When interviewed, marketers expressed that one of their greatest pain points and challenges with content marketing was lack of time.
With everything that’s involved in content marketing – the strategy, ideation, creation, promotion and analytics – it is becoming increasingly more difficult to find the time to fit content marketing into our busy schedules. (Along with doing a million more marketing activities like SEO, PPC, social media, emails and answering the forever-ringing phone).
With all of these activities to tend to and the constant distractions, productivity drops, you make even less progress with your content marketing strategy and have even less time to finish what you started.
But stress not, we have a solution. Tools.
Tools are fantastic for improving productivity, as they cut out precious time spent coming up with ideas or creating or promoting content, and provide you with the resources you need to succeed online. This lets you focus on what you need to do to get the job done and saves time to do more important things.
Yet not all tools are helpful. Some can suck up time and deliver very little. Even choosing which tools will help or hinder in itself can be a time suck. So, we have done the hard work for you and selected the content marketing tools that will make your life easier, fill in gaps in your skill set, and improve your overall content marketing productivity.
Having a content calendar will help to organise all of your content into a neat and tidy schedule. This is a place to gather your content ideas, headlines, keywords, goals, publishing channels, and date of publish. Use this to plan your content in advance and keep everything organised.
2. Trello
Trello is super handy for getting organised. Prioritise and manage projects and tasks with boards and lists, and share ideas with your team to boost productivity.
3. Evernote
Evernote is a great tool for jotting your ideas down, wherever you are. Inspiration strikes in the most unlikely of places and at the most unexpected times, so you have to be ready for it. Evernote also works across multiple devices and you can share ideas with other members of the team. Of course, you could also go for the good old-fashioned notebook and jot your ideas down in there.
Reduce time trying to come up with content ideas with Answer The Public. Simply enter your topic and hundreds of ideas are generated for your next stellar piece of content.
5. Feedly
In order to keep on top of your game, you need to keep reading and learning. Feedly compiles news feeds from a range of different content sources and publications all in one place, so that you don’t have to go searching for resources, and can spend more time learning about recent developments in your niche.
6. Pocket
Pocket is a bit like bookmarking your favourite resources. You find a really interesting article and pop it in your pocket for later. You need to keep reading to keep learning in this ever-changing digital landscape, so Pocket lets you save interesting articles to dive into when you have a spare moment.
7. Buzzsumo
Use Buzzsumo to discover what’s trending in your niche. See what the most popular pieces of content are and how many social shares each gets. Find out what sort of content people are engaging with most and use this to come up with your next content idea to get more engagement and shares.
Much like Buzzsumo, Google Trends assesses which search terms are most popular on Google. Use this to hack into what’s trending and find out what audiences want to read so that you can tailor your content to achieve the same.
This tool is useful for generating ideas. Simply enter your topic and a random title is generated. Although not all of the suggestions may be suitable, you can use this to develop ideas of your own.
10. Coschedule Headline Analyser
Headlines are crucial in content marketing. Headlines draw future prospects in, leading them to open your article, read it, and hopefully convert. This tool is ideal for crafting the perfect headline. Enter your headline and Coschedule’s Headline Analyser will rate it by its ability to result in social shares, traffic, and SEO ranking.
11. Hemingway app
If you struggle to write clearly and succinctly, the Hemingway app will improve your piece’s readability. It does this through highlighting any hard to read sentences and unnecessary words to ensure that your message is communicated in the clearest way possible, and you don’t waffle on and on. It is better not to sound clever, but to keep it simple and be understood, without any jargon.
12. Grammarly
Like the Hemingway tool, Grammarly helps improve your writing by making sure it’s easy to read and free of any mistakes. Grammarly will help you to become a better writer and communicate more effectively.
13. Thesaurus.com
Sometimes you can’t beat a good old fashioned tool. Use a thesaurus or synonyms when you’re struggling to think of the right word, or you need to make your writing more exciting and varied. A thesaurus can help you to broaden your vocabulary so that your writing doesn’t become boring and monotonous, but full of flair and inspires action.
14. Pablo
Although content marketers do have to wear many hats, most of us aren’t also designers. Luckily, tools like Pablo let us cheat at design by making it super easy to design blog and social images. Blogs and social posts with images achieve much greater engagement, so use Pablo to add an image to your post.
15. Canva
Canva is also a great way for marketers to cheat at design. If, like me, you struggle even to use Microsoft Paint, try Canva for all your design needs. Canva is a bit more advanced than Pablo, with more options including posters, presentations, blog graphics, flyers and Facebook covers. With loads of free templates and images, Canva will add some pizazz to your content marketing.
16. Yoast SEO
This tool will optimise your content for search machines. SEO and content are inextricably linked and need each other to thrive. In order for your content to be found it needs to be SEO friendly. Yoast is a simple WordPress plugin which helps you to write your slug and meta description, set keywords, and tell you how you can improve the post’s SEO by adding links and images. Aim to get a green traffic light and your SEO is ready to go.
17. Hootsuite
One of the most important steps in content marketing is the actual marketing part. Don’t make the mistake of creating wonderful content and not letting your audience read it. Perform outreach and promote your content. Social media is a popular platform for you to promote your content on. A social scheduler tool like Hootsuite will let you schedule multiple posts to multiple platforms and add links and images, and save you the time spent posting to each separate site.
This is another tool for promotion. Adding a booster to your Facebook post can increase its reach and make sure your post is seen by potential customers. You can also target a specific audience in order to be seen in front of the right market.
19. Pomodoro Timer
The Pomodoro technique has been proven to improve productivity. Try this timer as it counts down 25-minute bursts of activity with 5-minute breaks in between. The pressure of completing a task in 25 minutes increases focus and cuts out distractions.
20. Outsource
If your productivity still hasn’t improved, and these tools are not enhancing your content marketing, then it may be time to outsource to an agency who have the time and resources to produce results with a proactive marketing strategy.
Content marketing is linked to many other aspects of digital marketing, such as SEO, social, and design, so it is also more productive to outsource to a company who has an integrated approach to digital marketing.
The folks at SEO Gold Coast are always giving out free advice to people but sometimes the best tools to utilise are people with the skills to achieve your goals, rather than relying on tools to provide you with this. Outsource to a company with actually skilled designers, SEO pros and experienced writers, and boost your productivity by taking the work completely off your hands.
Summary
Hopefully, some of these content marketing tools will improve your productivity by cutting out time spent on tasks such as coming up with ideas and headlines, designing imagery, proofreading and editing writing, promoting content, optimising for SEO, organising tasks, and reading. Save valuable time and focus on the things that matter most.
Are there any content marketing tools we have missed? What are your favourite content marketing tools? Let us know in the comments below and follow @teambowlerhat for future updates.
