The great thing about doing marketing in the digital age is the wealth of tools available to us that can help us do our jobs better, faster, and more effectively. And let me tell you, there are A LOT of available tools out there today.

I’ve been in this industry for a long time, specifically in content marketing. It took a bit of trial and error, but through the years, I was able to sift through all the different platforms available for content marketing and I’ve come across content marketing tools that are not only great and effective, but they’re also free.

I’ve narrowed down my top picks to these 3 below:

1. For Generating Ideas

Content marketing is all about creating and churning out material that’s creative, original, and relevant. More importantly, it’s about publishing content consistently. It’s inevitable that you’re going to run out of ideas given how frequently you’re going to have to develop content for your blog.

Once you hit that wall, give Hubspot’s Blog Idea Generator a try. All you have to do is type in nouns related to your subject matter and it will generate a set of ideas for you. And while you may not get a specific topic from their suggestion, the Blog Idea Generator can help get your creative juices flowing.

2. For Collaboration

A lot of collaboration tools online, even the ones that are free, tend to overcomplicate the collaboration process with their high number of specialized features. So, when Trello was introduced, I found it refreshingly straightforward and simple. It‘s basically a digital to-do list, where you can customize columns to keep track of what everyone on your team is working on and see their progress. For a certain number of users, the whole platform is free. Hence, if you’re running a small business, you can make the most out of it without spending a penny.

3. For Social Media Management

Social media is critical to content marketing. Any content that you produce and publish has to be distributed across all your social media platforms. Gone are the days when you only had to worry about posting something on Facebook. In fact, it’s likely that your business has a Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter page, along with Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google My Business and other platforms, just to name a few.

Sure, you can post everything across all platforms manually. But that’s a tedious and time-consuming process that can easily be managed by Buffer. Buffer makes it easy for you to queue up all your posts across different platforms and do so ahead of time. Best of all, this handy tool is available for free for up to 3 social media platforms. Just sign up for a free trial, and after the trial ends, you can downgrade to the free version. If, like me, you also handle social media from multiple clients, you will need to opt for the paid version. But not to worry, Buffer lets you manage 8 social media profiles and schedule 100 posts for only $15 a month.

Hope my answer helps! Feel free to get in touch via Leadspanda if you have any questions. And if this answer gets read by fellow marketers, please feel free to share your favourite free content marketing tools below. I’d love to hear about them!