Without good quality content, there is no way that your marketing strategies can be successful. High-quality content is one of the basic necessities of a successful marketing plan.
Today you can see that more than 80% of businesses are focusing on creating targeted content for their audiences. This is because content helps a marketer engage their target audience and boost conversion rates.
Overview of Content Marketing for Rookies
Those of you who don’t have much knowledge about content marketing should know that content marketing isn’t just a plan. It is a complete process that includes research, development, and promotion of content that is relevant to the interest of the target audience.
Content marketing can be executed in different formats. Usually, blogs, social media posts, emails, white papers, and newsletters are used for marketing content directly to the targeted audience.
Upright content marketing strategies show that a company is committed to its customers. Moreover, consistency in content marketing plays a major role in building a strong relationship between the customer and the brand.
Content is one of the key elements, which helps a brand win loyal customers. You must understand that without blogs, social media posts, and newsletters, there is no way a customer can know about a brand, its products, or its services.
If a customer does not know about your brand or your products, they will certainly not trust you, which is why it is important for every marketer to focus on a solid content marketing plan.
A few advantages of content marketing are listed here:
- Content marketing helps a business increase its leads by more than 60%
- More than 50% of buyers coming on the web today would only trust brands that have an extensive blog and informative blog section
- With content marketing, a brand can easily inform the audience about new deals, discounts, and promotions
- Companies that execute content marketing plans have a 30% higher growth than those that don’t
- Most importantly, content marketing is ten times cheaper than the traditional marketing and promotion plans
There are many more advantages of content marketing, which is why expert marketers today recommend the use of content marketing tools.
Why Is There a Need for Content Marketing Tools?
Now that you know, what content marketing is and why it is important, you should also know about the importance of tools that can help you streamline your content marketing strategies.
Content marketing tools are digital utilities that can make the execution of certain plans easy for your team. With the help of these tools, marketers can easily save time, effort, and cost, which is compromised in manual execution.
There are tons of benefits to using modern content marketing tools. With the help of these tools, you can easily research and know about the buyer persona, you can find new topics, which can intrigue the audience, and they can also help you follow the rules and restrictions given by the search engine.
Other than these benefits, you can also use these tools to create fresh content capital, which can persuade the buying decision of a potential customer.
There are tons of online tools which are specifically developed and launched for content marketers. Now we cannot discuss each and every tool in this post, so we have hand-picked a bunch of useful ones. The tools that we have discussed below are quite beneficial for both beginner and experienced marketers.
Five Helpful Tools for Content Marketers of All Ages
Out of plenty of online tools, we have discussed five interesting ones for your knowledge. Let us dig into their details:
1. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a tool that provides interesting and relevant content ideas to marketers. As a content marketer, you would always need to have unique and interesting ideas for content creation.
It is quite impossible to manually find out topics that would engage the audience on different platforms (blogs, social media, emails).
To get a topic or an idea for writing content, you just have to enter a phrase, keyword, domain name, or headline in the search bar of the tool and hit the ‘Search’ button. Within seconds the tool would provide you with at least ten topics related to your search term.
BuzzSumo provides ten topics for free, but if you are using the premium version, then you can easily get more.
The tool doesn’t only suggest relevant and engaging topics but would also share detailed statistics, which would show which topics would perform best on social media or a blog post. This way, you can decide which posts would perform well on different platforms.
The topics suggested by BuzzSumo are always relevant to the search queries of online audiences. Every marketer who wants to get unique ideas should pin this tool on their browser.
Key Features:
- The thing that we like about BuzzSumo is that it doesn’t only provide topic suggestions. The tool also helps marketers connect with people (influencers) who can help their businesses grow. By using this feature, a marketer can easily share their content on a larger scale and win more leads, hence more sales.
- Another feature of BuzzSumo is that it helps a marketer find out people who have shared their blogs/social media posts and how much traffic has been added because of their sharing.
- The tool is better than Google alerts because it provides detailed results, and that too for free.
- The premium version of the tool is very affordable, so marketers don’t have to worry about big holes in their pockets.
Overall the tool is very easy to use and is quite useful for marketers. After getting topic ideas from this tool, you can easily plan your marketing strategies for the upcoming days. The tool plays a vital role in creating and publishing content with consistency.
2. Online-Notepad.Net
The online notepad is another helpful utility for content marketers. This is an all-in-one tool that can help marketers take notes, do research work and also create detailed articles. The tool is free and very easy to use and can help content marketers get rid of paper notes and manual research work.
Research is very important in content marketing. BuzzSumo and other topic suggestion tools can surely help a marketer get interesting ideas, but to get information about the suggested topic, you need to use the online notepad.
The notepad has a simple interface, and even a new user can learn how to use it without any effort. All you have to do is open the tool on your browser and select the type of note you want to create. The tool can be used for creating:
- Plain text notes; these are notes which could include certain points, facts, figures, and other research material related to a certain topic. Plain text notes are portable and easy to read.
- You can also create rich text notes with this notepad. A rich text note can be considered a daily diary, or marketers can also write down a blog or social media posts on it. The main feature of a rich text note is that you can easily format it as per your requirements.
- The third thing you can create with this tool is a task list. Marketers can use this tool to create a list of articles that they have in the pipeline for publishing on different platforms.
One of the best things about this online notepad is that you can use it for research purposes. Every note would contain the Google search bar in its header. Users can search with any term/keyword they want on the search bar and collect relevant information from Google.
Key Features:
- The online notepad is free to use. You don’t have to pay a single penny to create, save or import notes with this tool. The tool can be used on any device as long as it has a web connection and a browser.
- The notepad helps marketers keep track of lines and words they have written in the note. The online notepad allows you to lock notes having important information in them. The lock button can be found in the header of every note in the top right corner.
- The notes or task lists created on this tool can be saved and imported in multiple formats. Users can get their notes in PDF, Word, and in TEXT format.
In content marketing, one needs to create and keep notes for different purposes. You might have to create a note for keywords that you have to target in your content, and you can save topics that you want to write on in the notes, or you can also write and organize blogs/social media posts.
To say the least, you can reduce the big expense which is wasted in creating and keeping paper notes and go digital!
3. Word-Counter.io
This word counter, as the name tells us, is the tool that can calculate the number of words or characters you have written so far. The word counter has a big text box in which you can directly write down content or can also paste it from your clipboard. The tool helps marketers keep track of words written in real-time.
As a content marketer, it is important for you to understand that there are certain limits on every platform that you have to keep in consideration. There are different word count requirements for different forums, including blogs, emails, Facebook posts, Twitter feed, and other popular ones.
- Facebook allows 2000 characters
- Instagram allows 2200 characters
- On Twitter, one can add up to 280 characters
- Meta titles and descriptions are 60 & 150 characters, respectively
- The ideal length of a blog post is 1000 to 2500 words
Writing more than the requirement can be a waste of time and resources, which is why experts always recommend that content created for digital marketing should always be concise and within the given limits.
This word counter tool can tell users about the number of words, characters, characters without spaces, and the number of sentences and pages you have written. This information is quite helpful, especially when you are creating targeted content for your social media audience. You can also keep track of words/characters while writing down the metadata of a blog post.
Keeping track of word count in real time helps a marketer add relevant information to their posts and reduce wordiness. Google prefers content that has information and is of good quality. This is why you need to manage important information within the given word count limit of the forum.
Key Features:
- The online word counter works on all devices and operating systems. The tool doesn’t require any signup or installation
- The tool cannot only be used for tracking words, but you can also use it for formatting text. With this tool, you can change the text size, style, and case. You can give upper, lower, and title cases to text in the input box.
- The tool also has a built-in grammar checker, which helps users find and fix all sorts of grammatical mistakes in content.
- The tool is free to use. You don’t have to pay anything for word tracking and formatting.
The word counter is extremely easy to use and is perfect for digital marketers, SEO experts, and other people related to the writing fraternity.
4. Rephraser.co
This online paraphrasing tool is an extremely helpful tool for content marketers and writers of all ages. The main function of this tool is to paraphrase already written text in a unique and reader-friendly way.
In content marketing, it is always important that you create unique and high-quality content. Content that has plagiarism or human errors in it would never perform well and would not engage any audience or get leads.
For this very reason, experts recommend that marketers should take help from online paraphraser tools like rephraser.co!
Marketers can use this tool for multiple purposes. Some of the common uses of this rephraser are mentioned here:
- The tool can be used to improve the quality and readability of a draft which has quality issues in it. Even the best writers can make petty mistakes in their drafts, so it is best to improve the quality of content with the tool before publishing it.
- Rephraser can be used to repurpose old articles in a new style. As a marketer, you would have to use old ideas and information you have discussed in your previous posts. By using the rephraser, you can create unique versions conveying the same message without an ounce of duplication in them.
- A very big use of this tool is to reduce the percentage of plagiarism in content. If, for instance, you have scanned your content with a plagiarism checker and found duplication in it, you can rephrase the similar text in a different way.
This online paraphraser exists in both free and paid versions. With the free version, a user can paraphrase up to 500 words in one go; if you want to rewrite more, then you can buy the affordable plans of this tool.
Key Features:
- The rephraser works on every device as it is based online. You can use it wherever you want as long as you have a stable connection.
- The tool can be used to create quick content capital on short deadlines without any quality issues. You can find a built-in grammar checker on this tool, with the help of which users can check the quality of their work.
- With this online paraphrasing tool, one can ensure uniqueness in their drafts which is much needed in content tailored for marketing purposes.
- On the rephraser site, you can also find a summary generator tool with the help of which you can create short summaries of lengthy text. This feature is useful when marketers have to create short posts for Facebook or Instagram.
There are many more features that users can enjoy once they sign up with this easy-to-use rephraser.
5. Market Muse
Market Muse is our personal favorite and is no doubt one of the most effective tools for marketers. This assists marketers in content auditing, which is one of the most important tasks in a long-term content marketing plan.
An important thing that you need to know is that manual auditing and inventorying of your blogs, emails, newsletters, and social media posts can be a hectic task. Most businesses pay thousands of dollars annually to get their content audited just because they lack auditing skills and personal resources.
If you don’t want to waste your time and money on content auditing, then you need to try market muse. You don’t have to hire resources permanently or on contract to audit your work anymore. The tool is available with a free version which can be used by marketers who want to test this tool before buying the premium plans.
With the help of this tool, marketers can easily improve their content creation, optimization, and promotion strategies.
- The tool helps you know what kind of content you have published in a specific period.
- You can find out how well the content is performing on respective platforms.
- You can find the position of your content in terms of search results.
- Market muse gives your data-driven results, which would tell you what kind of improvements your content needs.
- The tool helps marketers understand what kind of gaps they need to fill in their content marketing plan.
- With marketing muse, one can also find out what their competitors are up to and how to beat them.
With market muse, content marketers can create content with predictable results. The tool can save hours of manual labor wasted and provide more accurate results.
Key Features:
- Market muse helps marketers research the right ideas, plan, publish, optimize and promote content faster.
- The tool provides suggestions that can help a marker drive more traffic and sales with content.
- The tool provides insights following which a marketer can easily publish content on different platforms with confirmed ROIs.
- The tool provides a free demo to marketers who are new in the business. The pricing plans are also quite affordable and can save a lot of money which is wasted in paying for manual labor.
The tool can be used on all devices and operating systems as it is available on the cloud! You just need to log in with your account to audit your strategies wherever you want.
Conclusion
Content Marketing is one of the most effective ways of promoting and uplifting a brand and its services. This term is not new anymore, and you can see that businesses from all across the globe are following content marketing plans in order to connect with potential buyers and increase their brand’s retention rate.
All tools mentioned in this blog post are suggested by expert marketers. There are many more tools that can help content marketers, but not all of them can be included in one draft. Feel free to try any of the above-listed tools and suggest any others which you have found useful in your journey as a marketer.
These five content marketing tools can surely help you streamline your plans along with reducing the man-work and cost consumed in traditional marketing!
