Content marketing is effort and resource intensive. Managing everything, from creating content to posting online and then sharing published content on various platforms, can get a little overwhelming at times. Resource and time management are the key challenges that marketers face.
Thankfully, there are a number of useful tools to help make your job a little easier. Read on to learn about 7 of the best tools you can use for your content marketing campaigns in 2020.
1. Stencil
Every content marketer understands the importance of eye catching visuals in their content. Visual assets in your content, be it a great feature image or some valuable infographics, tend to get you more clicks than just plain and simple text. In fact, 32% of marketers believe that visual images are the most important type of content today.
Stencil is one tool you can’t do without if you want your content to be visually outstanding and engaging. This tool allows you to create graphics and images for different platforms such as blog banners, Facebook cover photos, Twitter posts, Pinterest photos, Instagram posts and many more. It has over 60 preset canvas sizes that you can customize according to your need. You can add backgrounds and images from the 2.2 million high resolution stock photos. It also lets you choose text formats and fonts to add to your image. If none of the preset sizes work for you, you can also create custom sized images.
Anything you need for your content marketing campaign, be it logos, quote images, icons, can be created with this tool quite easily. It lets you share images directly on social media and if you have a Buffer account, you can even schedule posting directly from Stencil.
2. Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a one stop solution for almost all your major concerns with content marketing. This tool helps you organize your tasks by bringing everything you need on to one platform. So all your audience data, marketing channels and analytics can be managed from this tool to make processes faster and more streamlined.
Mailchimp has CRM tools that can collect data about your audience and give you insights about what they like, so that you can easily create campaigns that will convert. The in-built design tools also make creating a campaign quick and easy as they have some ready-made segments and templates you can choose from.
Apart from creating campaigns, the tool also tells you how they are performing. The analytics give you real-time performance reports as well as data-driven suggestions for what kind of content would work on which channel.
3. Narrato
In your content marketing campaign, content is undeniably the hero. If your content doesn’t go right, all your other efforts are in vain. Writing good content requires some skill and experience, and not everyone is born a writer. If you are looking for some good quality content without having to invest in an in-house writer, Narrato is your go to tool.
Narrato is a leading freelance content writing platform that has thousands of experienced and expert writers on board. Smart algorithms are deployed to match the job you post to the best freelance writers on the platform, who have relevant experience and knowledge of your topic. You can get a variety of content written for blog posts, marketing copy, website content, social media posts, product descriptions and articles – that is almost everything you’ll need to market your product or services online.
Matched writers pick and deliver your content within 24 hours and you can ask for revisions any number of times until you’re satisfied with the content. The platform also has a built-in plagiarism check to ensure the content you get is original. Narrato also offers a free image recommendation tool for you to find high quality images for your blog posts and articles. And to add to it all, your first article on the platform is just $1!
4. Evernote
If you are working in a team, it is very important to brainstorm for ideas and take note of everyone’s ideas. Don’t you wish there was a better way to track these brainstorming sessions and note down ideas for your future content? Evernote is just the right tool for this purpose.
Evernote is a simple but extremely useful tool that allows you to take notes and access them from anywhere at any time. Your entire team can have access to the information you’d like to share. You can add all the information you have collected through research, new ideas that suddenly struck you or images and clippings that might be useful. Evernote also allows you to capture your ideas in voice and pictures.
It is available across devices, so you don’t have to worry about getting to your office in a hurry to share an idea. You can do it all from your smartphone.
5. Grammarly
Proof-reading and plagiarism checking are key parts of content creation. But doing these tasks manually is a pain. If you don’t want to hire someone exclusively for proof-reading your content, use Grammarly instead.
Grammarly is a very handy tool when it comes to proof-reading and editing content. When you run a completed content piece through the tool, it can easily detect mistakes in the text that could be wrong grammar or punctuation or even sentence framing. The tool also gives plagiarism alerts, which may not always be relevant, but is still a good way to make sure there’s nothing in your content directly lifted off from elsewhere. Grammarly even has a tone detector that tells you how the tone of your content sounds, such as formal or friendly.
For a content marketer, a tool like this could save a lot of time and effort.
6. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another all-in-one kind of platform that every content marketer should love. The tools here allow you to carry out competitive analysis, keyword research, backlink research, content research, rank tracking and web monitoring. That is probably everything you could ever need for SEO.
The keyword research tool gives an organic search report that shows you keywords for which your competitors rank high in organic search. It also shows how much traffic each of these keywords drive. The platform gives analytics on your website too, such as your top performing pages or “content gap” which shows where your content is lacking compared to your competitors.
7. Trello
Trello is a project management tool that you will love to have as your team of writers and editors grows bigger. This tool allows you to manage and schedule content writing, posting and sharing easily, from one platform. It has a choice of boards, lists and cards that let you prioritize your tasks and interact with your team to keep them updated. You can add attachments, comments and deadlines to the cards to keep things on track.
Trello also has a bot for automating certain tasks by adding them as calendar commands or due-date commands, so you can take them off your to-do list.
This is a great tool to stay organized and keep your process in check from anywhere since it works across devices.
In Conclusion
Like in all other business processes, time is indeed money. These simple to use and extremely handy tools can help you save some valuable time in 2020 which you can invest in strengthening your strategy and creating new ideas. So, go ahead and try a few.
