Content marketing is one of the most effective, cost-efficient ways you can grow your business, engage your customers, and build trust among customers. But no matter how big your company is or what stage of business you’re at, constantly churning out effective content can be challenging. 

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Thankfully, there are many tools today to help you create high-quality content—and do it consistently. 

Here’s a list of the top content marketing tools you shouldn’t be without:

1. For measuring content marketing results 

Google Analytics is one of the best tools to measure and refine your content marketing efforts. If you’re running ads and want to track how they’re working, this is the perfect tracking tool to use. It is easily integrated with Google AdWords, and best of all, it’s free. 

With Google Analytics, you can get data on how many people are viewing your website, what country your audience is mostly from, what browser they are using, and other important information to help you improve your advertising and marketing strategies.

2. For publishing content 

Did you know that 43% of the web is built on WordPress? With this content management platform, you can create websites, set up blogs, and eCommerce sites. Its popularity because the platform is flexible. There are a lot of plugins available, and support from an active community of developers and users. 

WordPress themes are also easily customizable, allowing you to transform your website and tailor it to look and feel exactly how you want it to.

3. For editing content

Grammarly is a robust writing assistant tool that goes beyond just checking your work for typos. For starters, the tool is primarily used to review content for spelling and grammatical errors. In addition, it offers context-specific suggestions based on different writing styles—from business to creative, academic to technical, or casual to formal. Grammarly basically makes sure that everything you publish is easy to read and error-free.

The free version is available to correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes. But if you really want to access its full suite of features, the Premium version is a great investment.

4. For team collaboration

Content marketing involves a lot of different team members with varying roles. At any given time, you’re probably working with editors, writers, content managers, graphic designers, and so on. To help teams collaborate more effectively, Slack offers a single platform where everyone can chat and share documents, media, and other forms of content necessary to seamlessly run your content marketing team.

The platform integrates easily with popular applications like Google Drive, Google Calendar, and Dropbox and runs on both desktop and mobile devices. Chat rooms can be customized for easy team collaboration and notifications can be tailored based on specific users and keywords. 

5. For getting more traffic from organic search

Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO tool that helps you drive more traffic from organic searches. It helps with link building, keyword research, and identifying opportunities in the marketplace. It also lets you scale efforts by delivering insightful data and metrics. 

Ahrefs can help monitor your backlinks, find link-building opportunities through content promotion and outreach, and help you find topics that you can rank for. It also provides competitive research so you can see what keywords your competition is ranking for. 

The only drawback of this platform is that they don’t offer a free version or trial, but this tool is a smart investment that delivers great ROI. 

6. For keyword research

Semrush allows you to see what keywords your competitors are targeting and ranking so you can tweak your own strategies to expand your audience. It also lets you…

• Complete a full SEO audit of your website
• Review your backlinks 
• Deliver a comprehensive keyword analysis 
• See where your site is ranking for its target keywords 

Additionally, Semrush is also a PPC and social media marketing tool so you can create and track PPC campaigns, and schedule or post content on social media. 

The platform is available on a limited free plan with affordable paid plans as you scale and need more access to key features.

7. For designing graphics

Canva is a web-based graphic design platform that lets you create professionally designed graphics, gifs, and videos. It features an easy drag-and-drop interface and gives you access to thousands of illustrations, photos, fonts, and templates. Each template can be customized with artwork specifically for your brand’s needs. 

Canva is free to use. For more advanced editing features and access to more templates and graphic elements, you can upgrade to the Pro plan.

8.  For content collaboration

Google Docs makes it easy to share documents and edit content while minimizing versioning issues with your writing team. It’s a great tool that simplifies and streamlines collaboration with multiple writers and editors. 

Google Docs is part of the Google Drive suite of services, which is a popular cloud storage solution. Google Drive offers integration with Gmail, making it even simpler to share documents and files—and it offers offline editing functionalities. Documents can easily be accessed and edited on any device, allowing team members to add comments even when you’re not on your computer. You can also control the privacy settings for each document.

9. For identifying influencers

Buzzsumo is a great tool for finding influencers and building a relationship with them. The platform lets you search for the most shared content on any subject, giving you insight into what content has been shared by which influencers.

It’s also a useful tool for identifying top-performing content and gives you data on what your competitors are doing in terms of content. Finally, Buzzsumo shows how much engagement your content is getting versus your competitors and other brands in your niche. 

The platform is free for up to 10 searches per month. If you want to upgrade, the Pro Plan starts at $99 monthly. 

There are a lot of tools out there, but optimizing your content marketing means narrowing down your options to the most useful tools that fit your needs. We hope our list of must-haves helps improve your content marketing. If you want to learn more, reach out to us. Book a consultation or get started with Leadspanda to find out how we can help you. 

Any questions, leave a comment below or check out our LinkedIn or Twitter. 

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