New year, new opportunities. How do you take advantage of the upcoming year to grow your business? Content marketing! 2020 is going to be a great year to start a blog and attract customers. In fact, content marketing is the best strategy for small businesses according to many experts because it online marketing without spending too much money. To help you plan for the new year, I have accumulated top content marketing tools from all over the internet and put them into one helpful list. This should give you a big head start on your competitors and will enable you to build a strong foundation for your business in this new year.
HubSpot
HubSpot is an all-in-one inbound marketing, sales, and CRM suite that provides content marketers with all the tools they need to create actionable content that generates sales and drive leads.
The marketing suite provides content marketers with resources that enable them to create content, optimize it, and make sure it reaches the right audience. Once you’ve created your account and distributed your content, HubSpot analyzes your marketing strategy in terms of sales and overall performance.
When talking about content marketing tools, we cannot neglect Google. Google offers marketers a ton of tools that can have significant impact on your content strategy. Some of these tools include Keyword Planner for conducting keyword research, Google Analytics to give you an in-depth overview of your content performance over a period of time, Google Search Console, Google Trends, etc. The best part is that they are all free.
SEMRush
SemRush is your go-to SEO tool for keyword research and backlinks research. It is undoubtedly one of the best content marketing tools for researching content.
Best known for their keyword research tool, SemRush provides a detailed analysis of keywords with their difficulty score, monthly search volume, related keywords, and sites already ranking for the keyword.
SemRush earns the medal for being one of the best keyword research tools to use; with different filtering options available.
An important filtering feature for better and accurate research is the country filter. SemRush allows you to narrow your keyword research to a country.
When narrowing your keyword research, SemRush provides unique, different and accurate results.
To content marketers, the ability to carry out keyword research and know what your audience is search for is a plus.
The user base of SemRush includes bloggers and content marketers as the majority.
Beyond keyword research, SEMRUsh is an all in one marketing tool for content, SEO, advertising, and social media marketing.
Needless to say, SEMRush offers a backlink research tool that enables you to carry out deep research of the sites linking to your site alongside their domain authority, spam score, links gained and date, and links lost plus date.
However, SemRush allows you to run a project website that SemRush analyzes every month to give you a report on SEO performance and drawbacks.
You also get SEO site audits that enable you see if there are issues with your website that prevents it from ranking high on search engines. Some plans targeted at SEO agencies offer white label site audits.
Excellent. The cost?
SemRush presently has three standard recurring subscription plans; pro, guru, and business plan.
The pro plan costs $99.95, the standard plan costs $199.95, and the Business plan costs $399.95 per month.
And for agencies or companies in need of a custom plan, SemRush has this available as an enterprise plan.
Slack
Slack is a workplace communication and collaboration tool. The app is designed to help users collaborate with other people and team members online from anywhere in the world. The Slack workspace is made up of channels where teams can work together and share ideas. It supports the installation of other apps like Google Docs and Dropbox so you don’t need to ever leave the Slack workspace.
GetResponse
GetResponse is an all-in-one solution for email marketing and definitely not your regular email marketing software. It does more than manage your email list, it provides a webinar solution to host webinars.
Founded in 1998, GetResponse is regarded as one of the oldest and best email marketing service providers in the industry. GetResponse has a library of email templates to help you get started with engaging your subscribers.
The tagging and segmentation tool allows you to slice and dice your list based on their interest in order to send highly targeted emails to your subscribers. GetResponse autoresponders automatically send your subscribers emails based on a trigger. The trigger could be anything from replying to your emails, buying your product, and many more.
GetResponse also houses a library of landing page templates that lets you build a landing page to collect emails from your audience. The landing page templates are advanced enough to help you include attractive offers like videos and webinars on the page.
However, where GetResponse beats the competition is its webinar hosting platform. Rare to see email marketing tools that allow you to host webinars, GetResponse does.
For eCommerce marketing, GetResponse offers abandoned carts, payment processors, automation, store, reporting, and integrations.
The abandoned carts remind customers of all abandoned carts when they’re about to leave your store. The payment processor unlocks different payment gateway for integration on your eCommerce store.
Finally, the pricing plan. GetResponse offers four different pricing plans which are; basic, plus, professional, and enterprise plans. The basic plan starts from $15 per month offering email marketing, autoresponders, and many more features.
The plus plan starts from $49 per month offering all in the basic plan plus contact scoring and tagging, 5 sales funnels, automation builder, and webinar funnels.
And at $99 per month, the professional plan offers all in the Plus plan together with unlimited automation builder, paid webinars, and on-demand webinars.
Finally, the enterprise plan offers all in the professional plan together with transactional emails, account managers, and dedicated IP addresses.
SharpSpring
Another amazing content marketing tool you might need is SharpSpring. Founded in 1998 and one of the old marketing tools, SharpSpring has grown to become a strong alternative for its competitor, Hubspot.
Rather than being just an email tool, SharpSpring is a full suite marketing automation tool; that allows you to monitor your different marketing campaigns and also track what’s working.
The ability to track what’s bringing results in your marketing campaign is the foundation of SharpSpring according to its founder, Rick Carlson.
Among many features, SharpSpring allows you to send out emails, build landing pages with a library of templates, create forms, design your emails, lead nurturing, automation, lead scoring, and many more. SharpSpring offers different solutions for small businesses, agencies, and enterprises.
Notably, SharpSpring offers flexible pricing plans for different categories of businesses. They offer services for small businesses, agencies, and enterprises.
SharpSpring offers a month to month flexible billing that’s flexible enough to get started easily. The month-month pricing removes the word “commitment” from the pricing, and allows you to stop using the software anytime.
For the small business package, SharpSpring offers three different pricing plans which include the basic plan that costs $550 per month supporting not more than 1500 contacts to reach out to, the second plan that supports 10,000 contacts costs $850 per month, and finally the premium plan that costs $1250 per month offering support for up to 20,000 words.
Monday
Paid Plans starting at $8 per seat/month
It’s time to talk about organization. The other tools mentioned above have helped you create great content that your audience cares about. Monday will help you make sure that you hit publish on all of those ideas. Organization is key to your content success because content marketing comes with a lot of moving parts. With Monday, you can build out your editorial calendar, assign tasks to each team member, and add updates to each task to make sure they’re moving along the pipeline.
Content marketers love Monday because:
- They can create an editorial calendar that’s shared with their team
- Assigning tasks to team members avoid the need for extra communication in another platform (ahem, Slack or email)
- Adding updates to tasks helps keep the content lead in the know about the status of each assignment and the overall project.
Trello
Trello is a visual collaboration and project management tool that makes planning and collaboration fun.
The platform makes use of boards to represent projects and cards to represent tasks to be done. Inside the cards, there are lists that categorize and track the progress of each task. With Trello, you get to organize and track all the team files and projects all in one place. It also supports integration with most of the apps your team already uses.
PerfectAudience
PerfectAudience is a solution born out of needs created in the content marketing space. A product by SharpSpring (parent company: NowSpot Inc. ), Perfect Audience is built to help you make the best of your paid ads.
What’s more painful than your ads campaign stopping even before you’re able to convert any of your audience?
SharpSpring created PerfectAudience to solve this need. PerfectAudience helps you collate all your retargeting advertising into one application.
Rather than having to switch interfaces and transferring data to collate results of your retargeting advertising, Perfect Audience helps you gather all your retargeting advertising to build that “Perfect Audience”.
A perfect audience helps you to gather retargeting audiences from the Web, Facebook, Twitter, Shopify, mobile, and cross-device.
Definitely, with Perfect Audience, you can retarget lost visitors on your website with your ads and get a better conversion rate.
Interestingly, Perfect Audience is used by some of the best brands on the internet like Eventbrite, AppSumo, New Relic, 99Designs, and many more.
Surprisingly, Perfect Audience does not have a fixed pricing or a fee. Perfect Audience charges you based on the CPM you spend on retargeting ads.
In addition, they offer a two weeks free trial or a free trial until your ad spend reaches $100.
Adobe Marketing Cloud
Adobe is an online marketing cloud and integrated marketing solution that assists marketers in optimizing marketing campaigns and analyzing website performance data. The tool would sync all of your data in one easy to manage dashboard.
Even better, the tool integrates with more than 200+ partners in 20 countries.
SendinBlue
SendinBlue is an all in one digital marketing toolbox that helps businesses to optimize email campaigns. It has a helpful feature called “send time optimization” to help you increase the open rate of your emails by making use of algorithms that determine the right time to send out emails. It provides a robust email and SMS messaging service that is user-friendly.
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MailChimp
MailChimp is one of the best email marketing tools in the industry. It can also be regarded as an all-in-one solution, but email marketing remains its strength. It is one of the best content marketing tools for handling your email marketing.
Although MailChimp offers other services like running Facebook ads campaigns, Twitter ads, etc. the services aren’t as good as the email marketing service they offer.
Equipped with all you need to collect and manage emails, MailChimp can be regarded as an all-in-one solution when it comes to email automation.
MailChimp allows you to manage your customers by slicing and dicing them into segments based on their interests.
For a start, MailChimp offers prebuilt segments to put your customers.
With MailChimp software, you can create signup forms to collect information, put them in segments, and then send them a targeted mail based on their interest.
And that’s the major use of MailChimp as a content marketer.
MailChimp offers behavioral targeting feature that enables you to send certain messages to your targets based on set triggers.
The trigger could be purchasing equipment. Immediately after purchase, MailChimp automatically sends transactional emails to the buyer.
Other services that MailChimp offers are landing pages, postcards, shoppable landing pages, custom domains, tags, and report analytics.
As good as it sounds, MailChimp offers a forever free plan with limited functions and features.
The remaining three plans: essential, standard, and premium plan comes at a monthly fee.
The essential plan starts from $10 per month, while the standard comes at $15 per month, and finally, the premium plan costs $299 per month.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is your go-to backlink research tool that is second to Moz (only). It is really an industry leader in SEO and backlink research.
Ahrefs comprises amazing features and tools for effective SEO monitoring. Apart from the tool itself, Ahrefs provides advanced SEO tutorials on their blog and YouTube channel.
And that makes them a resource and a tool for every content marketer.
Ahrefs allows you to track broken links on your site, spam links, anchor texts for links, and many other SEO insights to check.
Perfect for running website SEO audits, Ahrefs gives you insights on how to better optimize your website for search engines.
A look at Ahrefs dashboard, Ahrefs has site explorer, keyword explorer, site auditor, rank tracker, content explorer, domain comparison, link intersect, SEO toolbar, and WordPress plugin.
Ahrefs pricing starts from $99 per month apart from some other features that are added as an add-on to the package.
While Ahrefs is one of the best content marketing tools for backlink research, it offers other features like keyword research, SEO site audit, search rank tracking, and content research.
Contently
Contently is the solution for your content needs. Housing thousands of freelance writers from various niches, Contently makes it easy to hire a writer.
As content marketers, we live and breathe content. Without content we are powerless, as our gospel is good content brings results.
From blog posts, infographics, poems, press releases, videos, images, ebooks, and many more; they’re all the backbone of content marketing.
And here’s where Contently plays in. Contently is a content marketing agency that let you hire freelance writers for your content marketing projects.
Instead of going through the stress and risks in hiring a skilled and knowledgeable freelance writer, Contently maps you to a suitable writer for your tasks.
Moreover, freelance writers on Contently have a portfolio section that contains all their writing samples and previous projects accomplished.
Definitely, as a content marketer (read : client) you have access to the portfolio of freelance writers.
Likewise, as a freelance content marketer, you have access to a pool of high paying clients. All you have to do is set up a profile and update the profile with your previous projects. Then, Contently matches you with a suitable project that you can handle.
Looking at record, Contently has paid more than $40 million dollars to their freelance writers’ community. And this is a massive revenue similar to those of Saas tools.
Definitely, even though Contently isn’t a tool per se, it’s a must-have for content marketers.
Zoho
Zoho is an effective CRM software with a range of features that makes it easy to close sales and attract new customers. Zoho CRM allows you to monitor all customer accounts for cross-sell or upsell opportunities. It also features an Opportunity Tracking Tool to help you analyze what stage of the sales cycle your customer is.
HootSuite
Hootsuite is a social relationship software that helps marketers use social platforms to execute marketing campaigns.
The biggest advantage of HootSuite is that it allows businesses to manage all social media platforms in one user-intuitive dashboard. The tool provides social intelligence by tracking mentions of your brand and product on social media.
Conclusion
When it comes to content marketing, your success depends on your content. A good content marketing strategy takes hard work, time and creativity. It is proven that creating valuable content brings in more traffic to the website. But, how you can make your business stand out is by giving something unique and valuable to your customers. These days, people don’t only read the text they’re given; they want entertaining stuff like audios or visual content like videos. Content creation tools are the right way to create an attractive, engaging and effective content quickly.