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March 18, 2021
Content marketing is essential for your business. It is the number one way businesses attract more traffic to their site. Did you know that website traffic is highest for those leading in the content marketing game?
Content marketing is important for your overall growth, social media strategy, and search engine optimization. With so much opportunity for content marketing, how can you make sure you are getting it right? A great start is finding the right content marketing tools.
Search engines reward websites that produce unique, useful, and high-quality content. If you rank highly in the SERPs (search engine results pages), potential customers are more likely to find you.
Below you will find some of the best tools for your business. Some are free to use; some operate on a freemium-style model. Having an excellent content marketing strategy doesn’t have to break the bank.
The first step when planning a content marketing campaign is to decide the topic for the content!
What do people want to know? What topics are others in your industry talking about? This is where BuzzSumo comes in very handy.
You type in your niche or a topic you want to write about; it will show you everything currently shared about that topic. You can see which pieces of content are getting the most shares on social media and how many backlinks they have. This will give you some idea of what people want to see online in this niche.
BuzzSumo isn’t a one-trick pony; it also shows you the influential people for a specific topic or subject. Having this information can be invaluable for when you start to promote your content. You can search for people who may want to share your content and reach out to them.
This tool also lets you see all the influencers in your niche. Finding exemplary brand ambassadors and spokespeople is vital for your brand image. You may want to collaborate with these people in influencer campaigns in the future.
Creating content with no research will never fly. You can’t just create a piece of content because you think it will be helpful for people. Analysis and planning are critical to any decent content marketing strategy.
Ahrefs is one of the best tools to get ideas. Mainly ideas about what your competitors are up to. You can use this tool to see which keywords your competitors are ranking for (very important!) and view their backlinks.
The keyword research part is instrumental for creating successful content. It identifies words that have high search volume but your competitors are not ranking for.
You can pinch the underused keywords for yourself! Create a quality piece of content around these words or phrases, and voila, you will be on page one of the search engines in no time.
This tool is also excellent to see the websites linking to your competitors. Credible backlinks are great for SEO and essential for your site to be recognized as authoritative by search engines.
You can check the content that your competitors are getting linked to and create something of even higher quality. Then you can see if the linking sites will link to your more up-to-date, thorough content.
Keeping up with every content marketing campaign you are running can be challenging, especially if you have several team members working on a project.
The answer to this is Trello. It is a fantastic tool for collaboration and team members to see what work still needs to be done on a project. It is also a great place to drop ideas and inspiration for things in the pipeline.
Did you ever click through to an article, see it was terribly presented, and leave the website?
Canva is the tool to avoid this ever happing to your site. There are hundreds of free templates created by designers to make your blog posts, social media, and ads look polished and professional.
There is also a premium subscription that offers the option to download photos and even more design templates.
Let’s be honest, if you have an incredible piece of content but no imagery to break it up, readers are going to churn. They need visually pleasing content to stay engaged. It’s just the way the human mind works.
On Unsplash, there are thousands of photos taken by professional photographers that can be downloaded for free.
The loading speed of your page is crucial to stop people from dropping off your website.
This tool helps reduce the size of images while maintaining their quality. Huge image files are often a reason for a very long load time. So make sure all your images are optimized to make your page as speedy as possible.
Did you know nearly 50% of us will only wait 3 seconds for a web page to load before we leave to go elsewhere? Don’t let your customers leave your site before they have even made it there!
Email marketing is still one of the best ways to have direct communication with your customers. Your email arrives in their pocket and asks them to take any action that will benefit your business. It’s genius!
Clever emails work wonders, and Mailchimp is still one of the best tools for this. If you have a small number of subscribers, you can get a free plan.
This tool’s analytics aspects are also excellent for giving you insight into open rates and click-through rates. You can analyze what messaging works and what doesn’t. Mailchimp even allows you to A/B test your subject line and email content.
Want to share a video or blog post on social media? But don’t you want to use all your characters up with an ugly, long link? This is the tool for you. It shortens any link to a few characters, perfect for sharing on social media.
Bitly also offers an analytics service, which means you can track how many people clicked on the link and where they clicked through from.
No content marketing is complete without a strategy for promotion.
It’s all very well creating content, but you need to get it in front of the right people. Using a tool such as Followwonk can help you find relevant people from your industry who may be want to share your content.
The tool allows you to search for people on Twitter through their bio. The search gives you information about their interests and location. Send them a message to see if they are interested in your content relevant to their work. If they say yes, send it over.
A tip here is to try and start a conversation, don’t just spam people with links. This won’t work and will irritate people. You want to use social media to build meaningful, reciprocal connections.
So you have planned, brainstormed, and created your content using all these content marketing tips and services. But what about continuing to share it?
Excellent pieces of content can be repurposed for multiple channels. You didn’t put all that work in just for one blog post, did you? Once you have repurposed the content, you can schedule it to go out on your different channels.
Hootsuite allows you to schedule content for publishing on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. You can set all your posts up at the beginning of the week and then forget it.
It will save you lots of time. You can concentrate on brainstorming for the next piece of content!
79% of companies have a content marketing strategy in place. Don’t get left behind. If you have a plan and clear goals of what you want to achieve, improving your content marketing will take no time.
The content marketing tools we have listed above are a great way to start upping your content game. We have covered planning, organizing, brainstorming, creating, designing, and promoting your content. If you follow this sequence in your strategy, you should get more clarity and results with your content marketing.
Would you like some professional advice about your content plan? As a content marketing agency, we are here to help. Get in touch with us for support with creating a unique content plan for your business.
