Content Marketing: Top Free Tools for Beginners

According to this report provided by The Content Marketing Institute, 86 percent of organizations use content marketing as a strategic approach focused on creation and consistent distribution of relevant and valuable content that drives profitable customer action.

That’s a complex definition, but it reflects the key purpose of content marketing: Customer action.

With the growth of content marketing, business owners can have problems distinguishing their campaign among all that competition.

How can you come up with fresh topics all the time?

Can you provide value to the community?

One solution is to hire a professional writer.

This is a reliable alternative you can take into consideration.

However, you should always make an effort to contribute your own work to the marketing campaign, because you’re the one who reflects the brand’s values and culture.

You say you’ve never written content for marketing purposes?

Don’t worry, I have a list of tools that will help you make a successful start.

QuotesCover

Before you start writing elaborate posts, why not try something simple?

No matter who your target audience is, you can rest assured they’ll enjoy beautiful images accompanied by relevant quotes.

Visual content is effective because it attracts the eye of the reader, who doesn’t need to spend much time understanding what it’s all about.

QuotesCover is a simple tool that doesn’t require you to upload a fancy image.

All you have to do is choose the background and the font, and then add a quote that will resonate with your audience.

You can share this eye-catching visual content via social media platforms, or via your blog and you can expect a large number of shares.

Piktochart

Here are a few facts that prove the effectiveness of infographics:

  • Ninety percent of the information the brain processes is visual.
  • People process visual information 60,000 times faster than text.
  • People remember only 20 percent of what they read, 10 percent of what they hear, and 80 percent of what they see and do.

A professional-looking infographic can present your information in the most engaging way, and the best part is it doesn’t require much writing.

With Piktochart, you don’t need design skills.

You can build an infographic with a simple drag-and-drop interface, and you’ll have a cool design in no time.

Basecamp

If you have an entire team working on a content creation campaign, you’ll need to keep them on the same page.

With Basecamp, you can monitor their activities, assign new topics, offer advice for improvements, and have consultations with your team regarding the progress of the campaign.

Basecamp allows you to work on multiple projects, chat with the participants, and send emails in the easiest way possible.

You can also use it to organize a schedule and categorize documents and files.

Searchmetrics

If you’re about to start a content marketing campaign, you’re certainly aware of search engine optimization and having to make it attractive for Google.

Searchmetrics is one of the best tools that enables you to develop a SEO strategy.

Use the tool to discover keywords that are popular in your industry, and to track their popularity over time.

Plus, Searchmetrics will help you to keep an eye on the activities of competitors and let you see who’s linking to your site.

Also use it to identify which of the pages you’ve developed are most visible on social media, so you’ll use that pattern when creating new content.

BuzzSumo

When you’re focused on creating great content for marketing purposes, you have to pick topics that perform well.

You can do that by analyzing the most authoritative content related to your niche.

Just insert keywords in the search bar and BuzzSumo will give you a list of the articles that achieved great popularity via social media shares.

This information is important in two aspects:

  • It helps you identify the influencers in your niche. You can contact them with propositions for guest posts, so you’ll promote your site in front of their huge audience. You can also quote them in your content to add relevance to the information you share.
  • You can explore topics that are gaining popularity on social media, and you can create something similar, but better.

Blog Topic Generator

Blog Topic Generator is a great tool from HubSpot that can help you come up with awesome topics for your posts.

It asks you to provide three nouns, and then it will launch a week’s worth of blog topics.

This is not one of those silly tools that suggest senseless topics, it’s something you can actually use when developing your publication plan and schedule.

If you provide contact information, you’ll get a huge list of topics that will guide your yearly content marketing campaign.

Edit Flow

Edit Flow is a free WordPress plugin that enables you to plan your editorial campaign to the tiniest detail.

It makes it easy for your team to collaborate within WordPress, through the following features: Calendar, editorial comments, custom statuses, notifications, editorial metadata, story budget, and user groups.

The calendar, as the most essential feature, is important for the proper development of your campaign.

You can use it to schedule publication dates and plan the research, writing, editing, and marketing steps in a precise timeframe.

Content Idea Generator

This is one of the coolest idea generating tools you can use.

It suggests unusual blog topics as soon as you type your keywords.

No matter how hard you brainstorm for cool headlines, sometimes you’re stuck and you can’t get inspired.

In such moments, the Content Idea Generator from Portent can give you the spark you need.

Some of the suggestions may be silly, but you can continue getting new ones until you find something that inspires you.

Content Marketing Tools

Content writing and promotion is an essential element of every online marketing campaign.

The process requires great diligence and persistence.

If you’re patient enough and you continue the good work, the results will be inevitable.

image credit: shutterstock

Stephanie Norman

Stephanie Norman – professional writer with wide experience in the field of education, writing and blogging. It gives her the opportunity to help people to find out some useful and necessary things and apply them correctly in different spheres of life. Also, she writes as a freelancer in Australian Writings, a writing service for students. You can follow her on Facebook and Google+ .

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