In 2023, content marketing is still one of the most important tasks on the marketing agenda of leading agencies and companies. Content marketing tools make this process much easier. We have collected our personal favorites in this blog post, most of which are also regularly used by us.
The Explosion of Content Marketing
No tool in the world can replace a sophisticated content strategy or a talented writer, but a solid technological foundation can be quite helpful in executing a strategy.
According to a survey by Hubspot, 70% of all marketers will actively invest in content marketing in 2020. According to estimates by ResearchDive, nearly USD 48 billion will be spent on content marketing alone worldwide in 2020 and more in the years to come. An average annual growth rate of 14.3% is forecast for the next 5 years, in 2026 companies will invest a total of 107.54 billion USD in content marketing.
This is our ultimate list of content marketing tools
Content Marketing Tools to help your Team succeed
SEMrush for Keyword Research
Discover relevant keywords for your content marketing
Keyword research helps you to identify the terms and phrases your content should contain so users will actually find it via Google and more. After all: the best content is useless unless your prospects actually find and consume it.
In the battle for the best ranking, you will compete against numerous competitors who have long since established their position. In order for your content to be found, you must outperform your competition with highly relevant and informative content. What keywords should your content contain and what aspects should it cover to achieve this goal?
SEMrush will tell you just that – within seconds, for any keyword in selected target markets.
Favorite feature: Related Keywords – for each keyword search made, you will also get suggestions for phrases and related keywords that should be included in a post to be created. This way you know exactly which topics you should include in your article in addition to the main (focus) keyword.
SEMrush analyses the 100 best-ranked websites for a specific search term in the target market. Frequently used terms and phrases are listed in a detailed report. Moreover, SEM Rush can also be used to analyze competitors’ websites, e.g. their strategies used in advertising, organic, and paid searches. All backlinks can be displayed.
You can also view the advertising budgets and display ads of competitors. However, we think SEMRush is best when used to identify keywords.
Price: $199 – $399 / month
The bottom line: SEMrush allows you to identify all the necessary keywords for your content to outrank your competitors.
CELUM for Online Collaboration
Tasks, workflows and file sharing for teams in one place.
Aaaaahhhhhrrrrrrrrrrgghh. Where is the content piece I worked on? What task has priority? Did the photographer already deliver all pictures?
If you can relate to those questions, CELUM might offer the right tool for you. The app offers a very content-driven approach to task and project management and was made especially with the needs and challenges of content creators in mind.
You can easily
- set up new workflows in seconds,
- assign tasks and responsibilities,
- add, comment and approve videos, audios, images and text,
- edit files locally and sync them with the CELUM Drive,
- and organize your files within the app.
For the professional storage and delivery of files, you can also combine our agile collaboration features with CELUM’s Digital Asset Management solution.
Favorite feature: The Annotation Editor has 4 marking tools which makes it easy to comment on different files. It is even possible to set a marker precisely on the frame of a video you want to have changed.
Price: Free 30 day trial. From €24.90 / month
The bottom line: If Trello and Dropbox had a love child, it would be CELUM’s agile collaboration and online proofing software. Unify all your team’s files, tasks, and workflows in one place.
Flipsnack for Content Creation
Design and customize your marketing content materials on the fly.
When it comes to creating diverse and engaging content, Flipsnack could be your go-to
solution.
Flipsnack is an intuitive, drag and drop content creation tool that allows users to design or
customize their marketing content materials and stunning visuals for their social media
platforms.
No need to worry about lacking creativity or technical abilities as this tool offers an intuitive interface. Users can create their own flipbooks with a page-turning effect in 3 simple ways:
- by uploading a PDF document
- creating a presentation from scratch guided by the design studio
- using one of the many preexisting templates available
With customizable templates, users can easily create engaging flipbooks by adding audio, videos, photo slideshows, GIFs, and many more interactive elements. Users can also embed Google maps into their document or add social media buttons that will guide the readers straight to the indicated platforms.
Forget about static documents and start creating innovative and engaging content using digital flipbooks.
Favorite feature: Users can track and measure statistics, using the integrated option, or connect their presentation to a Google Analytics account.
Price: from $14 / month
The bottom line: Due to Flipsnacks’ intuitive editor, creating diverse content and stunning visuals for your marketing campaigns is now as easy as a pie.
Traackr for identifying influencers
A content marketing tool to easily find relevant influencers.
Organic reach on social media networks such as Instagram and YouTube is an important KPI in content marketing. The right influencers help you to communicate to your target audience more credibly and cost-effectively. Influencer marketing is so effective because the trust in the influencer is transferred to your company.
However, social networks like Instagram are full of would-be influencers. Searching for suitable influencers for possible cooperation soon turns into the proverbial search for a needle in a haystack. Among thousands of wannabes, how are you supposed to find the most valuable candidates who really have a relevant, active target group in your target region?
This is where Traackr comes into play.
With Traackr, you can search social networks like Instagram and YouTube for influencers by topic or niche.
Traackr’s unique data set of about 6 million influencers with KPIs such as demographics, brand preferences, and historical growth provides this information. Moreover, you can browse profile bios and descriptions of individual posts.
Favorite feature: Influencer Vetting – Comprehensive analysis of individual influencers using numerous KPIs, illustrated in informative diagrams.
Ultimately, influencer marketing only works if you cooperate with the right influencers. That’s why we like Traackr’s performance reporting, which shows the performance by influencers or campaigns.
Price: custom
The bottom line: With Traackr you can instantly find the really relevant influencers. Stop wasting time with wannabe influencers.
BuzzSumo for topic selection
Find relevant topics for your content marketing strategy.
Finding new topics for your content marketing is difficult. Often you are missing creative ideas, or you have to do a lot of research. You want to address relevant topics that have not been covered dozens of times before.
BuzzSumo simplifies and speeds up this process significantly. Based on a selected keyword, leading posts are listed with social shares, you can see which topics and formats had the most engagement. You can segment by formats and regions. The app informs you of viral trends in real-time or by notification.
Favorite feature: Questions. Simply enter a keyword and the most frequently asked questions about this keyword will be listed. With the topic finding feature, related keywords and topic suggestions are displayed in a Word Cloud.
BuzzSumo gets its data from millions of Facebook fan pages and online forums, including Quora, Amazon and Reddit. The app not only saves you a lot of time, it also helps you discover aspects of a topic you may not have considered before.
Price: $99 – $499 / month
The bottom line: With BuzzSumo you can collect a lot of valuable content ideas in a very short time, which makes it one very useful content marketing tool in your toolbox.
Seobility for Backlink Analysis
A content marketing tool for identifying your competitors‘ backlinks.
Google considers backlinks from other websites to your website as one of many important factors.
You have already written a great blog post, but your competitors still rank higher than you? Maybe your competitors have better (and more) backlinks than you.
But how do you determine the number and quality of your competitors’ backlinks? Using Seobility – quickly and easily.
Simply enter the domain you want to analyze and click on Check backlinks. As a registered user, you will receive all information about the number of backlinks, the referring domains, and if the links are fore example dofollow or nofollow.
Seobility also provides you answers to questions like:
- How valuable are individual backlinks on your website / your competitors’ websites?
- What TLDs are the backlinks from?
- Which backlinks have been added or disappeared since the last analysis?
Favorite feature: With the link rating feature, a complex algorithm assigns each backlink a value between 1-10.
Price: €149,90 / month
The bottom line: Seobility gives you a complete overview of your and your competitors’ backlinks. Strategic backlink building made simple.
SpyFu for Competitor Analysis
Analyze your competitors’ websites within seconds.
In the battle for the best rankings on Google, you are always in fierce competition with competitors.
When competing for the attention of your target group, you and your competitors probably use largely the same keywords.
The good news is that the strategies that websites use such as keywords, internal linking, backlinks and other aspects are publicly available.
With the right tool, these can be analyzed in no time. SpyFu is exactly that tool. It makes competitive analysis simple and fast.
Simply enter the website you want to analyze, click Enter and you will get answers to the following questions:
- Which keywords do your competitors rank best for?
- For which keywords does your competitor run paid ads?
- What percentage of your competitor’s traffic is organic, what percentage is paid traffic?
- For how many keywords does the website rank exclusively, for how many are rankings shared with competitors?
Favorite feature: Organic Ranking History – Analyse Google rankings for up to 20 keywords over a period of up to 5 years.
Price: from $33 / month
The bottom line: SpyFu allows you to spy on the strengths and strategies of your competitors. Catch up on and outperform your competition.
Hootsuite for Social Media Planning
One of the best content marketing tools for Social Media.
Social media marketing is already hard and challenging enough. Different formats such as videos, images, infographics or plain text have to be prepared for different channels. To achieve sufficient reach, the time of posts must be considered. Several employees are involved in creating content for social networks.
How can you coordinate the timely creation of this content? How can you automate the sharing of content across different social networks?
The solution is the content marketing tool Hootsuite.
The Social Media Planning tool is divided into different news streams that give you an overview of current and planned posts on each social media channel. The user management feature allows administrators to assigns tasks to individual users and coordinate content creation. We love the extensive real-time analytics, which can report the performance of individual posts by channel using KPIs such as shares, comments and reactions. One particular strength of Hootsuite is its easy integration with many other tools such as Salesforce, Zendesk, or Adobe. A professional setup for distributing your assets on Social Media is by connecting Hootsuite to a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system. CELUM offers for precisely that case with Hootsuite Connect a good integration.
Favorite feature: Bulk-Scheduling – Using CSV-files, hundreds of scheduled SoMe contributions can be imported at once and scheduled in a time-saving manner
Price: €599 / month
The bottom line: With Hootsuite you can effectively coordinate, plan and automate your social media marketing.
Canva for creating visual content
One of the best content marketing tools to create professional visuals.
Visual content is often the best way to convey information. Other times it is used to support and illustrate written information. Social media posts with visual content receive exponentially higher click rates. Infographics can often convey content more effectively, go viral and generate a lot of traffic.
The problem, however, is that creating compelling visuals can be time-consuming and nerve-wracking. You do not always have a graphic designer at hand, sometimes visuals have to be created at short notice, an article has to be published within a few hours … But you don’t have to be a graphic designer to create great visual content.
With Canva, you can choose from thousands of design templates and create visually appealing content and graphics with a user-friendly editor.
Favorite feature: 1000s of templates – as a user, you can choose from thousands of design templates such as infographics, FB cover photo, IG posts, IG stories, YT video thumbnail and many more.
Price: €27 / month per user
The bottom line: With Canva you create attractive graphics and visuals for your content marketing –without having to pay a professional designer.
HotJar for on-page optimization
Discover which elements of your website need to be optimized.
Backlink building and keyword optimization are not enough. Your entire website must be optimized for users and search engines. On-page optimization concerns aspects such as the use of focus keywords in page elements known as ranking factors, page speed and many more.
How do you identify which elements of your website need optimization? And what measures can you take to achieve this?
HotJar provides you with exactly these answers.
More importantly: HotJar highlights website flaws using heat maps and video analysis of the user behavior of real website visitors.
Favorite feature: Heatmaps – Visualize website visitor behavior by displaying taps, clicks and scrolling behavior on desktop or mobile devices.
This way you can see whether certain elements confuse your users or cause a high exit/abandonment rate.
Price: from €99 / month (depending on page views)
The bottom line: HotJar lets you discover website elements that need to be optimized for usability. Optimize your website where it really matters.
Mailchimp for E-Mail-Marketing
Automate your email marketing and increase your conversion rates.
Email marketing creates regular contact points with prospective and existing customers. Interested parties can be addressed with relevant content and gradually converted to customers. Existing customers are informed about new offers, rewarded for special promotions, and – ideally – customer retention is increased.
However, email marketing can become very complex. Especially if you want to target thousands of contacts in your list with specific email sequences. Segmenting by past activity and setting up autoresponders is essential for effective email marketing.
MailChimp is arguably one of the most famous content marketing tools in the world. The tool gives you full control of your email marketing. You can view the KPIs of your mailings such as delivery rate, opening rate and click-through rate in clear diagrams. MailChimp supports an unlimited number of sequences and autoresponder messages and can be used particularly well in e-commerce or combined with your own online shop.
Favorite feature: Shopping-Integration: MailChimp can be integrated with online stores so that emails with customer-specific product recommendations can be sent automatically.
Price: from €14,99 / month
The bottom line: MailChimp allows you to professionalize your email marketing. Reach prospects and customers effectively and evaluate the performance of your mailings.
Google Analytics for Traffic Analysis
Real-time insights into the user behavior of your website visitors.
Digital transactions can be documented and measured. As an online marketer, you can measure all interactions and clicks of users on your website. You know how many visitors were on your website, how much time they spent here where they came from and how they navigated on your site. You can also see whether your visitors browsed on PC or mobile devices, which operating system or browser version a user is using.
But how can the resulting wealth of data points be managed and analyzed?
Google Analytics is leading, and in our opinion clearly the best analytics platform for websites.
Best of all: it’s completely free! Simply implement the tracking code on your website with a few clicks. All user interactions are logged anonymously. Of course, you must indicate this in the privacy policy and the cookie notice in accordance with the GDPR.
Favorite feature: User flow analysis – simply integrate into the website and analyze from which websites visitors come and which subpages they continue to surf to or where they exit the website
Price: free
The bottom line: Google Analytics tells you everything about your traffic and the browsing behavior of your website visitors. You recognize which content brings visitors and is consumed and which content needs to be improved.
Awario for Brand Monitoring & Social Listening
Keep an eye on your online reputation with this content marketing tool.
Holistic content marketing is more than just publishing content. It also monitors how this content is received and influences the brand image and brand perception. Especially on social networks, a digital misstep can soon become a boomerang. A massive shitstorm is just one inappropriate posting away.
How do customers talk about your company? How do they perceive your products or services? Was there a shitstorm you didn’t even notice? Do you have blind spots in your brand perception?
Awario is a powerful tool for brand monitoring and reputation management.
You can track and monitor all mentions on leading social networks, blogs, forums and news websites. The integrated sentiment analysis automatically determines whether the reports are positive, neutral or negative.
The service can monitor postings in all European languages.
Favorite feature: Individual reporting – the customizable dashboard can display information such as sentiment, impressions, social media engagement, influencer overview or influencing factor
Price: €89 – €299 / month
The bottom line: Awario lets you keep track of how customers talk about your business. You can manage your reputation and – if necessary – react.
Magisto for High-Quality Video Content
Create online videos in minutes.
Some information is best explained in video format. Especially software companies should effectively show the benefits and operation of their solution.
However, the rule is: do it professionally or not at all. Only high-quality videos with excellent picture and sound quality should be used in content marketing. Hastily recorded videos, with a noisy background or unclear transitions, cause more harm than good.
How can you easily cut and produce professional videos yourself?
Magisto is the first end-to-end video editing solution that works with artificial intelligence. Within a few minutes, you can create high-quality and professional videos. Thousands of available templates are also available with this content marketing tool to help you with the production.
Favorite feature: the AI algorithm. It automatically analyzes visual and audio content from the uploaded video. Based on this, a script is created that communicates your topic and characters with effective storytelling.
Magisto can reduce the manual processing effort to a minimum.
Price: $9,99-$34,99 / month
The bottom line: Magisto allows you to quickly create emotionally appealing video content with AI support. Use them to support and boost your content marketing campaigns.
The Hemingway App for Text Analysis
Online Writing Assistant.
Are your texts really easy to understand? Should you use active or passive voice? Are you sure you didn’t make any spelling or grammar mistakes? Does there go a comma or not? Do you have to capitalize this word? Most of us are not grammar geniuses…
Even the most interested readers have only a limited attention span – especially online. It is not enough to attract readers to your content. The content must appeal to your readers, move them, inform them, convince them (and often move them into action). For this purpose, you should use simple, informative and correctly formulated language.
But how can you determine whether your text is easy to understand and correctly written?
This is where the Hemingway App comes in handy.
With the Hemingway App you just have to insert your copy. You will get a comprehensive text analysis, which will alert you to sentence length, formulation errors, passive constructions, impersonal language, usage of too many adjectives or passive constructions. Moreover, it will tell you how easy or hard it is to comprehend your text.
The basis for the tool’s notes is the Flesch Kincaid Readability Index. Scientifically sound, this model shows how difficult a text is to understand. For this purpose, factors such as sentence length, number of syllables, the ratio of nouns to verbs and other aspects are used.
Favorite feature: the various tests, such as adverbs, use of passive voice, phrasing, hard-to-read-sentences are highlighted in different colors for easier comprehension.
Price: free
The bottom line: The Hemingway App allows you to write stimulating and clear texts that not only inform your target group but really convince them.
AnswerThePublic for generating new content ideas
Make your Content Marketing work by understanding what people really want to know.
What should your next blog post be about? Which topic should your next VLOG cover?
Most of your posts will address problems, challenges and current trends that are relevant to your industry or target audience. These topics are easy to find, the questions and concerns of your customers point them out to you every day. However, sometimes it is better to look a little beyond your own nose. Quite possibly, there are a few explosive topics that you didn’t even have on your radar.
AnswerThePublic is one of the best content marketing tools out there for precisely doing that.
With this free tool, you get an overview of many relevant content ideas in seconds. Just enter a keyword, select country and language and click on “Search”. You’ll get dozens or even hundreds of topic suggestions – clearly displayed in mind maps.
For best results, we recommend using very general keywords. ATP drills down into the individual sub-topics for you.
Favorite feature: Data comparison. This feature makes it easy to see which keyword searches have increased in the last weeks or months. Moreover, the new search queries added in the respective period are marked green and complemented automatically. However, this is a premium feature.
Price: $75 / month with an annual subscription
The bottom line: AnswerThePublic helps you generate hundreds of content ideas and identify the most relevant topics in seconds.
Conclusion
Content marketing is an essential and effective tool in the arsenal of every online marketer. No wonder 88% of all B2B marketers use it as part of their online marketing strategy.
Most likely you are already one of them. Or perhaps you are in the process of laying the foundation and making preparations. If your content marketing is to achieve the desired success, your measures must be easy and effective to implement. These 15 content marketing tools will help you to ensure just that.
We wish you much success!
