Content marketing was big in 2014. Last year, more businesses began regularly investing time and money into content marketing than ever before. That’s not much of a surprise when you consider the following facts found in a recent writtent.com blog post:
- Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about three times as many leads. (Source)
- 78% of CMOs believe custom content is the future of marketing. (Source)
- Website conversion rate is nearly 6 times higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters (2.9% vs 0.5%). (Source)
If you haven’t yet taken the time to invest in developing and implementing content marketing strategies for your business, now is the time.
Not sure where to start? Here are seven great tools you can use to master content marketing in 2015:
For Content Ideation and Research: Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a tool you can use for coming up with better content ideas, finding great content to share, keeping track of what your competitors are doing, and finding influencers. Specifically, you can use Buzzsumo to:
- Find the most shared content and most influential authors for a topic
- Identify the most shared content for a domain
- Find out who has linked to an article
- Identify who shared an article
- Create content alerts to track a topic or competitor
- Run a content analysis report for a topic or domain
- and more!
Cost: The lowest level plan will cost you $99/month. For other options, go here.
For Content Creation: Penflip
Penflip is a great tool to use when you need to work on bigger pieces of content, like ebooks, white papers, or long blog posts. The minimalistic design allows for a pretty focused writing experience, and the platform as a whole makes collaborating with others really easy.
With Penflip, you can:
- Easily write short or long-form content
- Share and collaborate with others
- Add images and links
- Organize by chapters
- Add comments and see revision history
- Make your projects public (like Jimmy Daly from VERO did here)
Cost: The lowest level plan will cost you $0/month. For other options, go here.
For Hiring Ghostwriters: Scripted
Not everyone has the time or energy to plug out blog posts week after week, and for many, that’s where freelance writers come in. With Scripted, you can hire content writers to help you with a whole range of content, like:
- blog posts
- white papers
- website pages
- social media updates
- product descriptions
The process is pretty simple: you post details and guidelines for your piece of content, a writer claims your work, they submit content, then you review it and publish it when ready.
Cost: A standard blog post will cost you about $99.
For Project Organization: Trello
Trello is a great tool for managing any of your content marketing projects—especially when you have more than one person involved. Trello is different than a lot of project management software platforms and apps because of its focus on visual organization and flow. With Trello, you can:
- Drag and drop cards to show progress
- Invite other members of your team to collaborate
- Upload files, share links, create to-do lists, and leave comments
- Set deadlines, respond via email, and categorize with labels
Cost: The basic version of Trello is free. You can, however, upgrade to a higher level called Trello Gold.
For Social Media Publishing and Scheduling: Edgar
Edgar is a fairly new social media publishing and scheduling app that offers a unique twist: the ability to store, categorize, and re-use the updates you create and share with your followers. The process is pretty simple: you write your update and upload it to Edgar. The app publishes your update according to your category schedule. Then the update goes into your library to be published again after all your other updates in the category have been shared.
Cost: It currently starts at $49/month to use, and you have to request an invite.
For Paid Content Distribution: Zemanta
Zemanta is a content promotion and distribution tool that companies use to share their content on other popular partner sites around the web. On partner sites, your content is shared in a variety of ways, such as:
- Promoted recommendations
- In-text links
- In-stream ads
With this tool, you set campaigns and decide which content you want to share, you set your budget and demographic specifications, and then Zemanta takes care of the rest.
Cost: It really depends on your needs and the monthly budget you set
For Manual Outreach and Promotion: Streak
Streak is a CRM platform that operates within Gmail. It’s a great tool to use when you move into the outreach and promotion phase of your content marketing efforts. With Streak, you can create and save an outreach template so when it comes time to promote a piece of content, you can customize your greetings, and you can send out multiple emails with just one click.
Cost: At this time, Streak is free to use!
What other content marketing tools would you add to this list? Leave a comment for me below.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Startup Stock Photos
All screenshots taken January 2015
