and provide access controls to users without paying any additional charges. It supports campaign drips, transactional emails, API calls, and RSS feed updates. You can also track your email campaigns, customize the unsubscribe page and email preferences. It provides a single dashboard to manage all your brands which are further divided into lists, campaigns, templates, and forms. Manage unlimited users and assign them different roles and permissions. BigMailer can be integrated with hundreds of applications like Shopify, PayPal, Slack, Google Forms, and many more with the help of Zapier. It also offers custom templates, drag and drop builder with unlimited image hosting.
Wordable
Wordable is handy when you like writing in Google Docs and publishing directly to WordPress, Medium, and Hubspot. This nifty tool will cleanse your doc files of span & font tags, unnecessary line breaks, spaces, etc., making it publish-ready and ready to export with just a click. Besides, this not only works with the words but images and tables as well. Wordable compresses images, auto-generates compatible tables, helps set featured images & alt texts, embeds video links, and can practically function as an all-around publishing assistant. Moreover, you have the choice to export (single or bulk) documents as live posts or drafts. Finally, you can see all that in action with their 7-day free trial.
KingSumo
KingSumo is the best lead generation platform on the face of the internet. They help users generate tons of leads for their business and brand with viral giveaways. They assist in generating leads at a fraction of the cost of Facebook ads, Instagram influencers, and other marketing channels. With KingSumo, you can have prospects take the action you want for bonus entries, such as following your social profiles, visiting your website, and so much more. It is considered best for entrepreneurs and enterprises that wish to generate new leads through viral giveaways. You are all set to give away your product, product from partners, physical and virtual reads, and even PDFs through a simple form. In a recent survey, it has been reported that months when websites run giveaways, 20% of the lead generation account for KingSumo.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo helps to get content insights so that you can generate ideas, create amazing content, monitor performance, and select the right influencers for your marketing strategy. It has 4 key components.
Discovery – Explore high-performing content suitable for your category of business/niche so that you can target the right audience.Research – Sharpen your content marketing strategy with the help of billions of data points.Influencers – Identify the right influencers for your brand based on your product and marketing strategy.Monitoring – With BuzzSumo, you can track how your target audience interacts with your content and the latest trends to follow.
Uberflip
Uberflip is probable the content experience platform to engage buyers with relevant content. Uberflip offers quick launch campaigns, scale ABM programs, empowered sales, and measured results. It strengthens its spot by addressing the critical gap that most marketers miss out on – engagement. Most marketers make the error of onboarding audiences without any strategy of engaging them. This is where Uberflip comes in. It has everything in its tore to make the visitors that come to your platform stay. Uberflip focuses on creating personalized destinations instead of generic landing pages, engaging users with relevant content buyers are genuinely interested in. With the help of these customized destinations, you can convert your prospective visitors into loyal customers by offering them what they seek. Agility is another concept that Uberflip involves increasing engagement. Launching campaigns quickly with automatic pull-in, organization, and centralizing the entire content library allows you to tag your content for easy discoverability across the platform. You can also easily and quickly deploy content without requiring web development or IT. Other vital principles that Uberflip shapes its software upon are: Scalability, sales engagement, intelligence, and so much more. Marketers have been using Uberflip for Account-based marketing, Demand generation, inbound marketing, sales engagement, and customer engagement.
ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels is a unique concept in this list of Content Marketing tools; it boasts as a website and sales funnel builder for entrepreneurs. It was created to free entrepreneurs from the shackles of coding and programming. It assists you in guiding your visitors step-by-step through the entire sales process and eventually points them straight to the one product or service they need the most to help solve their problem. ClickFunnels offers simple tools and strategies you need to market, sell, and deliver your products online. You can use the simple drag and drop web page editor, quickly build a sales funnel that converts, a smart shopping cart with one click upsell email, and Facebook marketing automation.
GetResponse
GetReponse does precisely what it is named after. It gets you leads, sales, growth, along with many other things. It is a powerful and simplified tool to send emails, create pages, and automate your business’s marketing. With GetResponse, you can get your business online with the help of a suite of free marketing tools curated to fuel it with a stream of fresh, organic, and new leads. You can grow your audience by finding new customers and building an email list with lead generation tools that turn anonymous contacts into loyal groups. But there’s more, don’t shy away from engaging with your customers and potential clients with targeted communications that convert and boost your sales and market your commerce business by delivering Xperia cues that convert visitors into returning customers. GetResponse is considered best for entrepreneurs, online marketers, marketing managers, and large companies. They can use this tool for Email marketing, Website building, Paid ads, Sales funnel, Popup forms, Autoresponders, Marketing automation, Website tracking, Live and on-demand webinars, transactional emails, and dedicated customer service. Although you get most of the features in Free Content Marketing tools by getting a response, few sophisticated tools are reserved for premium customers. There are three service plans offered by getting a response to its large pool of clients: Free Forever, Paid Plans fixed at $10.50 a month, and custom curate Max plans personalized to every client’s needs.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is the favorite tool of every budding entrepreneur because it does not require you to be an SEO pro to rank higher and get more traffic. It is an all-in-one SEO toolset that offers free learning materials that deliver passionate community support to its clients. Its much-hyped all-in-one toolset has everything to be hyped about. The holistic approach the tool takes includes, Optimization of your website, analysis of your competitors, research of the trending keywords on the internet, takeaways from the top leaders of the industry, and tracking of ranking progress. Ahrefs is considered best for Pro SEOs, content marketers, bloggers, agencies, SAAS, e-commerce, and every other website on the internet. It is trusted and used by some market giants like Facebook, eBay, Tripadvisor, Shopify, LinkedIn, Netflix, Uber, Expedia, Pinterest, Huffpost, survey monkey, and many more.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is the leader in generating an audience for your social media channels. We live in a world where people connect on social media more than they do in real life. This establishes social media channels as one of the critical elements of your business. And Hootsuite not only understands it but uses this relationship to your business’s advantage by deploying innovative and proven strategies to convert your business into a brand on social media.
Final Words 👩🏫
Initially, content marketing is a road of confusion, mistakes, and difficulties for businesses, but the further you go down, the easier and rewarding it becomes. The tools described above will help you make the right marketing strategies, stronger connections, and an enhanced customer base so that you can grow and scale your business. You may also be interested in the Best Email Marketing Tools. Also, check out: 15 Courses to learn Content Marketing from scratch. 25 Online Marketing Terms to Know as a Small Business Owner.
