18 Content Marketing Tools You Need To Be Successful

In 2019, current Content Marketing requires content publishers to have breakthrough, creative & persistent content. But each person has limited capacity, you will not be able to do all the steps yourself in the process of publishing content.

Therefore, more and more content marketing tools with good quality are constantly improving features to serve users. Depending on the purpose, you will use different tools, including free and paid tools.

In this article, I will present 18 effective content marketing tools that I often use to increase the value and quality of content, as well as content production performance. Some tools also help me monitor and optimize the content published on the website.

I will classify these tools into 5 main groups:

  • Content editor tool
  • Research & Creative tool
  • Content promotion tool
  • Performance tracking tool
  • Productivity Tools (or Writing planner tool)

content marketing tools

Content editor tools

First, you need the tools and platforms that make publishing content easy & professional… because most content marketers know nothing about programming.

Fortunately, technology has given us many gifts to make this work easy, convenient but extremely powerful.

1. WordPress

Talking about the content publishing platform, WordPress is always number 1. 70% of websites worldwide are using this source code, so there is no reason to find another source while you are not an expert in coding.

If you do not have a website of your own and you do not have much knowledge about wordpress, please refer to this article. I am also using wordpress for my website, the content you are reading here is built on this platform.

WordPress editor provides any features you desire. In addition, if you install Shortcode Ultimate plugin, you can add a lot of additional elements to your content.

And yet, with thousands of support plugins, you can find & use any marketing support tool to power your website, not just content marketing.

2. Unbounce

Unbounce is a platform that helps you create and design Landing Pages professionally and beautifully without knowing anything about coding. I’m a big fan of Unbounce when it comes to landing-page tools to use for one simple reason: its features.

Unbounce’s landing-page software is one of the best in existence right now. It’s perfect for building custom landing pages with diverse page elements. You have beginner-level customization options and even highly advanced options.

Further reading: 3 things to consider when creating a new landing page

3. Fastone Capture & Monosnap

Download:

Share key Faststone Capture:

  • User Name: Administrator
  • Registration Code: AXIQS-RCMRV-KCIFM-HCMFV

In the tutorial articles (for example, tool or software manual), screenshots are indispensable. For example, here is a screenshot with the arrow that I use often:

The screenshot helps clarify the problem in question, shows the authenticity and makes it easier for readers to understand what you are trying to convey.

The 2 tools above will help you take screenshots & edit them quickly. I use Faststone Capture for window and Monosnap for MacOS.

4. Visually & Easelly

Home page:

Sure, everyone is talking about how important visual content is in your strategy. But did you know that including images in your posts make your content (and your business) more:

  • Attractive,
  • Engaging,
  • Understandable,
  • Memorable, and,
  • Relatable.

In addition to publishing quality text content, you also need to consider creating other forms of content integrated into the article to increase user interaction. That’s where Infographics come into play.

Infographics are a visually compelling communication medium that done well can communicate complex data in a visual format that is potentially viral.

“Infographics” is one efficient way of combining the best of text, images and design to represent complex data that tells a story that begs to be shared.

For example:

You can create Infographics by hiring a designer or more easily with the support of 2 tools Visual.ly & Easel.ly. Each tool has a free template available for you to choose and modify, add content then you can download into your computer.

You can pay extra to access more advanced templates.

Research & Creative tools

Preparing materials to create content such as: Research for topics, spying on you competition, find ideas, … quite complicated & time consuming.

This is the answer to the question: Is your content useful? Can it bring you customers?

1. Keyword Planner

Writing content without knowing what keywords are targeted and which readers are synonymous with you are working arbitrarily.

Further reading: Why keyword research should be the first Important step for SEO?

One of the most used free tools for keyword research is Keyword Planner.

With this tool, you will know the exact number of searches per month of that keyword on Google, trending keywords & find countless related keywords, including longtail keywords & buyer keywords.

Based on that, you will have different strategies depending on the data found.

However, to fully display Google Keyword Planner data, you need to spend a certain amount of budget on Google ads. This makes it difficult for website administrators to not use this service.

2. KWFinder

If Google Keyword Planner only focuses on Google Ads users, KWfinder will favor content marketer and SEOer.

This is a paid tool, but it’s perfect and totally worth the price. After spending a lot of time using keyword research tools, I decided to be loyal to KWFinder.

This tool allows you to:

  • Exactly check the monthly search volume of each keyword.
  • Provide long keyword suggestions around the main keyword
  • Full display of key indicators in SEO and information on top 10 ranking for that keyword.
  • Calculate the relative difficulty of each keyword when doing SEO.

3. Buzzsumo

This is a super powerful content marketing tool that I use regularly for 3 purposes:

  • Find and analyze trends and viral content by keywords in a certain period of time
  • Search for Influencers in the market to follow & find ways to build relationships with them
  • Keep track of what refers to your website brand & competitors. Not only does it help ú make good content, but it also serves other important tasks like link building.

4. Feedly

When you develop a website in a certain field, you will always want to have more in-depth knowledge in that field. Even though you might hire a writer, you’re still the one who orientate the content of the site. This requires you to have in-depth knowledge of the topic your site refers to.

To monitor and update the latest news and knowledge, I use Feedly. I create different feeds for each topic I’m interested in. In each feed, I add the websites to follow (meaning I have to synthesize quality sites to track).

And so every day, I can always get the latest updates from the above websites in only one feed.

Promotion tools

After having a good and systematic idea, you can start developing content. Or you could have a writer do it if your writing skills are not good.

After you get quality content, it’s time to use the tools to help transfer content to users in a much more convenient way than do it manually.

1. Blog2Social

When publishing an article, but having to share manually on each social network account, it is very annoying, so you need to use the social media automation plugins.

WordPress has countless free plugins that help you establish a connection with social networking accounts and automatically share in bulk whenever new content is published.

In addition, platforms like IFTTT or Buffer also allow you to set up social network sharing management with more advanced features, often used on a large scale.

2. Addthis, Sumome

Home page:

These are tools to help your website have like, share buttons of popular social networks.

When readers are interested in your content, they will want to share with others or share on social networks to save. You only need to install & set up displays for these tools in the appropriate locations.

3. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a powerful email marketing support platform with a beautiful interface, supporting a lot of features for marketers.

ActiveCampaign aims to be an ecosystem that helps your business automate all content promotion tasks instead of just stopping in email marketing.

With ActiveCampaign, after you’ve finished publishing quality content, you’ll be able to set up the features:

  • Send promotion emails to your email list.
  • Easily categorize different groups of readers to send them appropriate content.
  • And there are many other features that assist you in automating content promotion.

Performance tracking tools

After investing a lot of effort in producing & promoting quality content, you need to keep track of your results that are measured by indicators.

At this late stage, I often use 3 tools:

1. Google Analytics

Any Webmaster must install this free Google support tool on the website.

With Google Analytics, you can easily track the basic parameters such as: website traffic, sessions, Bounce Rate, Session Duration, Traffic Channel,…

And more importantly, you will see what content is most visited by users. Thanks to these features, you can easily optimize the content or continue to use these content as leverage for the next marketing campaign.

Also Google Analytic has many other features. There are many courses that help you not only know how to use, but also use it in a quality and effective way.

2. Google Search Console

The old Google Search Console is called Google Webmaster Tool, which is a free tool from Google that any website owner or webmaster needs to use.

Google Search Console allows you to:

  • Accurately monitor the monthly traffic flow statistics by Google data.
  • Analyze keywords with traffic on the website
  • Posts that receive the most traffic.
  • The internal links, external links, backlinks of each article in the website.
  • And help you manipulate many tasks with Google when the website has problems.

3. Ahrefs

Ahrefs integrates many other tools inside, mainly for SEO and website analytics purposes.

Since it is a super powerful tool and does not seem to have a competitor, the cost of maintaining this tool every month is not cheap.

In terms of content marketing, in addition to helping you spy the content being ranked by your competitors, it also helps to analyze your own website.

The Content Explorer feature will help you know the level of interaction, sharing your content on social networks.

You also know where your content is shared, who shares it.

4. Jetpack

Jetpacks is a free plugin of WordPress that allows you to install, connect API key and website status statistics, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly traffic.

Also similar to Google Search Console, Jetpacks lists the top pages on your site that receive the most traffic.

Jetpack also has a number of other support features such as: Share button, related articles, CDN, Lazy loading, comment, sitemap, … However, I do not turn those features on because there are other more specialized tools.

Productivity Tools (or Writing planner tool)

The last group of tools I want to introduce to you is the tools that will be used to manage the writing schedule in content marketing campaigns.

If you manage a team, these tools are indispensable, but if you are a personal blogger, you can use it to improve your blogging performance.

1. CoSchedule

This platform works similarly to Slack and Trello. However, there will be a simple free package for individuals.

This tool makes it easy to assign writing tasks, track individual content publishing progress and handle work for professional teams like never before.

2. Google Calendar

Google is almost full of applications for your work, including Google Calendar, which is used to do any work related to scheduling.

This is the first interface of Google Calendar, you can add any content to the time frame, marked by color to distinguish.

In addition to using Google Calendar to remember personal time, you can easily use it for your content publishing schedule and track and remind yourself by SMS and email settings. All are free.

3. Evernote

Evernote has previously been known as an effective personal note tool widely used by the community.

In order to develop into an essential tool in everyone’s daily life & work, Evernote has upgraded many features and templates that allow you to:

  • Store important content and data on the internet to serve as a source of content development
  • Plan, add members to discuss
  • Countless template templates to serve all life and work activities, making it easy to deploy content production schedules.

Conclusion

So, in this article, I have introduced you to 18 effective tools for your content strategy. All were classified according to their intended use.

These are almost the most typical tools, with a large user community. So you can easily find the user guide on Google.

You can learn and apply them for your work today. If you want to add any useful tools, don’t hesitate to leave a comment!

Related post: 7 Top Content Marketing Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2019

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