It might seem like a bit of a cliché, but very often digital marketers are defined by the tools they use to get their work done. It’s the case across all digital channels - if you’re not utilising the right tools to plan and manage your time and efforts your job will immediately become a whole lot harder.
Whether you want to breathe some new life into your content marketing strategy or if you’re just starting out with a brand new one, there are some great web tools out there that can seriously help. For content marketers it’s all about using these to do what it takes to create and distribute something that offers some serious value to your audience. Your content is your way of getting users to buy into your unique brand story.
Quality content has the capacity to not only build your audience, but build it in a way that draws an engaged user base that it is worthwhile investing time marketing to. Bear in mind, however, that in most cases content marketing doesn’t have an immediate effect. The long term potential benefits are totally worth considering though - increased web traffic, better scope for engagement on social channels, the possibility that you could start a dialogue with your brand at the centre, positive SEO, etc, etc,.
If you don’t condition your mind to think like a journalist and start considering what your audience want to read you’re in for something of an uphill struggle. Here are some of our favourite tools to help reinforce your content marketing strategy…
Tweriod is a seriously simple and easy to use tool that gives you an idea of the best times for you to share your content on Twitter. It does this by analysing both your own feed/tweets and that of your followers, before giving you a better idea of when you should send out your posts for maximum effect.
Stumbleupon is a network where users can discover new content based on their likes when they hit a button. Their tagline is “Discover the best of the web, one click at a time”. Alongside being able to discover new content, users can also add their own pages and tag them. Results vary depending on your industry and the style of content you create. Certainly worth a shot for distribution.
Feedly is the RSS feed of choice for many people, collating all of the posts and content from channels that matter to you in one place. It will allow you to discover content and ideas that are relevant quickly and easily.
Twitter trending topics are a great way to get a snapshot of the kind of dialogues your followers and other social users are currently part of. This can give you a great indication of the kind of questions it might be worth answering within your content. For small and local businesses, local trending insights can be really useful for directing your themes and topics.
Inbound.org is a community of marketers and a great place to go to get answers, direction and to grow. Go there to find content that has been curated by other marketers to help you head in the right direction. On the other end of the spectrum, it’s also a great place to go to get noticed and build relationships within the marketing community.
Yoast is the search engine optimisation wordpress plugin of choice for many. It can be a great tool and resource for you to tailor your content to perform well on major search engines and also to help broaden your professional understanding of SEO best practice.
Evernote is a great little organisational tool that can help you keep track and build on ideas all in one place. It’s used by people across both professional and personal life and can be accessed both on the computer and on the go via their userfriendly app.
Ubersuggest is a userfriendly keyword discovery tool that can help you get to grips with the sort of queries that users are searching for.
If Ubersuggest doesn’t do it for you, you can always choose to use Google AdWord’s own keyword planner. Plenty of marketers swear by it for insights into the kind of headlines and titles that might gain some traction. It can also help you to discover the best keyword pairings to include within your article. Bear in mind, however, that long gone are the days when you could trick Google into thinking your article was quality by spamming keywords so only use these as a basis for seriously well written content that is worth reading.
Not a tool as such but certainly something worth getting into the habit of using. Embedding tweets in your content is a great way to both improve the credibility of your content and the variety of media within it.
Okay, so this might seem like a slightly contrived choice of tool, but hear us out. There are certainly benefits to writing your content on Google Docs to using other word document creators, especially the dreaded MS Office Word. Docs allows you to share and collaborate on content, which can be especially useful for organisations where articles need to get the okay from a selection of different people far more desirable than conflicting copies being saved to Dropbox at any rate! The interface is also sleeker and far simpler to use.
We’ve said it once and we’ll say it again, Canva is our preferred web-based image editing engine. A great place to go to create some high-quality, good looking blog headers and infographics.
What are your favourite tools for content marketing? We’d love to hear! Tweet us @GiraffeSM…
