Customers go through a journey before they commit to a purchase. As a small business owner, it is your duty to engage and interact with them until they do so. And when they do, you continue to nurture them so they become your brand’s advocates.
With content marketing, you can convert random online searchers to website visitors, make them a part of your tribe and drive more sales by consistently providing them with valuable information.
You also get the opportunity of boosting your website traffic, amplify your brand awareness, improve backlinks to your website, build more credibility and increase your ROI.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing to reach their customers, and 86% of them believe that it is a key strategy for lead generation.
In this post, you’ll learn about the 10 must-have content marketing tools you should start using today.
Content Marketing Tools: Why Do You Need Them?
Content marketers use tools to save time, effort and make more money. This could be for innovative product development, workflow management, strategic sales funnel building, and so on.
These tools go a long way to get you the results you need faster. So, deciding on the content marketing tools you want to use for your business isn’t something to subject to guesswork. If you want to avoid publishing content that doesn’t help your small business in any way, then you should leverage the power of these content marketing tools. Else, you’d end up with erratic posting schedules or publishing content that your readers do not need at all.
Below are some of the must-have tools to establish trust with your audience, build your social media following, and drive sales for your business using content marketing.
Content Marketing Tool #1: BuzzSumo
Buzzsumo is a content marketing tool that allows you to discover high performing content so that you can develop a better one to get more likes, links, and shares. It is useful for creating a marketing strategy and helps you analyze top-performing articles by platforms. So, if an article is doing well on Pinterest or Twitter, you can decide to create yours and compete on that space or attract visitors from other channels.
The influencer segment of the tool is highly useful and exceptional. With it, you will identify influential people to power up your brand or campaign. For instance, if you’ve written an article about the “5 fashion creatives in this coronavirus season.”, you can look for influencers in the fashion space, link to their works and inform them about the article so they share with their audience too.
With other great features such as monitoring to track comments and trends, capturing opportunities, and ease of automation with APIs, this content marketing tool is a must for you as a small business owner. You can begin with a subscription to the pro version at $99/ month.
Content Marketing Tool #2: Hotjar
How possible is it to develop content that your audience would love if you don’t know what they want? Quite impossible, right? Hotjar bridges this gap with a content marketing tool that helps you understand what your user wants and cares about. It presents this with a visual that represents your customer’s clicks, taps, and scrolling behavior on your website. The great feature of Hotjar extends to the conversion funnels. For instance, the conversion funnel on your website could be from the homepage to blog, features, pricing, etc.
It also helps you to identify the exact page that your potential buyers are not engaging with on your website so that you can improve the copy on that page. To ease your data collection for customer insights, it also provides you with online form completion rates by discovering which fields take too long to fill and why visitors abandon your form and page.
It costs $89/ month for 20,000 page views per day and $189/ month for 50,000 page views per day.
Content Marketing Tool #3: Zapier
Zapier makes automation seamless. It helps you automatically move information between your web applications without juggling from point to point. All you need is to share data by linking up your web apps with few clicks, zap this information between apps with workflows, and then build faster processes and achieve more by focusing on your real job. Zapier connects with more than 2,000 applications. Certainly, you can’t be limited in your work process. Some of the apps it connects with include Google Sheets, Gmail, Twitter, Slack, Facebook, Google Calendar, Mailchimp, etc.
Zapier basic is forever free. However, you can get the starter offer for $19.99 billed annually or $24.99 month-to-month. There are other upgrades for $49 and $299.
Content Marketing Tool #4: Canva
The human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text. You are likely to convert visitors to customers after seven or more interactions with them. You can maintain this interaction with great visuals. Marketers using visuals with amazing content are growing their business fast. That’s where Canva can help. It is a design tool with a drag and drop feature and professional layout which allows you to consistently create stunning graphics. It has lots of loaded easy to use features and functionality that anyone can use to create engaging content. You can create informative and inspirational images, memes, infographics and presentations with this tool.
Canva is free for individuals and small design groups, but if you’re looking at more customization and productivity, the pro plan costs $9.95 per month for a user and the enterprise costs $30 for larger teams.
Content Marketing Tool #5: Wordable
Wordable is a content marketing tool that instantly exports your content from Google docs to a WordPress post or page. It exports every part of your content from the raw HTML, to headings, images, and tables.For content managers who deal with many writers. Working on Google docs is the easiest way to create, edit, share and collaborate on a document. You save yourself the stress of sending emails back and forth. After finalizing the content with the editor, publishing on your WordPress website can be a pain. With Wordable, your problem is solved as you’ll be free of the frustration of spending hours copying and pasting content into WordPress.
You can save your time with this tool by paying $19 per month for 1 user and a WordPress site, or scale-up to $49 per month for 5 users and 5 WordPress sites.
Content Marketing Tool #6: CoSchedule
CoSchedule is your ultimate marketing organizer and does everything in one place. It organizes your content, social, work, and asset. There is a marketing calendar that helps you get global visibility of all your projects in a cross-functional calendar view. CoSchedule also allows you to create a unified workflow for every project inside a collaborative calendar for content, social, email and events.With the presence of a blog editorial calendar, WordPress integration, social media publishing, and task management, you have no challenge with your content marketing efforts than to effectively utilize this tool.
The growth package costs $150 per month while the professional package starts at $750 per month.
Content Marketing Tool #7: SurferSEO
This content marketing tool stands out with its data-driven approach. It has a content editor, keyword research tool and an SEO surfer. You can use it to generate a one-click audit of your website. By doing so, you get a precise, actionable plan that you can start implementing so as to bump your website to the top of the SERPs in your niche. Not only that, it also helps you to focus on optimizing or creating new content.
For instance, if you want to boost your website SEO, you can perform a complete audit of your website using this tool. This is better than manually analyzing your rankings, leveraging on your intuition and wasting time too for the whole process. SurferSEO also helps you analyze far more ranking factors, pull data from over 50 pages and use it to point you to the direction of writing effective web copy.
Not only that, the real-time data-driven methodology will also offer you key insights by providing you with perfect keyword density, common words, and precise web copy length. With this information, you can create a detailed and valuable content that will outrank your competitors. That way, you can gain the trust of your existing customers and win new clients.
You can try the 7-day plan for $1. Then upgrade to a basic plan of $59 per month or a pro plan of $99 per month.
Content Marketing Tool #8: Buffer
Buffer as a content marketing tool helps you to build your audience and grow your brand on social media. With proper planning, collaboration and publishing of content that drives meaningful engagement, your business can scale to a profitable level. Using this tool, you can create the perfect post for each of your social media networks, all from a single dashboard and publishing it immediately or scheduling it for a later time.
It also lets you review posts among your team members, manage your social media accounts and ensuring that everyone stays in sync. With 8 accounts and 100 scheduled posts, Buffer costs $15 per month for a user. With an additional user and 2,000 scheduled posts, it cost $65 per month.
Content Marketing Tool #9: UberSuggest
UberSuggest is an intuitive SEO tool that provides you with actionable insights you need to gain the top SERPs rank in your niche and maintain it. From rank tracking, site audit, and keyword research, etc. this tool helps you to track keywords, check technical SEO issues, pull your website historical data and generate valuable content ideas.It also provides you with a comprehensive competitive analysis that allows you to get insights into the exclusive strategies that other top players in your niche are using. That way, you can improve and outrank them. With the content ideas section, you can analyze top-performing content pieces for any given keyword so that you write targeted content that people are waiting to read.
This tool costs just $5 per month and comes with a 7-day free trial.
Content Marketing Tool #10: Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a content marketing tool that helps you better understand your customers. This tool analyzes your customer behavior and makes buying predictions in one place. It reveals the performance of all your marketing effort, content, and product.For instance, you’re in the healthcare industry, Google analytics will make you see how people are interacting with your site and the role that social media channels are playing to get your brand to your audience. You can connect measuring systems like your customer relationship management tools so you can have a more robust view.
The unique machine learning capabilities of Google Analytics will also provide you with users that are likely to make a purchase. The fun part is that Google Analytics is absolutely free. Good for you as a small business owner with a limited budget.
Conclusion
Content marketing can be a useful strategy to grow your business if you know how to leverage it. Aside from that, it provides better conversion opportunities for your business and generates long-lasting traffic on your website.
Utilizing content marketing tools will make your business stand out and showcase you to visitors and customers as someone that’s sincere, consistent, reliable and committed.
But then, there’s no amount of good any tool can do if you don’t put in the work of creating top-notch content. What’s the use of knowing the content your audience wants and you’re not creating it.
