What are content creation tools? Content creators will use a variety of popular free content creation tools, from free word processors to free graphics editing software or free website design software. Need help finding free social media content creation tools? Read this article to find the best list of free social media content creation tools out there.
In case you weren’t aware, there are many different types of content creation tools that can be used for content campaigns. “Although people may not be familiar with marketing, everyone who is involved in marketing should know about the best free content creation tools available.”
Content creation tools help media professionals create social media posts and other content across multiple channels. These tools can save a lot of time because they provide templates and shortcuts to help you find the right words and format quickly. This article introduces what are content creation tools and the benefits they offer, then lists the top eight content creation tools for social media.
Content Creation Tools are a set of tools that marketers can use to help them with their content marketing work. Bloggers, social media managers and other online marketers can leverage these tools to optimize the performance of various content initiatives. There is a large number of such tools out there, so it might be challenging to find the right one. To ease the pain of choosing the best tool, we’ve compiled a list of the most important content creation tools that you need to know about.
What is content creation?
Content creation is the process of generating ideas for topics that appeal to your audience. It is creating written or visual content around those ideas and making that information available to your audience as a blog, video, infographic, or other formats.
Content creation usually involves:
- Setting measurable goals for your content
- Understanding how each piece of content fits into your wider marketing strategy
- Developing ideas to meet your goals through brainstorming
- Keyword research and competitor analysis
- Planning and producing top-notch content
- Ongoing optimization and improvement
- Measuring and analyzing the success of your content
When you approach content creation with goals in mind, you will be able to scale it up and gain a competitive advantage as a result of your work.
It’s all about developing content that has a purpose and understanding how you should set up every piece to make sure that it has measurable results.
The most important thing to know is that content creation is a process. If you can develop a solid content creation process, you will be set up to succeed.
SEMrush Topic Research Tool
Topic research is one of the most effective ways to quickly come up with ideas to explore further and to inspire your content plan. The SEMrush topic research tool makes it a quick and easy process to come up with a whole host of potential ideas around your core topic in just minutes.
Just enter a subtopic and see related articles and questions being asked in real-time.
Cost: From $99.95 per month (but this includes an entire sweet of content, SEO, PPC, and social media tools)
SEMrush Marketing Calendar
Once you have identified the content that you want to create, you need to map out a solid editorial calendar and stick to it.
Planning a content strategy around a calendar will help you be accountable and take the steps needed to regularly drive growth. It is a great way to motivate you to keep on top of a regular publishing schedule, and the SEMrush Marketing Calendar is the perfect tool to help you to do this.
Cost: From $99.95 per month
SparkToro
SparkToro positions itself as a way to “Instantly discover what your audience reads, watches, listens to, and follows.” When it comes to planning your content strategy, it is absolutely imperative that you know who you are targeting and what their interests are.
The more you can create your content around your target market’s needs and wants, the better success you will enjoy, and this tool crawls tens of millions of social and web profiles to share the insights you need on your audience.
Cost: From FREE for 10 searches per month to $225 per month for 500 searches
Google Trends
Google Trends can help you to understand the popularity of a search term or topic amongst Google searchers (which, let’s face it, is the majority of web users).
Enter a query and see how interest has trended over time and use this insight to create content around topics that are quickly gaining traction (gaining a competitive advantage by being the first to jump on a trend) or, similarly, identify those that are likely losing interest.
Cost: FREE
AlsoAsked.com
Google is regularly referred to as an answer engine, and this means that we need to be considering the questions that are being asked by searchers.
And one of the most effective tools that you can use to help you to find the questions that you need to be optimizing your website for is AlsoAsked.com, a free tool that returns the “People Also Asked” data, giving you an insight into longtail searches and, importantly, defines the relationship between topics and questions.
Cost: FREE
Answer the Public
As we have already discussed, you should be optimizing for questions as part of your SEO strategy, and the more insight you have access to, the better responses you can give to the different questions that are being asked.
While AlsoAsked.com shows results from PAA, Answer the Public returns results from Suggest data, showing combinations of auto-complete searches.
Use the two tools together to supercharge your insights and research.
Cost: FREE
Feedly
Feedly shows you all of the relevant feeds in your niche under a quick search, and consistently updates new content into your feed each and every day.
So, you’re never out of the loop.
But what makes it a good content creation tool?
Because by adding your competitors into the tool you’re able to see:
- New content when it’s published
- The hot trends you need to talk about
- Where you can add blog comments to drive traffic back to your blog
- Steal content ideas that you can Skyscraper
- Curate content for your social media feeds
For example, when I look at my Affiliate & SEO feed every morning, I’m greeted with everything my competitors have been doing:
And you can take it one step further and narrow it down to each individual competitor:
And you get all of this for the grand total of…free.
Plus with the new Feedly integrations, like with Zapier and IFTTT, you can curate content directly onto your blog, tweet them or store them in pocket:
You have to upgrade to Feedly Pro for these ($5.41 per month) so if they’ll come in handy, I’d definitely recommend using them.
Quora (not for the reason you would think)
The usual reason to use Quora is quoted as, “Find out what your audience is asking about and create content about it!”, which is great and all, but I have a different variation on why you should be using it.
It’s not only to find ideas to write about but to actually write about your content.
Let me explain…
Darren Rowse says one of the best outcomes from Blog Commenting is that you’re immersed and it often births new ideas for blog content because you’re forced to write about a specific topic or angle and share your opinion.
And, he’s not wrong.
By using Quora for this you’re able to do it for all of your platforms, too.
Finding questions and answering them you force yourself to create content more frequently and cement your opinions. Which is where content ideas come from.
I left this comment when someone was asking about email marketing & blogging–
Which led to me write a much more detailed guide about email marketing along with my full personal strategy & copies of all of the emails that I send out as part of my autoresponder.
Instead of just looking for questions and writing your answers somewhere else, commit to writing answers there and look for the content ideas that come from them.
There’s a much better way to answer questions on your own platform coming up next…
Where you would use Feedly to target your competitors, you should use Flipboard to find new competitors and even more on-the-pulse trends.
Flipboard is available on your phone, and desktop, and most Samsung Phone users will already be well acquainted with it (swipe right on your home screen).
Now, stories of Taylor Swift’s love life aside, you can set it up to follow specific channels and topics. And, it’ll bring you all the relevant stories that have been submitted to Flipboard up to this very moment.
If I type in Plumbing – a hard topic to create content about – you’re given this extensive list of topics (it goes on beyond the image):
For your Plumber’s social media feed or blog you now have a virtual cheese board of content ideas to choose from, curate and skyscraper.
From this list I’ve already got:
- 10 Quirky Ways To Decorate Your Pipes
- Natural Bath Designs (That Don’t Need To Be Natural)
- 15 DIY Bathmats You Can Make For Under $10
- How To Create A Household Sink And Drain Unblocker
This is one of those content development tools you can check every day just for fresh inspiration, and can delve into much more deeply when you’re really stuck for an idea.
And, guess what? It’s free.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo simplifies the entire content research process by pulling in popular posts based on keywords.
These results can then be sorted according to their reach in social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
This allows you to scrape the web for content ideas that pique your target audience’s interest.
You can also use custom filters to further refine your search.
For example, you can look specifically for “how-to” posts, narrow your search down to a specific country, exclude a certain domain, and much more.
SEMrush SEO Content Template
If you are creating content to help you rank on the SERPs, you shouldn’t be writing blind. You need to know what is helping the top results to rank and take this into consideration when creating your own content.
The SEMrush content template can help you analyze the content that is ranking top for your target keywords and help you understand what you need to include in your own pages to compete.
Cost: From $99.95 per month
Grammarly
It might sound simple but creating mistake-free content is harder than it sounds.
Grammarly can help you check for spelling and grammatical errors in your content while writing, as well as helping you to focus the tone of your content and check for plagiarism. The browser add on also makes sure you avoid typos in social shares.
Think of it as your helping hand to make sure your content reads well and is free from errors.
Cost: Free version and Premium $139.95 a year
What types of content are out there?
There are many kinds of content, including blogs, listicles, ebooks, infographics, videos, how-to guides, and case studies.
All these different content types are usually hosted online, either as part of a website, available for download or accessible as a reward for membership or signing up for a newsletter.
The content that you create is heavily tied to your business growth. Like all marketing pursuits, creating content that is well-planned, and well-executed that engage with your audience and creates a level of trust with them will directly affect your sales.
In order to get the most you can out of your content creation, you will know what kinds of content are popular and the ways that content is changing.
Content has recently seen a big shift from the entirely written, text-based content of the 20th century to the video and audio content that has overtaken today.
Podcasting in particular has exploded in popularity over the last few years. There are now more than 700,000 active podcasts, covering everything from business advice to pop culture to keep listeners engaged.
Conclusion
Content creation tools are essential for businesses to create textual and visual content for their website, blog, and social media accounts. With the rise of social media marketing and digital marketing, tools that help in creating engaging content have become popular. There are many free and paid content creation tools available which help marketers create informative as well as visually appealing content that can be shared through multiple channels. These tools can be used for various purposes such as for creating training programs, tutorials, webinars, presentations, and much more.
Content creation tools are online platforms that allow users to create and edit content. There are many benefits to using content creation tools, such as the ability to collaborate with other users on a document at the same time. A great, free option for creating digital documents is Google Docs, which features add-ons that can help you improve the readability of your content.