8 Best Content Marketing Tools and Expert reviews on them

In one of his famous TED Talks Seth Godin said, “Marketing is not about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell.” This statement holds true today as one of the study mentioned that 76% of the marketers increased their content marketing investment. 

Today with many sources available, everyone is creating some great piece of content so now the only thing that makes a difference is marketing of that content. Many times you will find a great article on Google’s 7th or 8th page although it had everything that could easily rank it on the 1st page. The main reason behind this problem is poor marketing of that content. To make sure that this thing does not happen with you, today I bring to you the list of 10 best tools that will not just help in creating good content but also help you to market it well.

CoSchedule

If you have a big content team and have to deal with a lot of writers and editors then this tool is for you. CoSchedule is one of the best tools when it comes to task and team management. It offers some amazing features that include:

• Marketing Calendar
• Social Media Scheduling
• Work Flow Management
• Comment option on various projects
• Integration with other tools like Word Press, Google Analytics, Google Docs, Bitly etc.

Pricing

CoSchedule offers 3 plans :

• Solo Calendars at $15 per month
• Team Calendars $30 per month
• Advanced Calendars at $60 per month

Expert review on CoSchedule

Chris aka Mr. Cable Cutter who runs the site Cut Cable Today a site designed to help people find ways to watch TVshows and movies without cable says, “The best tool I have recently fallen upon is CoSchedule. As my blog has grown, I’ve needed a way to manage multiple writers, editors, and social media management. CoSchedule allows you to put it all together. It starts with a content calendar that’s integrated with WordPress. You create assignments on the calendars, and can assign them to writers and editors from the calendar. No need to go to a different program. Then, you can connect you social media accounts and set it up to where the content is automatically shared once it is published. It looks like this is going to help me take my site to the next level!

Hemingway App

You create content but are people able to understand that content? Many a times, you are so keen on creating great content that you compromise with the basics. The Hemingway app is a great tool which highlights the problems with regards to the English language. If your sentence is too long and complicated, you can easily know through this tool. It also tells you what changes you can make to make your content reader/user friendly. You just have to paste your content in Hemingway and it will take care of the rest.

You can get a small sneak preview of this tool below:

Pricing

You can use the Hemingway tool for FREE.

Expert review on Hemingway

Natalie Andrews, Online Marketing Manager at Helping.com an online cleaning platform says, “This is a great tool to check the readability of your content. It highlights simple tweaks you can make to your content writing – sentences that are too long, where you can reduce word length, adverbs that can be switched for strong verbs. Using this tool allowed me to improve content we use for outreach, and increase my response rate by almost 55%. More precise content, and more succinct outreach emails, have been instrumental in improving our content marketing.”

Serps.com

Serps tool mainly provides you with the SEO feedback of your content. The main point of creating the content is reaching out to maximum people and that is only possible if it ranks well on the search engines. With the help of Serps you can get all the important information about your data easily. At a glance you can monitor organic traffic, top rankings, even link metrics. Through Serps, you can also keep a track of your content’s ranking city or country wise.

Pricing

Serps offers a 30 day free trial offer after which you can opt for either of the below mentioned subscriptions:

Serps Pro – For growing brand and agencies available at $497/month

Serps Enterprise – For big brands and agencies available at $1997/month

Expert review on SERPs

Anna Daugherty email and inbound marketing specialist says, “One of the best tools for developing content from your targeted keywords is SERPs.com. When you determine what keywords you want to target, you can use SERPs.com to track those keywords to see where your site currently falls, 
then develop quality content that will boost your rankings. Daily monitoring on SERPs.com helps you determine what’s working and what isn’t for your SEO content.” 

Canva

Are you one of those people who can write content of upto 5000 words easily but your mind goes blank when it comes to designing? If your answer was in an affirmative, then welcome to the club, because you are not the only one. If you can shell out huge sums and ask professionals to design for you then well and good but if you are working on a tight budget I’ve got a tool for you and its Canva

According to Unbounce the demand for infographics has increased by 800% in the last two years and in such a scenario you just cannot avoid them.

So Canva is a tool which helps you to create some really amazing infographics for free. Not just infographics, you can create graphics for social media postings as well.

Creating an infographic on Canva is very simple. Just select the template that you would like to use and let the designer in you (if there is any) take the front seat.

Pricing

You can use Canva for free

Expert review on Canva

Louise Hendon co-founder of Paleo Flourish Magzine says, “Best Content Marketing Tool that every content marketer must use is Canva for creating infographics. I’ve known about the power of infographics for many years, but it didn’t 
make sense to spend hundreds of dollars on infographics that I wasn’t positive would work well. With Canva, I can create amazing-looking infographics very quickly and then if I want to pay someone to produce an even better one, I can do that after testing it. 

One of our most popular infographics designed in a few hours using Canva generated over 1750 repins on Pinterest (from our pin alone) and driving a lot of traffic to our site.”

Hashtagify

If you are using your Hashtags right then your content can reach out to the correct target audience. For example, when you tweet, your tweet will reach out only to your followers but if you are using a hashtag along with it then you can reach out to all the people on twitter who will like to know about that particular keyword.

With the help of Hashtagify you can know about the best tags for your content that are trending on twitter. You can get information about its popularity and related tags that you can use. Like in the example below, I searched for #contentmarketing.

Through this I come to know about the popularity of my keyword and the recent tweets for that keyword and the related searches which can help me to build a social strategy.

If you go to the top influencers tab, you will find the people who are though leaders of that field. You can contact them or ask them to go through your content and share their feedback or simply check the content that they share and take content ideas.

Pricing

Everything mentioned above can be done for free on Hashtagify but if you want a great hashtag marketing strategy they offer 3 packages

• Starter available at $9.99 per month
• Business available at $59 per month
• Enterprise available at $299 per month

Expert review on Hashtagify

Lily Weiner, content co-ordinator at recruiting social says, “Hashtagify helps us to find the best Twitter and Instagram hashtags for a particular topic. Whether you’re promoting blog content or sharing native social content, it helps identify not just the most popular hashtag but key related hashtags that you can also target and use to expand the reach of your posts. We use it to plan out all our social promotion, using different hashtags for different Tweets or posts so that we can reach maximum people.”

Buzzstream

As a content marketer it is very much possible that you may be looking for guest blogging opportunities link building opportunities, content contribution opportunities and many more then Buzzstream is a tool for you. It works as an outreach and relationship management platform. While researching the opportunities for you, Buzzstream quickly identifies the contact information and website information and updates the same in the Buzzstream dashboard. You can also use mass email to send guestposting/link building request. It also keeps a track of all the communication that takes place between you and the website’s concerned person.

Pricing

Buzzstream offers 3 plans:

• Starter plan which is available for $29/month
• Plus plan which is available for $99/month
• Premium plan which is available for 249/month

Expert review on Buzzstream

Richard Protheroe, Content Marketer at Veeqo who uses Buzzstream for guest blogging opportunities says, “Buzzstream is brilliant for finding guest blogging opportunities. It uses a crawler which searches a site and identifies contact details such as name, email and social media profiles and adds them to a CRM system. 

You can then group these sites together and send a mass email asking for a guest post. It’s a great tool for quickly identifying contact details and for outreach. An example recently, we were able to obtain 7 guest post slots in one day! They were all sites talking about ‘Magento’, which is an ecommerce platform our customers would use.”

Buzzsumo

One of the greatest problems faced by the content marketers is selection of the right topic for creating an article or blog. You might have an idea about the topic but may be you are not sure if it will work well. In that case you should use BuzzSumo . You can easily find the trending topics through BuzzSumo.

Through BuzzSumo, you can:

• Discover the most shared content across all social media platforms .

• Find influencers on any topic and review their content.

• Get content alerts whenever someone mentions your keywords in their content.

• Track the performance of your competitor’s content and do detailed research.

Below is the result for the search query “Best Content Marketing Tools” in BuzzSumo

Pricing

BuzzSumo offers 3 plans:

• Pro which is available for $9/month
• Agency which is available for $299/month
• Enterprise (Contact them for price)

Expert review on BuzzSumo

Richard Protheroe says, “Buzzsumo on the other hand is great for 2 reasons. You are able to identify the most popular content based around a certain subject. It will show you what’s trending around ‘ecommerce’ say and you can then replicate this article to bring traffic to your site. 

Also, it is great for finding influencers. Once you have written a post you can identify people on Twitter who are specialists in the subject and share the article with them. We have received many RTs from this method and our articles which used to get around 10-12 shares are now receiving 100+”

You can go through the presentation on BuzzStream and BuzzSumo tool by Richard Protheroe.”

Headline Analyzer by CoSchedule

According to copyblogger on average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest. So if you want to increase the number of people who read your entire article, it is important that your headline convinces them to do so.

CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer tool will help you with that. This is a very useful tool that helps you to analyze the headline from different perspectives. It tells what is the score of your headline overall, how is the word balance, which are the important keywords and many other things.

Like in the example below, I entered the headline “8 Best Content Marketing Tools” which originally was the title of this article.

Now you know that why I changed the title.

Getting a hundred or even 80 or 90 is quite difficult. But anything around 60 to 75 is a good score. As far as word balance is concerned make sure you maintain a good balance and score atleast a B.

You can use this tool not just for the blogs but also for your mailer’s subject line.

Pricing

You can analyze your headlines for free using CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer tool.

Expert review on CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer

Morgan O’Mara content co-ordinator at Record Nations says, “My favorite tool when creating content is the CoSchedule headline analyzer. This is a free tool from CoSchedule that analyzes your headlines and rates them. This is a great way to know if you headline will attract readers. I use this for all of my posts and email subject lines. Since I have started using this, our average  open rate has increased by 4%.”

Some more tools that you can try:

Grammarly – To make sure your article is grammatically correct.

Buffer – To schedule your content on social media

Meme Generator – To add a comical aspect in your content

Trendspottr – To know about the trending topics

Picktochart – To create amazing infographics

UberSuggests – To add long tail keywords in your article

Emotional Headline Analyzer – To know the emotional quotient in a headline

WordToCleanHTML – To convert your MS Word file or Google Doc into clean HTML code

Plagiarism Checker – To make sure that your content is free from plagiarism.

I am sure many of you must have already used some of these tools or must be using some other tools to generate good results. Share your favorite tool in the comments box below.