Content Marketing Tools Landscape

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is about creating and distributing content to build brand awareness, generate leads, and drive sales. Traditionally it involves creating and sharing blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, social media posts, and other forms of content. Ingredients of effective content marketing are a well-defined target audience, a clear content strategy, and a distribution and promotion plan.

Sounds simple enough. But when you dive into the specifics, you will soon find out that a lot of steps are necessary to make an impact. And each step requires different software applications. In this article, we will address a handful of content marketing software apps, that will give you success.

Prepare

Preparation is an essential part of effective content strategies. To create more effective and targeted content that is more likely to drive results for your business you need to prepare with:

• Keyword research: to improve the visibility of your content in search engines and attract more qualified traffic you need to identify relevant keywords
• Competitor analysis: to identify content opportunities and develop more effective strategies, you can use tools that can provide insights into the content and SEO strategies of your competitors
• Backlink analysis: if you want to secure more high-quality backlinks for your own content, you need to perform backlink analysis to identify websites that are linking to your competitor's content.
• On-page optimization: to impact the visibility of the content in search engines, you need insights into your on-page optimization (including the use of keywords, meta descriptions, and other elements)
• Content ideation: to help you gain insights into the types of content that are performing well within your industry and to identify gaps in the market

SEMrush

SEMrush is a digital marketing tool that provides a range of features and tools for search engine optimization (SEO), paid search (PPC), and content marketing. Some of the key features include keyword research, competitor analysis, on-page optimization, backlink analysis, and website audit tools.

Ahrefs

Like SEMrush, Ahrefs is a tool that helps you track and analyze websites and competitors' backlinks, organic search traffic, and keyword rankings. Ahrefs also has a keyword research tool that allows users to find long-tail keywords and related keywords for their content marketing and SEO efforts. Hrefs has a large database of backlinks, comprehensive keyword research capabilities, and detailed website audit reports.

SpyFu

With SpyFu you can research and analyzes your competitors' online SEO and PPC advertising strategies. SpyFu offers extensive keyword research capabilities, including information on the keywords that competitors are ranking for and the cost per click for those keywords. It also provides a detailed analysis of competitors' PPC campaigns, including information on the ad copy and landing pages they are using. To get the most out of SpyFu, you need to have some prior knowledge and understanding of digital marketing and SEO concepts in order to fully utilize the tool.

Keyword Tool

With Keyword Tool you can generate keyword ideas for your SEO and PPC campaigns. With Keyword Tool you can generate a large number of keyword ideas in multiple languages and countries. It also integrates with various advertising platforms such as Google Ads and Bing Ads.

Create Content

When you are creating content - a blog, ebook, whitepaper, or infographic - you need at least two things: Copy and Visuals. A new kid on the block in content creation is interactive content, like quizzes, calculators, surveys and assessments. With interactive content, your leads provide information and receive value in return. This value exchange is the mechanism that drives increased conversions and generates more leads. For an effective content strategy you want to combine passive and active content. We will highlight some tools that can help you in creating great copy, visuals, and interactive content better and faster.

Grammarly

Grammarly helps you improve your writing by checking for real-time grammar, spelling, punctuation, and style mistakes and giving grammar explanations and suggestions for improvement. Grammarly's biggest strength is its ability to provide comprehensive and accurate feedback on writing errors and help you to improve the overall quality and clarity of your writing.

ChatGPT by OpenAI

Since the introduction of powerful AI writing models, new applications were launched that can support your copywriting. One of the most influential AI companies out there, OpenAI, has launched its own interface on top of its AI technology, called ChatGPT. Giving you a viable alternative to the paid tools. ChatGPT offers a conversational interface that can handle a wide range of questions. Perfect for supporting you in your content creation efforts.

Hemingway Editor

Hemingway Editor helps you improve the clarity and simplicity of your writing. It offers real-time suggestions for shorter, simpler sentences, and it provides a readability score. Hemingway Editor focuses on simplicity and clarity, helping you to write clearly and concisely.

Bannerbear

Bannerbear helps you auto-generate social media visuals, e-commerce banners, and more with their API and integrations. The app supports #nocode automated workflows that take care of repetitive marketing tasks in the background.

Canva

Canva makes it easy to create and share professional designs. They offer thousands of professional templates, images, and quality content to get started. No matter if you are making an infographic, banner, poster, or video, Canva has the tools to enable you to create stunning graphics.

Figma

Figma is primarily an interface design tool. But its versatility and broad feature set allow you to create stunning marketing images with ease.

ConvertCalculator

ConvertCalculator offers a no-code builder that allows marketers to create interactive content such as calculators, quizzes, quote forms, and lead generation pages. Our do-it-yourself drag-and-drop builder allows marketers to create interactive content without the involvement of developers. We offer a broad range of high-quality templates to get you off to a good start.

ConvertCalculator distinguishes itself from the competition, by offering an extremely versatile, flexible, and powerful tool. That allows you to create interactive content with very few limitations or set approaches. Our proprietary logic and calculation engine called FormulaScript is our (not so) secret sauce that breathes life into your content. The power and versatility do mean ConvertCalculator can have a steeper learning curve than alternatives.

Involve.me and Outgrow

These tools have a similar offering to ConvertCalculator and allow you to create some great-looking interactive content. Both tools are more restrictive in what you can create, but that also makes them easier to learn.

Final thought: a great resource to discover software tools that fit your content marketing strategy is a marketplace like Tekpon.