Are you a startup owner or someone looking for content marketing tools for a startup? Today, having a content strategy is a must-do for young companies because if you’re not staying on top of the latest trends in content creation and audience engagement, your business will be left behind.
This is not an option.
But someone who has a little experience in content marketing can quickly get overwhelmed trying to follow the newest techniques. Besides, completing all the work required to create awesome content can also be daunting because of the sheer amount of work that you have to complete.
Good news! You don’t have to do everything yourself. The popularity of content marketing contributed to the development of numerous tools designed to make it easier to achieve your marketing goals.
Need to create good-looking infographics? No problem, there’s a tool for that. Struggling to come up with a good title for a blog post? There’s a tool for that, too! Thanks to the effectiveness and usefulness of content marketing tools, their adoption rate by businesses has also been impressive in the recent years.
For example, according to this Email Monday compilation, marketing automation is used by 42 percent of companies but some areas of automation are even more popular (email marketing automation tools are used by 82 percent of companies).
The same source also cited a GetResponse survey of business owners, executives, and marketers that outlined the biggest benefits of marketing automation tools.
As you can see, marketing tools provided some great benefits as saving time, generating leads, increasing revenue, retaining customers, shortening sales cycles, and tracking and monitoring marketing campaigns.
If these benefits sound good to you, let’s then get to the list of tools that you can use to start your content marketing strategy game right.
Headline Creation Tools
It goes without saying that headlines are a critical part of content marketing because they attract the attention of people. Enticing headlines could be a powerful tool to increase reader engagement, so creating them is a must to increase the effectiveness of your strategy.
Some headlines tend to work better than others in terms of engagement, so knowing the best practices is also important for your content marketing. For example, a recent study of 100 million headlines by BuzzSumo found that the following words contributed to a great readership.
Here are the tools that will help you to create such headlines.
1. Portent’s Content Idea Generator
A popular free tool for creating engaging headlines that requires a subject such as your keyword or industry name. Then, it generates a headline and explains why it works.
For example, the Generator came up with “Why Your Content Marketing Never Works Out the Way You Plan” for “content marketing” subject. See the screenshot below for explanations (clicking the Refresh button creates more headlines!)
2. Title Generator
The next tool on our list is also a great title maker. However, unlike the Portent’s Idea Generator, this one works a bit differently. Instead of creating one title with explanations, it generates hundreds of them!
For example, I used “content marketing” again and the Title Generator produced 700 headline ideas. Of course, some of them required some revisions, but many were pretty good.
Here are the first ten.
As you can see, using tools like these provides a strong foundation for creating engaging headlines. However, if you feel like a headline you have needs some polishing done by a human content writer, you can always use review sites like Top Writers Review to find reputable content creators.
3. Headline Analyzer from CoSchedule
If you want to analyze your existing or new headlines’ ability to generate engagement, you can do so with this tool. It gives a score to your headlines and generates a report explaining why such score was given.
For example, I used the aforementioned “Why Your Content Marketing Never Works Out the Way You Plan” headline and here are the results.
To further improve this headline, the analyzer offered the following tips:
What Makes Emotional Headlines So Powerful?
How To Master Your Headline Word Balance
Learn More About Headline Types.
Also don’t forget that you always have an option of using professional assistance with headline creation by looking for editors on services.
Content scheduling tools
Content has to be two things to be successful: High quality and timely. Even if you have the best writing ever, if you post it after everyone is done talking about the topic you will not see much interest. Likewise, if you post something during the height of discussion, if it does not add anything new to that discussion chances are you will not see any benefit from it.
While predicting the trends in your industry can be quite difficult, if you can keep your content on schedule and on the money quality-wise, you will see at least some of the benefits here. Of course, keeping your content publishing on time on top of the thousands of other things you do as a business owner can be challenging. Marketing is often one of the first things that gets dropped off when you get busy since it is so easy to sacrifice.
Crosscap:
To help make sure this does not happen, we found a useful tool that lets you schedule your content and manage your marketing workflow. Crosscap provides your team with the ability to map out all the different marketing efforts – including content – that you have planned. Since content planning is such a major headache for so many small businesses having a tool that allows you to collect all this information in one place and then see it throughout the year removes some of the incentive to let it slide.
Crosscap will not write your content for you. That is still something you have to manage. However, the tool can also help you coordinate with writers and different marketing personal to get this done as well. With Crosscap, there really is no excuse for letting your marketing and content efforts go. Just make sure that can keep up with the schedule you set!
Visual Content Marketing Tools
Creating visuals is something that you absolutely have to do to make your content stand out from the pack from the very beginning. According to Venngage, 30 percent of marketers create their own visuals instead of using stock photos to attract the attention of viewers (and you should do that, too!)
Recent studies support this method. For example, a recent one from BuzzSumo and OkDork found that articles with images were shared by twice as many people than those without.
Venngage also identified the most popular visuals created by marketers (see image below). They included infographics, videos, presentations, GIFs, memes, charts, data visualizations, and photos. Consider creating these types of visuals to improve the performance of your content marketing as well.
Feel free to use the following tools to create stunning visuals.
1. Canva
Canva is a popular tool that allows to create visuals for social media, wallpapers, Pinterest graphics, presentations, photo collages, posters, and many more others. A user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface makes the creation process really quick and easy.
2. Visme
According to the creators of Visme, the main purpose of the tool is to help the user to ‘speak visually.’ To do that, they provide a selection of more than 100 fonts, thousands of templates and icons, millions of free images, and other resources needed to create quality visuals. Some advanced options such as animation and voiceover are also available, and most of the features are available for free.
3. Easel.ly
If you need an infographic maker to have a lot of templates for different projects, then check out this. Easel.ly has a great selection of templates for such infographics and visuals as timelines, reports, processes, resumes, comparisons, and others.
Each of the templates can be easily customized to meet your requirements. To help you with that, the tool offers a large library of icons, images, illustrations, and charts.
Social Media Tools
Sharing your content on social media is a must because it allows to expand your online presence and connect with more potential customers. Every brand, however, should have a clear strategy for social media to avoid common mistakes such as sharing tons of content every day and building the image of a spammer.
In addition to helping you build your online presence in a proper way, social media tools can also be helpful to do many other important things such as content research.
1. BuzzSumo
If you’re struggling to come up with interesting topics for your articles, you can use BuzzSumo to discover the most shared content on the Internet. All you need to do is enter a keyword or a keyword phrase and the tool will generate the list of the best-performing content.
In addition to content research, you can also set up notifications when a keyword or the name of your brand is mentioned on social media, and perform an influencer research to identify influencers that you could team up with and build a strong online presence.
2. Buffer
Sharing content on social media should follow an evidence-based strategy to be as effective as possible. For example, a recent study by Sprout Social found that the best times to post on Facebook to generate the highest engagement was Wednesday at noon and 2 p.m. and Thursday at 1 p.m. and 2 p.m.
Other social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram also had specific times that produced the most engagement.
Doing all the posting at these times manually is something that requires a lot of repetitive work, so why not automate it? A good way to do so is to use Buffer. All you have to do is ‘feed’ the tool with the new content and schedule the time when you want it to post on social media.
As the result, you’ll maximize the chance that your content will be viewed by most of your followers. But don’t forget that best times for engagement could be different for your target audience, so do your homework by researching your followers and when they use social media.
3. Facebook Audience Insights
In order for your content marketing strategy to be effective, you should always create content that is relevant and interesting to your audience. If you’re using Facebook for lead generation – and you should – then you need to know your audience very well to make sure that your content meets the aforementioned requirements. Thankfully, you have an excellent chance to get insights into your audience behavior and characteristics without spending money from your startup’s marketing budget. Facebook as a built-in analytics tool for audience research that provides information about your visitors such as demographics and their preferences such as the content they liked, commented, and shared.
Conclusion
Automation works, and your startup could greatly benefit from using tools like the ones described above. Since you’ll have to dedicate a lot of your time to other important business activities required to grow your business, using them makes a lot of sense because they can reduce the time needed for repetitive tasks.
