The Ultimate List of Content Marketing Tools and Resources-IV

Market-o-sphere is a beautiful place to be at.

Well, most of the time (if your product has a market, your marketing strategy is spot-on, and it becomes your strong suit).

It upgrades to being MAGNIFICENT when you upgrade to Content Marketing.

Let’s stay motivated with this pep-talk, so we can upgrade to see the results.

Speaking of results, we have shared several Content Marketing tools & resources to make this process every Businessmen’s cup of tea in this series of blogs.

Here’s what we have already published:

The first post in the series (The Ultimate List of Content Marketing Tools and Resources)  covered a list of literature and gurus you should follow and the platforms where you can find freelancers.

In the second post of the series (The Ultimate List of Content Marketing Tools and Resources-II), we talked about where to get content and keyword ideas from and the tools for effective communication and collaboration.

The last post (The Ultimate List of Content Marketing Tools and Resources-III) covered the tools that help you stay organized, remove language redundancies and design engaging visuals.

The list would keep going as Content Marketing has dozens of aspects having hundreds of tools to assist with different functions.

However, we’d have to call it a day somewhere. So let’s begin with the closing post of this series.

1 – Using Stock images and illustrations

 

 

The Stock industry uses images and photographs that are licensed to be used for most commercial purposes and are either found for low cost or for free. There are several online sources to get help from, but we brought some good options for you. 

a. Pixabay

It is a platform to find images, vectors, illustrations, and videos that are licensed. The website provides all the kind of visual data under separate categories and gives the option of *Safe search*. The best feature is that the visual content is available for free.

b. Shutterstock

It is a stock-image provider service you can use for as low $0.27 per image for a monthly package of 750 images that costs you $199 in total (for individual usage). There are many different packages with a varying number of images allowed. The packages for teams are also available.

c. Pexels

Pexels also provides free, licensed stock images to users. They are earning their revenue but not from you, instead from donations and partner organizations.

d. VectorStock

VectorStock is a stock-based royalty-free gallery that provides both free and paid vector art, graphics, clipart, illustrations and vector images in high resolution. The term *Royalty-free* refers to the fact that you do not have to pay any fee to use the image after you have paid the one-time, flat fee. The packages began from $9.95, allowing one user only for 5-projects a month with 10Gb storage and five emails a month. There are other available packages too.

Have a look at the kind of results you get on vector stock against the search query *Content Marketing*.

2 – Spreading the word 

You’d often see some Content Marketers whining about how their content did not draw any attention.

Well, creating the content (and even posting it out there) is not even half the work done. The most critical task is shooting the content to the audience. 

Now, this sounds insane, but this is the kicker.

If you don’t want your content to lay there unattended like an orphan in a fair, well start sharing it with the people it matters to.

Here are some of the tools and resources to share your content with targets like crazy but strategically.

a. Reddit

Just as Reddit is considered to be an excellent platform for collecting ideas, it is an equally fantastic platform to get your name out there. All you have to do is participate in relevant subreddits and share the content with the people where it would sell hot.

b. StumbleUpon

Neil Patel has shared four ways to use Stumbleupon to get your word and name out there. They are both free and paid methods to get you qualified traffic.

c. SlideShare

SlideShare is a great platform where you can find the slides on almost every topic. For increasing visibility of your content, you can repurpose and optimize it for SlideShare. Jimmy Thomson at Hootsuite has explained how SlideShare can maximize your website traffic and improve your Google ranking.

d. Scribd

While scribd is an online library, you can use it to promote some of your content too. If you have created a type of content you’d find in a library, i.e., books, guides, etc., you can post an interesting part of it on Scribd. The users interested in that kind of content would be attracted to your masterpiece and would be found where your content is, shortly after.

e. CoSchedule

Although CoSchedule is a complete marketing suite, it can be a useful tool to spread your word. The busy marketers often forget to post or promote a piece of content. Co-schedule is the answer these marketers are looking for. Co-schedule shares content with prospects a long time after producing it, so it gets its fair share of audience attraction.

f. Email marketing

This aspect of marketing has also scored a good position as a reliable advertising and promotion weapon. Hold on till the next section to read more about it.

3 – Automating content

The era of hard work is over, and smart work is today’s hot trend. Now that 24-hours a day are falling short for Content marketing efforts, slow can’t win anymore. Shifting your Content Marketing efforts on the fast track is a cup above other solutions. 

Here are some tools to speed up the process for fast and effective execution and better results.

a. Hootsuite

It is a social media management tool that is one dashboard to schedule and run all your Social media from. It is useful even if you have a small team as it helps in fast and easy scheduling, reporting, and management of your content. You can be carefree after scheduling your content across all the platforms because Hootsuite would take it from there as a responsible big bro.

b. Buffer

Buffer is another Saas solution that manages many Social media platforms and analyzes the results. Just schedule up to 100 posts at once and relax when the platform posts it for you at the right time.

c. Zapier

Zapier is another automation tool that automates chores for you by the integration of apps. This removes the need to do the same task repeatedly. All you have to do is to set a Zap.

In simple words, Zap is telling Zappier what action to take in response to what triggers. The simplest examples are tweeting your new blog post or saving the images you receive on a particular app to Google drive. Marketers, however, can creatively use it for better purposes.

d. IFTTT

If this then that (IFTTT) works pretty much on the same principle as Zapier. You integrate apps or services in IFTTT by making applets.

The craziest applets we came across are connecting Siri to Trello, muting cell phone at a specific time each night, or saving voice notes to EverNote. 

Can’t you now imagine the fun-filled ease in life IFTTT promises?

e. MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is a Social Media management tool that can be used for content automation. You can post your content or schedule it for reposting, setting an expiry date for the seasonal content as well.

4 – Email automation tools

Different Email marketing and automation tools differ from each other with the features they provide, but the ultimate goal is to provide ease and speed to you and your process.

a. GetResponse

GetResonse is marketing software. Its email automation tool is used to send out newsletters in bulk, has autoresponders and can be used for online surveys. The other variety of features making it a good option include the powerful reporting, landing page creator, and usable email templates. 

b. MailChimp

It is another Email service provider that follows the freemium model. Some of the services include access to 7 marketing channels and customizable email templates, automation series, retargeting ads, and much more.

c. SendinBlue

It is a cloud-based software suite with services ranging from email marketing, marketing automation, customer relationship management, landing page creation, ads for Facebook, retargeting ads, SMS marketing, etc.

5 – Tools to measure analytics & ROI

Now that your content is out, you need to track how well it is performing to measure your ROI and improving performance. Here are some of the Content Marketing Analytics-tools popular amongst content marketers.

a. Google Analytics

Neil Patel has a detailed post on what you can utilize Google Analytics for. You can use to track your best and worst-performing website content and campaigns and important source data (age, gender, location, interest, device, and others). It shares the stats of Social platforms to the extent of traffic or conversions they bring. You can visualize loopholes in your sales funnel where people are abandoning the cart or you can track your goals. 

b. Kissmetrics 

Kissmetrics also provides detailed analytics to understand the behavior of your prospects so you can convert them easily and strategically. Along with the stats that Google Analytics provides, you can also find out the most common features here like the groups of convertors, bouncers & drop-offs. It also makes retargeting easier with its Email automation feature.

c. BuzzSumo

Monitoring and tracking our performance (along with those of the competitors) is one of the many features of BuzzSumo. It gives details of people sharing your content, shows the buzz about your content, reveals the number of people the content is converting, and other stats from your Social media. 

d. SEMRUSH

SEMRush gives you important analytics like traffic sources, causes of traffic depression, audience behavior, and traffic destinations of visitors from your website. Like BuzzSumo, there’s more to SEMRush than just analytics, including its competitor’s research feature.

e. Alexa

Alexa analyzes your competitors to give you a complete picture that can have many sprouting opportunities for you. It compares your traffic to that of your competitors, gives you their breakdown of analytics and the common audience between you and your competitors. It also reveals the most useful keywords for your audience and relevant keywords your competitors have worked on having the potential for you too.

 

Bonus

Like Google analytics, you’d find in-built analytics with almost all the Social media sites i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn, etc.

6 – Tools to spy on your competitor’s website

Whatever you do as a business, just NEVER consider your competitors ‘underdogs’ and NEVER EVER cut them some slack. Keeping a keen eye on your competitors helps you know exactly where they stand. That’s how you stay in the race. This often wins you chances to utilize resources that the competitors couldn’t leverage. 

 

There are many important metrics that you need to observe to track a competitor’s performance. 

But how can you actually do that?

Let’s dig into a few tools that grease these wheels.

a. Ahrefs

Ahref is an all-in-one competitors-research pack, but some features make it a worth-using tool for most marketers. You can begin by identifying your competitors based on the keywords you are trying to rank for, organically.

Once you know your competitors, analyze their domain authority, referring domains, the estimated number of ranking keywords, and estimated traffic. Now you have their whole situation in front of you; time to make your next move.

The premium tool has a 7-days free trial as well.

b. Rank Signals

It is a free tool that digs into your competitor’s site and brings out the link data, referring pages, URLs, and a lot more. The data on backlinks is a treasure for you, providing you a chance to win them for your site. 

c. Social Mention

Just like social mention can update you when you are mentioned anywhere across the web, it gets you the same information for your competitors too. Knowing their reputation is an important weapon for you.

SocialMention also gives you strength, sentiments, reach, and passion metrics of your competitors along with a chance to generate yourself quality backlinks that your competitors are using.

d. SpyFu

SpyFu helps you find out the paid Keywords of your competitor, along with their cost per click. It prepares you for the competition with the list of resources to help you compete well. Competitor’s AdWords history data reveals a lot about their advertisement, including their creatives over time, details of campaigns, optimized elements, and the results of those optimizations. 

Wrap-up:

Content Marketing is a multi-faceted process. It requires a good team and a good strategy that the team executes. But most importantly, the process involves several tools and resources to be executed in a way that is fast, strategic, and results-oriented.

We are wrapping up the series with tools and resources for using stock images/illustrations/videos, for spreading the content and automating it, for analyzing your stats as well as to spy on your competitors.

So that is pretty much all from us on the topic for now.

If you want to dig further into the sea of Content Marketing, well here’s your chance to find some pearls.

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17+ Insanely Actionable Content Marketing Hacks

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9 Content Marketing Tips for Digital Marketers

4 must-have roles your Content Marketing team needs today

Powerful Content Production Strategy influencers follow [Content Sprout Method]