Posted by Content marketing is an ever-growing field, and you need the right tools to keep up.
When companies have reached their maximum output, they need to scale their content marketing strategies to ensure continued business growth. To do this, they need to invest in the proper tools and infrastructure.
Whether a company is an industry leader or a budding start-up, their content marketing strategy and the software they use must grow with them.
Why you need content marketing tools in 2021
In 2020, around 70% of marketers were actively investing in content marketing, according to Hubspot’s report.
That’s a lot of competition!
When you’re trying to reach a larger audience and elevate your content marketing efforts, two crucial factors help you make a lasting impact — an efficient content creation process and using the right tools.
Moreover, marketers with low content marketing success in 2020 said that it was due to content creation challenges (63%) and strategy issues (51%), followed by challenges in content distribution and measurement.
While you can improve your content creation process using different tactics, you need the right tools to boost strategic planning, content distribution, and measurement.
Apps and platforms can help marketers improve content creation and distribution processes, save time via better planning, and focus on collecting and analyzing the right data.
All of these benefits lead to better content marketing strategies.
Here’s a list of five of the best tools to help you elevate your content marketing in 2021.
1. Crowdfire – Social Media Marketing
You can’t elevate your content marketing without improving your social media tactics.
Your content needs to be relevant, keep users engaged, and make them want to engage with you via likes, comments, and shares.
Experienced content marketers already know that you can’t do this with in-house content alone. Social media moves too fast for that. This is why most successful campaigns curate third-party content.
Crowdfire is the perfect app for content curation and scheduling. The app lets you pick areas of interest and then produces a feed of relevant content. No matter what niche your business is in, Crowdfire’s got you covered.
You can directly publish the curated content to one or more of your social media platforms. You can also schedule posts to go out later when your target audience is more active.
Apart from curating and scheduling content, Crowdfire lets you pre-schedule your own content.
The platform gives users one crucial advantage — it curates images. You no longer have to worry about creating separate posts for Twitter and Instagram. Crowdfire suggests pictures you can use for your posts and tailors them to match your social channels.
This service also provides analytics for your posts and notifies users of every mention.
With Crowdfire, content marketing on social media is made effortless. You can schedule posts weeks in advance, freeing up time for the more critical parts of your content strategy.
2. SEMrush – Content Ideation and SEO
SEO directly affects the success of your content marketing campaigns. Poor SEO leads to lower-ranking on Search Engine Result Pages (SERP) and significantly reduces traffic to a company’s website.
If your current campaign plan isn’t leading your company up the SERP ranking, then it’s time to reassess.
SEMrush is a platform that helps users research topics that resonate with their target audience, create SEO templates for content briefs, and find the right platforms to distribute them.
The SEO Writing Assistant and Brand Monitoring features can help content marketers greatly. The first feature ensures that all the content you and your team are putting out is engaging, contains the right keywords, and is in the right tone.
If your campaign needs influencers, then the Brand Monitoring feature helps companies identify relevant influencers and evaluate their potential reach.
The feature also lets you keep track of your competitors’ mentions online, so you gain real insights into your campaign’s impact.
Suppose competitor A is heavily-focused on visual content, and this is boosting their brand mentions. In that case, you can look into creating more images and videos yourself.
3. Grammarly – Error-Free Content
Any content you post must be error-free.
Everyone wants their content to make an impact, but not in the way something like Donald Trump’s “covfefe” tweet did. In that instance, the message of the post is forgotten, but the mistake lives on.
While most marketers don’t tweet or post to millions of people daily, the lesson still stands. Even the best article or social media post can be ruined by a spelling mistake, improper verb usage, or just awkward phrasing in general.
Incorrect spelling and poor grammar can also reduce credibility with your audience.
A tool like Grammarly can check your content for grammatical errors. This can be a huge help with your content marketing efforts. Not only does it point out basic mistakes, but it shows suggestions for sentence structure improvements and replacements for overused words.
Grammarly’s key selling point is that it is very easily accessible via a browser extension, native apps, or even a mobile keyboard.
With the browser extension, marketers have Grammarly ready to use on all websites, including social media platforms and content management systems (CMS) like Google Docs and WordPress.
The tool can be fine-tuned to suit your English dialect, be it British English or American.
All of these factors make Grammarly a much-needed addition to your content marketing toolbox.
4. Wistia – Video Content
Hubspot’s 2020 survey revealed that video is the most used media form in content strategies, ahead of blogs and infographics.
While YouTube is a platform worth investing in, you can’t have videos with distracting ads on your website, emails, or other content.
A How-To video for a product on the company’s website with ads in the middle is a surefire way to get users to click away.
Marketers need a platform to develop and share videos without ads and distractions.
Wistia is a self-proclaimed video marketing software that enables businesses to publish and embed ad-free, dynamic videos across multiple platforms.
The platform has a custom video player. You can even change the colours of the player to match your branding. It’s even possible to include interactive elements like a call-to-action, email gates, and annotation links.
You can post videos on your channel, or create videos to embed on your website. For example, American software company Intercom uses Wistia to develop videos to “communicate with customers at every stage of their lifecycle.”
Viewer data can be collected and used for marketing on different platforms, such as ads on Facebook. The data can also be sent to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms like MailChimp, HubSpot, and Pardot.
5. monday.com – Planning and Execution
We’ve listed various forms of content above. All that content must be planned and executed as part of a bigger picture – the marketing campaign.
Efficient planning and smooth execution are essential to improving marketing campaigns. A platform that enables this is monday.com.
monday.com is a Work OS that lets you build the right infrastructure for your projects, so users can create project boards to manage multiple, complex marketing campaigns.
You can use these boards to plan your content calendar, assign content pieces to different team members, track progress, and a lot more.
With its intuitive UI and stellar pre-defined templates, managers and team leads can lay the groundwork for their content production workflow in minutes.
You can use multiple boards to manage different aspects of content marketing. For example, you can have one for content planning, one for each of your campaigns, one for tracking pitches, and so on. It’s all up to you. Every element is customizable.
The platform also provides real-time analytics for your tasks, so you can track the progress of all your content projects at a glance.
Wrapping Up
While there’s no definite route to content marketing success, the tools we’ve listed above can definitely make your life easier.
Whether you measure success by audience reach, ROI, or any metric, these tools can help you take your content marketing strategy to the next level.
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