Content marketing is what all the cool kids are doing these days. And not just any old content marketing, but content marketing that is highly social, super engaging, and successfully drives customers to become not just buyers, but passionate subscribers and brand evangelists for all types of organizations. According to this Demand Metric infographic, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates approximately three times more leads per dollar spent. It also makes 82% of customers feel more positively about a company and 70% feel closer to a company.
What tools are the cool kids using to generate these awesome results? Here are the 10 top content marketing tools for 2014.
Content marketing is increasingly shifting toward the visual. Website content, blogs, and social media are still important, but more and more those channels are being used to promote visual content. In the earlier days of web publishing, you pretty much needed a graphic design degree and an expensive software package to create anything remotely pleasing to look at, but not anymore. Canva is a new image creation tool that you can use to easily create beautiful visual content. Best of all, it’s free.
For content that is based on data (i.e., from surveys or other research), the most effective and engaging way to communicate that data is through an infographic. Piktochart is a powerful tool that makes it extremely easy to create and share infographics across the web. The best feature is a large selection of themes, which saves you a ton of design time and allows you to get your marketing messages out faster.
Content marketing is all about “out with the old, in with the new” (just look at what it’s done to traditional marketing). What’s new right now is interactivity—in everything. Thinglink is a handy app that lets you add interactive links to videos, photos, presentations, and more. If it’s on the web, you can use Thinglink to make it interactive, which the company claims boosts click-through rate by a factor of 10 and increases time spent threefold.
Beatrix is a must-have “social media virtual assistant” for any company whose content marketing strategy includes either Facebook or Twitter, meaning virtually all of them. This app isn’t just for social media management (like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite), but it actually recommends content for you to post. Users can choose from a variety of categories, and select keywords within those categories, and then Beatrix takes the lead and finds content for you to post. Talk about a time-saver!
As content marketing becomes more complex, it can get hard to keep track of all of the projects you have in progress and what’s in the batter’s box. Trello is arguably the easiest project management tool out there for keeping on top of everything. You create project boards with cards that you can then move around according to their difficulty, level of completion, or any other factor you choose.
A lot of research has been done on the best times of day to engage users via social media in general, but what about for your business in particular? Tweriod analyzes your tweets and your followers’ tweets to generate a report that tells you when to post content on Twitter for maximum exposure.
Shareist is an excellent full-service content management and distribution application, especially for small and medium-sized businesses. It allows you to do quite literally everything, from devising an editorial calendar to creating and curating content, distributing that content, and then tracking the success of that content.
Successful content marketing is about more than just knowing your stuff; it’s also about understanding your customers. Woopra helps you learn more about those customers on an individual level across multiple channels, providing analytics that include not only the basics like page views, but also advanced data such as exactly where in your content customers get bored and decide to head somewhere else.
The definition of content is expanding in several directions, one of the hottest of which is digital magazines. Issuu is an app that allows you to create your own online magazines, which is a fun way to spice up more standard content marketing formats, for example the newsletter.
Despite all of the recent advances and new, fun tools, great SEO is still the cornerstone of successful content marketing. nTopic is an SEO tool that analyzes your content for topical relevancy, including helping you find related words to include and detecting words that may be lowering your relevancy. With this tool, you can ensure that the content you put out there looks as good to search engines as it does to customers.
Content marketing is hot and getting hotter. These 10 tools will help you and your company stay on the cutting edge of content, which will lead to increased customer engagement and more sales.
Business Articles | Business 2 Community
(287)
