89% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers report they are using content marketing to increase leads and drive their brand forward.
When it comes to startups, a content marketing strategy is probably the most affordable and effective growth solution. It costs 31 to 41% less than paid search and it can increase your website conversions six fold.
However, content marketing is often time-consuming and tedious. In today’s competitive market, you have to invest wisely to make your brand hog the limelight. With the right tools, you can make your workflow streamlined and focused.
So, looking for content marketing tools to streamline your content marketing process in 2018?
Let’s take a look at following content marketing tools you need to make your workflow streamlined and focused.
1. Idea Generation: Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator
Before any content is written or published, it begins as an idea. My team and I rely pretty heavily on questions, pain points, objections, etc., that come directly from our audience.
Still, it never hurts to have a resource in your tool kit that keeps you from getting stuck during those times when you need inspiration for topics.
That’s where HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator comes in. Just type three nouns related to the general topic you’re considering into the tool, and it generates five ideas for blog posts.
Review:-
What do you like best?
So far, the people! I have experienced the best support and customer service since day 1 searching for a marketing automation and sales support tool to integrate with our CRM.
The educational resources and intuitive setup structure is amazing, and so far I haven’t run into a single task or feature I want to take advantage of, even when looking for features I used in my past life as a Certified Marketo user.
What do you dislike?
That I can’t wave my magic wand and know how to do all-the-things right now! Even having used other marketing automation platforms, there is a learning curve to mastering the features and integrations of HubSpot. Comes with the territory!
Recommendations to others considering the product
Do your homework! When you start digging in and asking real questions of HubSpot and other similar competitors, it becomes immediately clear that HubSpot is superior.
Competitors try to hide some of the ways that HubSpot is better, like their integrations, pricing increases, workflow builder, and customer service support.
It’s also very clear how much HubSpot truly values their customers and customer experience.
Every other platform we looked at charges for support and setup services, whereas with HubSpot it is free for All users 100% of the time (other than a small 1-time setup fee, which still saves you thousands every year over competitors).
What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
We have been able to get rid of 6+ redundant and manual marketing system that we were using previously to piece-meal together a marketing automation solution from landing pages, email marketing, marketing automation, blogging, social media, paid ads, and more.
With a topic in mind, it’s important to have a road map of where your article is going before you actually start writing.
Otherwise, you can end up with a rambling mess of what you think are interesting ideas that aren’t actually connected.
MindMup’s brainstorming tool allows you to create a visual mind map of your thoughts using text bubbles, links, and images so you (and your audience) never feel the stress of disorganized thoughts.
Review:-
What do you like best?
You can use different colors / text dimension in order to better manage your elements.
What do you dislike?
You can just put a URL in the text, and MindMup recognize it showing only text and the link is shown as a clickable button. It could be better if I can select a property and put the link here, without touching the texts.
What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
I can create visual topic cluster for my content marketing strategies. I like how MindMup let you create a lot of links between elements! We have a very big map.
Have multiple thought leaders working on content? Asana could be the go-to hub for your teams to collaborate on content in one place.
This flexible web and mobile app makes facilitating workflow management and communication easier and more seamless.
With features like project templates, team pages, and visually engaging dashboards, Asana makes it easy to nix the chaos of team projects. The baseline version is free for up to 15 team members.
Review:-
What do you like best?
Great tool for organization protects and tasks withing company. Easy of use and nice graphical user interface. With Asana you can organize tasks in different way like list or in board style.
Asana offers easy collaboration between teams. Plus it offers calendars, notifications, file sharing, keep tracking history, searching options and so forth.
It even has free version to help you estimate it’s opportunities.
What do you dislike?
It will take some amount of time to learn of it is multiple capabilities to understand what configuration and methods will work for you. It has issue with permissions, where all users have same ones.
Recommendations to others considering the product
Not suitable for all companies, it is good for large, but not for small ones.
What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
With Asana you can organize work of your whole company by monitoring all projects, their progress and understanding who and what is doing in current moment, conducting your business in right way.
4. Researching and Supplementing: Google Drive Research Tool
Say you’re in a Google Doc writing the draft of your next article and you need to find a stat to back up your point.
Rather than open a new tab and open yourself up to distraction, you can select the icon in the bottom-right corner and search without leaving your document.
You can access all the information from Google minus the distraction of navigating away from your work – and it’s completely free.
Review:-
What do you like best?
Free application that I use to save any document in the cloud, besides allowing me to work in a team.
Since these documents or stored information can be viewed or edited by colleagues or friends allowed by me, I can select who can edit my files and who no, I store documents, videos, music regardless of their type or size since this does not have restrictions .
I can access them from any computer and place so I always have my information available at hand when I need it and with a series of tools of editing that allow me to edit my files
What do you dislike?
The main one that has this storage in the cloud is the need to have internet connection, the speed of loading and unloading will depend on the internet connection that has
Recommendations to others considering the product
Application that allows the entire work team to access the files at any time without relying on a computer, since everything is in the cloud and you only need your gmail account.
What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
Having a free storage without having to occupy spaces in the company’s PC and accessing your files at any time and in any place is a great advantage for any company
5. Visual Content Development: Adobe Spark
With the rise of visual storytelling, it’s becoming more important than ever to boost your content with graphics and images.
Thankfully, you don’t necessarily need to be a graphic design pro to incorporate visual elements into your content.
Adobe Spark allows users to generate graphics for animated videos, social media posts, and website pages with just a few clicks.
Review:-
What do you like best?
Ease of use combined with useful templates. cross-platform use. it allows for various levels of expertise, from beginner to expert. The interface is easy to understand.
What do you dislike?
Limited to mobile devices and web browsers makes this a difficult option for professionals. Bit prescriptive at times and sometimes clunky. The cost from Adobe is very high and it is the single biggest issue I have.
Recommendations to others considering the product
This is a cool piece of software that allows anyone to create posts across platforms. It is easy to use and has the basics of a great post.
It allows for customization and varying degrees of control.There are versions for mobile and desktop which help in the long run.
Once you get stuck in you need to plan ahead before you start to ensure that you don’t lose your momentum.
What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
Easy to deploy a force of content creators out on the field that can create content on the fly.
The content is relevant and unique which makes it highly sale-able.
The user can deploy this app on their own personal device and create from anywhere.
6. Headline Writing: CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer
If you’ve put the work into creating a high-quality piece of content, you need to make sure its headline is just as high-quality.
An analysis of more than 4 million pieces of content in “The State of Digital Media” offers insight into the details of what makes a good headline; make sure you’re consistently creating those effective headlines with CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer.
This tool by CoSchedule, a company I’ve worked with, scores your headline based on the overall word balance, length, sentiment, and keywords.
Plus, it provides a Google search preview and email subject line preview so you know exactly how your content will appear to readers.
Review:-
What do you like best?
This platform will allow you to effectively plan, organize, schedule, monitor and analyze your social strategy.
Not only is it an aesthetically pleasing platform, the team at CoSchedule are incredibly helpful and friendly – no matter your social emergency.
Plus they have master classes, training and free tools to continue building your social media skills.
What do you dislike?
Sometimes the cost is a little bit shocking, but in comparison to other schedulers, it has way more benefits.
Recommendations to others considering the product
You have lots of social to schedule, need your posts to look consistent, easily find information on what has been posted, looking for analytics, looking for organization? CoSchedule is the right scheduler for you.
What business problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
- The main benefits are:
- Saves time
- Team members can see the schedule without having to log in (share link)
- I am able to schedule social campaigns and individual posts, see analytics, make responses comparatively – all on one platform
- When link previews load to LinkedIn they are not broken (the title of the article shows up)
7. Checking Duplicate Content: Copyscape
Copyscape is an online plagiarism detection service that checks whether similar text content appears elsewhere on the web. It was launched in 2004 by Indigo Stream Technologies, Ltd.
Copyscape is used by content owners to detect cases of “content theft”, in which content is copied without permission from one site to another.
It is also used by content publishers to detect cases of content fraud, in which old content is repackaged and sold as new original content.
Review:-
I work with a lot of content written by a lot of people. Copyscape is the golden standard of plagiarism.
I’ve checked out a lot of other tools and this one come back consistent and helpful. People have different ideas of what plagiarism is, but I think everyone can agree on Copyscape.
