Content marketing can be a highly effective means of marketing a website, brand, or yourself. However, it is time-consuming, requires accuracy and reliability, and involves repetitive tasks.
Fortunately, there are many tools out there that can help with mundane tasks and those that assist with everything from researching content to scheduling its publication and even designing your infographics or other visual content.
Below, we look at 11 of the best tools to boost your content marketing efforts in 2024.
1. Competitor Analysis And Research
Competitor analysis and research are grouped together because the best tools for one are also the best tools for the other. Ahrefs and SEMRush are both powerful and efficient tools, and both have their supporters and detractors.
With either of these tools, you will be able to analyze the competition to see what they’re getting right. You can choose their most successful content and produce something bigger and better. You can also analyze keywords, potentially finding some hidden longtail gems, and both have features that allow you to see which pieces of content are hot right now.
2. Security
Security and privacy are important in all aspects of content marketing. Antimalware software will protect you when you’re researching and visiting dozens of sites, and if you self-host a website, you will need one of the many server antivirus solutions that are available.
Technology writer Ilijia Miljkovac advises choosing security software that offers real-time updates without overloading your server and slowing its performance. Free tools are available, but a paid tool like TotalAV is a low-cost alternative with more powerful security tools.
3. Scheduling
Effective content marketing means posting, sharing, and marketing content regularly. In most cases, this means establishing a content calendar. And then sticking to it. Unless you’re writing timely pieces based on the latest news topics, it is a good idea to have pieces of content ready to go. It’s easier to do the research and compile a dozen pieces over the space of a week than it is to do one a week for the next three months.
You can just use Google’s Calendar to set up a schedule or save posts as drafts in WordPress and have them published automatically, but a tool like Airtable offers much more than basic scheduling. It automates much of the management process and is especially effective for content marketing teams that rely on the smooth combination of multiple moving parts.
4. Design
Whether you’re putting together an email newsletter, a multi-slide presentation, or an infographic, design matters. From the choice of font to the appropriate use of whitespace and the implementation of call-to-action buttons, nailing the design is the difference between OK content and something that shines.
Canva is handy for some basic design elements and offers free service. Still, there’s a reason Adobe Photoshop remains one of the most popular pieces of design software – it’s powerful and effective. There are a ton of tutorials and active communities you can call on when you get stuck.
5. Grammar
Whether you’re writing a copy for an infographic or compiling an extensive whitepaper, grammar matters, and Grammarly has quickly become the grammar checker of choice for individuals and businesses.
Grammarly has a plugin for Word and an online checker for Google Docs and pretty much any other word processor or design software. The software is free, but if you want features like a passive voice checker, you will need to upgrade to the paid version.
6. Headlines
The headline of an article or other piece of content is what draws visitors in. It needs to be enticing, powerful, and effective. It also needs to be relevant to the rest of the article. And, if you’re publishing blog posts or other pieces of online content, it is also an extremely important part of your SEO efforts. In short, a headline has a lot of work to do.
A headline analyzer like Coschedule checks the grammar and factors like keyword inclusion or email subject line optimization. While it can’t write the headline for you, it can check your work well.
7. Publishing
Buffer is like having your own social media virtual assistant. It is compatible with Instagram, LinkedIn, X, Facebook, and others, and it combines all of these sites into a single dashboard, allowing you to schedule, publish, and monitor social media updates.
Hootsuite is an alternative tool that will publish an update to all of your social media profiles, potentially saving you a ton of time if you post the same content over several platforms.
8. Project Management
Project management tools are very beneficial if you have a team of people working on individual projects, but even if you’re working solo, you can still use project management features to speed up processes and ensure you don’t miss anything.
A tool like Notion lets you coordinate team members’ efforts and can also be used to create knowledge and set up processes for you or your team to follow. The checklists are useful for solo projects, and you will find a template library that can help you formulate your content.
9. Content Optimization
Content marketing and SEO go hand in hand, and even if search engine traffic isn’t your primary goal, it never hurts to drive some traffic from Google, Bing, and other search engines. Although the search engine’s algorithms are not public knowledge, certain strategies are considered best practices, and content optimization tools can help you hit these.
Many WordPress publishers are familiar with YOAST, while SurferSEO is a handy browser-based app that offers similar functionality.
10. Email Marketing
Like SEO, email marketing is a complex topic in its own right and is another form of online marketing that can combine especially well with content marketing. After all, you use content to drive, keep, and convert leads. Managing an email list not only means adding email addresses but also means measuring bounce rates and read rates, keeping the list clean, and segmenting it.
There are many email marketing tools out there, from those with basic features, like Campaign Monitor, to more advanced suites that combine email marketing with other marketing elements, like MailChimp.
11. Result Monitoring
Whatever content you publish, and however you promote it, monitoring results is important. It not only helps see how well you’re performing, but it enables you to test, change, and optimize performance.
Google Analytics is one of the most popular analytics packages on the market. It’s free, and its most recent updates have made it even more powerful across various metrics. You can track content performance and see how visitors discover your content, which pages are performing best, and even visitor demographics like location and the type of devices they use to access your site. Goals let you track conversions, too, so you can ensure that the traffic your content is driving is actually converting.
Conclusion
There are a lot of tools available to content marketers and content marketing teams: tools that help design content assets, schedule their publication, and even share them to your social media profiles. You can monitor results, analyze performance, and optimize campaigns using the tools listed above.
