21 Best Content Marketing Tools for Small Businesses
21 Best Content Marketing Tools for Small Businesses
Improve your content marketing strategy and team communication with these top content marketing tools. We’ve identified the best tools for content planning, team collaboration, SEO, and content creation.
Content marketing can promote your brand and establish your business as a leader in the industry. By developing and sharing online materials such as blog content, social media posts, whitepapers and reports, infographics, and more, companies can generate buzz and attract traffic to their website.
While content marketing can be very beneficial for both small and enterprise businesses, they can take up a lot of resources. In order to be effective, content marketers need to consistently create unique and valuable content that appeals to their audience.
Luckily, there are content marketing tools that can help streamline your content marketing team’s collaborative process and create unique content that will perform well in search results. Try one (or more) of the following content marketing tools.
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Need help with your content marketing strategy? Search for leading content marketing agencies on The Manifest.
Best Content Marketing Tools for Content Management
Some of the biggest challenges for content marketers is staying on top of content goals, delegating tasks to various team members, and maintaining communication with collaboration. To successfully execute their content marketing strategy, many rely on content planning and collaboration tools. Here are a few of the best tools for content management:
Planable
Planable is a cloud-based social media collaboration platform that allows teams to create, review, and approve social media content before it's published. It's designed to streamline the social media management process by creating a central point for creating and publishing social media content, helping users manage their social media workflows more efficiently and effectively.
Various team members can use Planable to collaborate in real-time, leave comments and feedback directly on social media posts, and see how the content will look once it's published. The platform supports all major social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Trello
Trello is a Kkanban project management tool that helps content marketing teams track and manage tasks. Users can create a Trello board to organize information for large projects and workflows. For instance, a content marketing team can create a Trello card for each piece of content in the content calendar.
Then, using the board, they can track which stage of the development process it’s in, who is in charge of creating it, and when it will be published.
Asana
Asana is another project management tool that can be used to streamline content workflows and make collaboration easier. Similar to Trello, Asana allows users to assign projects to specific team members, track the project status, and share documents between team members.
These tools make it very easy to manage your content calendar and various content processes.
Airtable
Airtable stands apart from other project management tools because it is particularly effective at sorting data, similar to spreadsheets. This makes it great for tracking campaign metrics, managing writers and influencers, and keeping track of content calendars. However, it also has all the same project management features that Asana and Trello have that benefits content marketing.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a content management system and customer relationship management software that includes several tools that can help streamline content marketing processes. Whether you’re looking to build a contributed content program, conduct email outreach, build a social media campaign, or manage communication with customers, you can create custom workflows to make the entire process easier and more efficient.
Wrike
Wrike is another project management tool that can help marketing teams coordinate various content projects. In 2016, they launched Wrike for Marketers to specifically support asset creation for marketing campaigns.
Users can organize their content marketing calendar by assigning project owners a task. These tasks are part of a larger project, which is then stored within a broader folder. To support collaboration, users can leave comments, tag other team members, highlight assigned tasks, and view their content calendar.
Best Content Marketing Tools for SEO & Keyword Research
Content marketing is particularly important for search engine optimization (SEO). To build your online presence and bring traffic to your website, companies need to target their audience based on search queries and stay on top of trends. Here are some popular content marketing tools to support SEO, keyword research, and topic ideation.
- Yoast
- Buzzsumo
- Ahrefs
- Google Analytics
- AnswerThePublic
- Google Search Console
- HotJar
- SEMRush
- Keyword.io
Yoast
Yoast can help businesses with WordPress websites optimize their content by targeting keywords. This plugin supports SEO efforts by analyzing content on all of your web pages, scoring it, and providing suggestions to improve it.
However, as a WordPress plugin, there are some limitations. If your website is hosted on another platform, this may not be the best option for your business.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo supports content writing by scraping the web and creating a report on top-ranking posts for specific keywords. This can help marketers with content ideation. It is particularly helpful for identifying trending topics that are likely to generate clicks and traffic.
Users can then narrow down which platforms the content is being shared on and create custom filters to refine their searches.
Ahrefs
Afrehs offers a variety of tools to analyze website traffic and support content marketing. In addition to their keyword research tool — which can help users identify topics, calculate search volume, and estimate how difficult it would be to rank for that phrase — Ahrefs also has a great site crawl which can be used to monitor backlinks, track rankings, and estimate traffic to various pages.
Content marketers are also able to create a dashboard to quickly and easily monitor their site’s performance. Particularly as the launch content campaigns, they will be able to measure performance of target keywords over time. While high-performing content can indicate success, drops in rankings can indicate that older content needs to be updated.
In addition to supporting content efforts, Ahrefs can be used to improve your site’s technical SEO by auditing the platform and identifying issues.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free product that can help content marketers measure the impact of their campaigns. With proper configuration, it can help companies:
- measure traffic
- determine popular landing pages
- monitor bounce rates
- track form submissions
- product purchases
- monitor session duration
This can help content marketers get a better understanding of their audiences and how to create content that appeals to them.
AnswerThePublic
AnswerThePublic uses data from search engines, such as Google, to identify trending terms and phrases. Specifically, it listens to automocomplete data to provide insight into what people are searching online.
Users simply need to enter a topic, keyword, brand name, or product to the search bar. Then AnswerThePublic generates a graphic to showcase what is being searched for most.
This provides invaluable insight into consumer behavior, which can support the content ideation process.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console, formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, is one of the most powerful content marketing tools available. It is particularly valuable because of the variety of features it provides — plus, it’s free! Anyone with a website can set up Google Search Console to monitor their search engine performance and come up with content ideas.
For content marketers, one of the most valuable features that Google Search Console provides is the “Queries” tab, which will show you which keywords people are using to find you website content.
This can help you identify what content appeals to your audience and help you ideate similar content to increase traffic to your site.
Similarly, content marketers can also use “Pages” to monitor which on-site content that is attracting the most number of users.
Other features allow users to monitor indexing, track backlinks, measure clicks and impressions, track time spent on the website, and more.
HotJar
HotJar is a unique tool for content marketers because it creates a heatmap to illustrate how users interact with content on your website. The insights that content marketers gleam from HotJar can help companies optimize their on-site content to increase click-through rates and conversion rates.
SEMRush
SEMRush provides a ton of data that can support SEO. It is most commonly used by content marketers for:
- competitor research
- keyword research
- backlink monitoring
- content editing
In addition to these features, SEMRush also offers an SEO Content Template and SEO Writing Assistant to help content writers optimize content to target specific keywords.
Keyword.io
Similar to AnswerThePublic, Keyword.io uses search data to provide insight into search trends. Content marketers can select a search engine and then enter a search term and target location. Keyword.io will then generate keyword suggestions and relevant topics based on search trends.
This is a great tool for brainstorming content ideas and creating relevant content for your audience.
Best Content Marketing Tools for Content Creation
A great content marketing plan includes long and short-form content, images, and video. These tools can help you create engaging content that stands out to potential customers.
Google Docs
Google Docs allows content writers to write and edit content online. What makes this tool so valuable for content marketers is that it is really easy to share documents with editors and other team members, making collaboration a breeze.
Multiple people are able to make edits or make suggestions to improve content. It also automatically saves and tracks changes, making it easy to revert to older versions.
Writers can also use Chrome extensions to add additional features that make content development easier.
Grammarly
Grammarly is an AI-based assistant for writers that reviews spelling, grammar, and punctuation. It uses natural language processing to make suggestions to improve clarity and the message of the content. It is particularly valuable for content writers who generate a lot of content quickly, ensuring that all of their work is high-quality and accurate.
Jasper.AI
Jasper.AI is a writing assistant that uses artificial intelligence to generate various content types. It can develop anything from social media captions and ad copy to full blog posts. Content marketers can create a prompt, select a template, and even specify tone and audience to make sure the content that is generated reflects their brand’s voice.
Depending on your content needs, Jasper.AI can be a valuable resource for content marketers who need to create a lot of content.
However, it’s important to recognize the shortcoming associated with artificial intelligence: some content can be flagged for plagiarism, lack voice, or be factually incorrect. While writers can use tools like Jasper.AI to support their content efforts, it’s important to edit and fact-check content.
Loom
More and more marketers are utilizing video content because it captures the attention of users and generates engagement. Loom is an easy-to-use video messaging app that allows users to record themselves and their screen.
This makes it easy to create video content for your website, social media, email, and more. Whether you’re looking to create a product video, answer common user questions on your website, or add context to blog posts, you can use Loom to create the video you’re looking for.
Canva
Canva is a web-based design tool that content marketers can use to create unique images and graphic designs. The platform is super user-friendly, with an intuitive user interface, making it easy for content marketers without design experience to create images.
Canva offers templates for:
- Presentations
- Social media posts (on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Etc.)
- Video
- Business cards
- Infographics
- Brochures
- And more!
Creators can even use brand colors to promote brand awareness and recognition. These images can then be shared on various platforms to enhance content quality and increase engagement.
Adobe Photoshop & Adobe Illustrator
Adobe provides several options for design software. Photoshop and Illustrator are among their most popular because of how easy it is to create and edit custom images. They are both preferred by design professionals because of the robust functionality that provides complete control over the final design.
Whether they’re looking to create high-quality raster images or want to develop unique logos in a vector format, designers can use hundreds of brushes, quick-click selections, shaping tools, and limitless colors to create custom designs that are sure to stand out.
Use These Tools to Optimize Your Content Marketing Efforts
While content marketing can be a resource-intensive process, it can drive measurable results for your business’s online visibility. The tools listed in this article can help marketers with ideation, content development, and internal communication.
Whether you need help with keyword research, identifying search trends, creating engaging content, or simply managing your content calendar, these tools can help.
Need help with your content marketing strategy? Search for leading content marketing agencies on The Manifest.
Additional Reading
Hannah Hicklen
Senior Content Marketing Specialist at Clutch, Clutch