Content marketing lies at the core of all online marketing strategies as it improves brand awareness, fosters strong customer relationships and increases revenue (indirectly).
Let’s take a quick look at a few statistics that reveal the potential of content marketing, when done correctly:
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Marketers who leveraged content marketing saw 7.8 times more website traffic than those who didn’t, according to Aberdeen
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Content marketing costs 62 percent lesser than outbound marketing, but generates three times more leads
If you want to take your marketing strategy to the next level, create high-quality content and distribute it across the right channels to ensure maximum visibility. The tactics are several, but you need to know and apply the right ones along with the right tools to ensure success.
Here is a list of the top 35 tools that will help you stay ahead of the competition:
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1. Quora
Description:
Quora is a social networking forum that was designed to provide the ‘best answer to any question.’ Content marketers can look for recent trends (what people are talking about), communicate with peers and potential customers, and offer readers with helpful information and/or solutions, thus establishing authority in their niche.
Features:
- Video posts on Q&A pages
- Top writers program
- Blogging section
- Threaded commenting system
- Win a badge by answering an average of 350 questions
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2. BuzzSumo
Description:
BuzzSumo helps you with content discovery, content curation and identification of influencers who can enhance your content marketing efforts. Use insights offered by BuzzSumo to create useful content and track competitor’s content strategies. You can track backlinks as well.
Features:
- Know topics that gain most attention
- Get insights about content that perform best on social media
- Identify influencers
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3. Harvest
Description:
This time-tracking tool will keep you on-track, help you spend less time tracking and do more useful work. With Harvest, you can quickly get your employees and team members onboard and make important business decisions. Understand how much time you are investing on specific tasks, which areas demand more time, and how you can organize your schedule to make sure you get better results with Harvest.
Features:
- Simple time-tracking
- Quick online invoicing
- Powerful reports
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4. Alltop
Description:
Alltop answers the question ‘What’s Happening?’ on a variety of topics. It collects the top stories from the best blogs, sites and other top publications, and displays them on its interface for its users. You can find information regarding food, religion, technology, business, science, game, fashion, celebrities, and any other field. So, you can take cues from the latest topics and create content around them to attract attention.
Features:
- View the latest news
- Aggregate different topics from the app
- Identify the most popular stories
- Browse or search by category
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5. Buffer
Description:
The success of your content marketing strategies depends on how you distribute the content. Buffer helps you manage multiple social accounts and schedule content for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. By utilizing this tool, you can streamline content distribution.
Features:
- User-friendly interface
- Add accounts and manage content easily
- Quick reporting
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6. HubSpot
Description:
One of the best-known tools for inbound marketing, HubSpot has helped many businesses win at content marketing. It helps businesses create a solid Web presence, convert traffic into leads, and analyze business metrics to understand what works and what does not. Increase traffic, conversions and overall revenue for your business. Analyze your content to track performance and the channels that drive maximum traffic to your website, and focus on areas that need improvement.
Features:
- Business blogging
- Social media management
- HubSpot CRM
- Full channel analytics
- Lead management
- CTA reporting
- Email campaign management
- Marketing channel analytics
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7. Hootsuite
Description:
Hootsuite offers you a platform to manage multiple social accounts. The dashboard can be used to promote products and services, analyze social traffic, track brand mentions, and do a lot more. With over 10 million active users, it surely has the potential to give you the competitive advantage.
Features:
- Social Analytics reports
- Update multiple networks in a single step
- Optimize delivery
- Manage multiple contributors
- Gather intelligence by tracking mentions of your brands
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8. SlideShare
Description:
Think PowerPoint presentations are a thing of the past? You may want to rethink that! SlideShare allows you to promote products, services and content (about any topic) in a visually appealing manner. When done correctly, you can attract tremendous attention. For example, content with an interesting headline like ‘YouTube Virality’ received 20,000+ views.
Features:
- Uploading presentations (publicly or privately)
- Embedding presentations on blogs, websites
- Social sharing
- LeadShare for generating business leads
- Creating webinars
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9. Kissmetrics
Description:
Kissmetrics offers you with insights and timely interactions that help you turn visitors into customers. It helps businesses understand their online users and create content that would be most useful for them. Insights from this tool can help you identify important patterns within specific audience segments. You can use these insights to improve your content marketing strategies and measure their impact.
Features:
- Cohort report
- Real-time tracking
- Revenue report
- A/B testing
- Behavioral comparisons and campaigns
- Funnel report
- Audience segmentation
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10. Pinterest
Description:
Visual content has a deeper impact on human beings compared to textual content. Tag and share images and videos, follow brands and individuals, and ‘repin’ images. Derive inspiration from popular pins and create content around the most happening topics.
Features:
- Collect any images online as visual bookmarks, and organize them
- Share lists with anyone or keep them private
- Follow pins and lists from others
- View images with location tags on a map
- iOS and Android apps available
- Collaboratively curate digital scrapbooks
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11. Twitter
Description:
With 317 million monthly active users, Twitter has emerged as one of the largest social networking platforms. Search for trending topics on Twitter and gain insights on what people are talking about around the world. Search for hashtags relevant to your niche and industry to find the subjects that interest your existing and potential audiences.
Features:
- Send and read other users updates
- Send and receive updates via Twitter website, SMS, RSS, emails, etc.
- Identify people who you need to follow
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12. PRWeb
Description:
Pitching journalists is an important aspect of content marketing as they can act as influencers. PRWeb allows marketers to publish SEO-friendly press releases about your services and products to reach out to 30,000 journalists, 250,000 opt-in news subscribers, and 3 million monthly visitors. This is an easy-to-use platform and offers a number of tools to create press releases, distribute them and track their success.
Features:
- Create and distribute
- Track news
- Associated press distribution
- News digests
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13. BuzzStream
Description:
BuzzStream helps you build links, drive traffic to your website, and manage word-of-mouth marketing campaigns. While it is designed mainly for link-building, it can also help with contacting influencers, managing relationships, and conducting outreach. Link-building boosts your content and SEO rankings, and improves their reach and visibility.
Features:
- Research influencers
- Metrics collection
- Scheduled emails
- Social media metrics
- Get email notifications
- Data filtering
- Press contact list
- Collaborative workspace
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14. MailChimp
Description:
Emails are a great means of reaching your target audience and nurturing your relationship with existing customers. You can use MailChimp for automating and personalizing emails. The content you create can be shared with email subscribers and used to attract new subscribers to your email lists. Email marketing is still alive and helps content marketers in numerous ways.
Features:
- Set up email lists
- Run email campaigns
- Track responses
- Handle unsubscribe requests
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15. SimpleReach
Description:
SimpleReach was designed to help content marketers with content measurement and distribution. Distribute your killer content among your target audience across channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Outbrain, Twitter, etc. Track its performance and use the insights offered by this tool to optimize your content’s reach.
Features:
- Audience-targeting
- Brand management
- Conversion tracking
- Distribution management
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16. Google Analytics
Description:
Who does not know about Google Analytics? It is the most widely-used free analytics tool that offers easy-to-use interface to measure Web metrics. It also allows you to generate customized reports, measure the impact of social media, track mobile traffic, and measure conversion rates. Google offers free tutorials that make accessing the analytics easier. It is available in two versions, namely Google Analytics 360 (for enterprise users) and Google Analytics for Mobile Apps (to track data from iOS and Android Apps).
Features:
- e-Commerce tracking
- Conduct site search
- Set campaigns
- Filter internal traffic
- Connect to Google Webmaster Tools
- Connect with Google AdWords
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17. Simply Measured
Description:
Simply Measured is a social media analytics and measurement tool that helps content marketers research every post and measure its effectiveness. It offers reports on all major social platforms including Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and others. Though the reports are not very detailed, useful insights from them help in designing content marketing strategies for social media.
Features:
- Competitive analysis and benchmarking
- Consolidated data
- Social media channel analytics
- Social media monitoring and research
- Reports in Excel and online formats
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18. Klout
Description:
The key to content marketing success lies in creating high-quality content and distributing it among the right channels. Klout makes this easier by suggesting topics that your audience is yet to see and helps you measure their impact. Klout Score is a feature that measures social media users’ influence (on a 100-point scale) over several social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The higher the score, the huger is the influence.
Features:
- Content scheduling
- Klout Score
- Daily following suggestions
- Measuring and tracking impact
- Sharing content
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19. Traackr
Description:
Influencer marketing has recently become the buzzword among content marketers; and if you want to be successful in your content marketing efforts, you cannot afford to ignore it. Traackr allows you to identify influencers and manage your relationship with them. You can also track influencers’ impact on your business.
Features:
- Identify influencers in your niche
- Engage with influencers on Twitter
- Access content published by influencers in real time
- Track influencers’ impact on your business
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20. Storify
Description:
Millions of people share ideas, thoughts and perceptions online and you can get cues for content creation by simply studying them. The secret to successful content marketing lies in the ability to create valuable content that resonates with the audience. Storify offers you with way to collect, identify and share what others are saying. Create unique stories and share them with your audience to build trust and improve the visibility of your brand.
Features:
- Live story updates
- Custom sources available
- SEO compatibility
- Advanced Twitter search tools
- Real-time collaboration on new data
- Photo uploading
- Google Analytics integration
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21. Contently
Description:
Scaling content is the biggest challenge content marketers often face. Contently helps create, distribute and optimize top-quality content to attract new audience. It has a number of well-established clients that include Philips, GM, American Express, among others. Stay in touch with over 55000 professional content writing freelancers, who make sure you never run out of ideas.
Features:
- Editorial calendars
- Content management tools
- Collaboration tools
- Analytics
- Social media management
- Freelancer payment management
- Editorial team management
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22. Trello
Description:
Staying organized is easy with Trello. This platform allows you to organize everything, from long-term projects to daily work, with help of neatly-organized cards in a visually-attractive environment. You can use Trello to not only collaborate with team members, but also as a community bulletin, idea repository and a lesson planner.
Features:
- Real-time collaboration
- Create unlimited cards
- Assign tasks
- Email notifications
- Categorize cards
- Make lists
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23. Visual.ly
Description:
If you have been doing content marketing for a while, you will know how important infographics are. In fact, infographics are 30 times more likely to be read than textual content; but do you know how to create them? Visual.ly will help you get this done with help of experts and designers from their market place. Drive traffic and amplify your social preference by creating cutting-edge infographics.
Features:
- Report builder
- Analytics
- Data visualization
- Cloud platform
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24. Skyword
Description:
With access to 20,000 writers, Skyword offers different levels of content creation services to clients. It has partnered with Bigstock Imagery for providing stock images and Thomson Reuters for providing business intelligence. With Skyword’s help, you can take your content marketing efforts notches higher and create deeper connections with your audience.
Features:
- Audience targeting
- Schedule publication
- Editorial calendar
- Brand management
- Conversion tracking
- Distribution management
- SEO and social media management
- Multi-channel publishing
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25. Socedo
Description:
Social media plays a critical role in augmenting content marketing. Socedo is an intuitive social media lead-generation tool, which helps businesses fill their funnel with qualified leads. It makes it easier to identify target audiences, engage them and convert them into leads.
Features:
- Analytics, API
- Access control
- CRM integration
- Automatic notifications
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26. Outbrain
Description:
Outbrain is a content promotion tool that is designed to promote content on top media sites and feature them as ‘promoted stories’. This gives publishers an opportunity to reach larger audiences and improve the visibility of their content. Outbrain allows publishers to select a daily budget and cost per click, based on which the tool determines the sites where the content is to be posted.
Features:
- Content promotion
- Advanced testing & conversion tools
- Mobile application
- Content recommendation optimization
- Content analysis
- Real-time recommendations
- Native campaign support
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27. Evernote
Description:
Having a hard time organizing your content marketing efforts? Evernote will help you get sorted. It helps you track your content ideas, maintain the editorial calendar, and save Web content for future reference. It also serves as an amazing collaboration tool that allows you to discuss your strategies and plans with your team members in real time. Evernote is available on all devices to get everything organized on the go!
Features:
- Web-clipping support
- Geolocation
- Record audio
- Save documents
- Snap photos
- Content available on any device
- Save favorite Web pages
- Share notes and collaborate on file
- Edit rich text and links
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28. Google Calendar
Description:
Google has always offered marketers with useful tools and Google Calendar is another one that helps content marketers stay organized. Creating content and sharing it at the right time is important to attract the attention of the people who matter the most to your business. Google Calendar helps you track important events and tasks related to your content strategy, and helps you collaborate with team members.
Features:
- Gmail-to-Calendar event add function
- Smart Rescheduler
- Event Flair
- Auto-Decline Events
- Year View
- Event Attachment
- Gentle Reminders
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29. Tweepi
Description:
Twitter has emerged as an important content marketing tool and can offer amazing results when utilized in the right manner. However, it can take hours to manage your Twitter account and connect with followers. Tweepi helps you find your target audience, connect with influencers and get noticed. The right level of engagement is required to strengthen relationships and gain audiences’ trust. Tweepi helps you do just that. Apart from increasing the number of followers, it helps you use data filters, remove inactive followers, and much more.
Features:
- Identification of non-followers
- Identification of targeted audience
- Un-follow users
- Follow by Bio Search tool
- Tweepi Flush
- Tweepi Reciprocate
- Tweepi Cleanup
- Tweepi Geeky Flush
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30. NewsCred
Description:
NewsCred is the one-stop tool for all content marketing necessities. It offers clients with millions of full-text articles, videos, photos and provides businesses with 2,500 sources to help brands grow efficiently. It also manages the legal and billing aspects for using content that belongs to other publications, companies and individuals.
Features:
- Editorial calendar
- Advanced analytics
- Marketing analytics
- Workflow management
- Schedule multi-channel distribution
- Email marketing
- Onsite training program
- Content recommendation
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31. Google Keyword Planner
Description:
Google Keyword Planner gives you insights on the keywords you should target. The keywords used to target through content is different from those used in PPC campaigns. This tool allows you to conduct in-depth analysis of the keywords and improve your content’s performance.
Features:
- Search for new keywords using a phrase, website or category
- Get search volume data and trends
- Get click and cost performance forecasts
- Track competitor performance
- Find local keywords
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32. Embedded Tweets
Description:
Increase the credibility of your content and make it more interactive using Embedded Tweets, a Twitter product. Twitter allows its users to embed tweets on websites, blogs and articles. By using Embedded Tweets you can increase traffic, share customer testimonials to prove the credibility of your business, promote events, and do a lot more.
Features:
- Embed tweets on websites, articles, blogs, and more.
- Embed tweets within tweets
- Include unique photos or a video within embedded tweets
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33. Moz
Description:
Moz offers basic and advanced research tools that allow businesses to monitor social media and manage SEO campaigns. It also offers keyword research tools that help identify keywords and analyze them for best results. Access numerous advanced SEO tools and leverage them to make your site rank on the top of the SERPs with Moz.
Features:
- Weekly crawls and rank tracking
- On-page recommendations
- Competitive analysis
- Continual improvement
- Moz toolbar
- Beta access to new tools
- Advanced Online Marketing Guide
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34. Nightwatch
Description:
Nightwatch is an all-in-one SEO tool designed for companies who are focused on scaling up their internet business. It is exceptionally good at segmenting and visualizing data with its intuitively designed dashboard.
Features:
- Monitor backlinks
- Perform a site audit
- Discover keywords and competitors automatically
- Integrate Google Maps Pack
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35. Shareist
Description:
Shareist is a useful tool that allows small and medium businesses track their entire content marketing cycle. It is especially helpful to those focusing on social media marketing. Get insights about latest trends, capture content from around the Web, save and schedule posts, and more with Shareist.
Features:
- Capture URLs, images, videos, tweets, documents, and so on.
- Built-in RSS reader to find great content
- Manage content in your ideas inbox
- Build content quickly and easily
- Schedule and share posts
- Social engagement analytics
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Conclusion
You need to modify your content strategy for your business from time to time in order to stay ahead of the herd. Content marketing, as you may know, is a time-consuming process, but with the help of the right tools, you can cut down the time needed and achieve quick results. So, evaluate your specific needs and choose the tools that would be most suitable for you.
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