It may be a tired cliché to bring up the carpenter’s toolbox when discussing proper preparation and usage of the right content marketing tools, but let’s put it in a slightly different light. Finish carpenters have a more precise and exacting task then general carpenters do; their job is to make it all perfect and precise and ready for the owner to move in right away.
Thus, their toolboxes are different. While a framer or general carpenter has powerful saws and giant drill bits to rip through massive amounts of wood, the finish carpenter has delicately shaped router bits and sanders to get all the finishing touches on the trim and baseboards just so. You need both sets of tools to build a house; likewise, you need powerful content marketing tools to produce and manage your content, yet you also need precision tools to make it perfect.
Let’s check out a few content marketing tools to see which ones you need on your belt.
5 of the Best Content Marketing Tools You Need to Use
1. Airtable
Above all things, your small business or marketing team needs organization. Project management, for one or many, can take various forms, and everyone processes information like this differently. For an all-in-one project management and content marketing tool, you can’t do much better than Airtable.
Fully customizable for any type of business, Airtable can connect all of the department teams involved in multiple projects with the power of a full database and the precision of a spreadsheet. By setting up individual “bases”, teams can monitor and organize every stage of content production in a collaborative manner.
All of this powerful software is presented with incredibly intuitive UX; you can present an editorial calendar, for example, in grids, app-like galleries, or in regular calendar form—basically, in whichever way your content creators prefer. Big dogs like Shopify, Buzzfeed, and Time use Airtable for their project management needs, and you can try it for free (though the very affordable paid version is well worth it).
2. Canva
It sure would be convenient to ask one of your roofers working on your house to help out with some major electrician work, but you may not feel super comfortable with the results. Asking a content writer to tackle graphic design in order to spiff up a case study or social media post has its risks as well.
You need an easy to understand and intuitive content marketing tool to enable your team to make their content look good, and Canva has you covered. Starting with basic design templates, Canva lets you not only make elementary infographics and borders but gives you and your team the content marketing tools and educational resources to customize branded graphic content to fit all your needs.
With a comprehensive blog chock full of advice and resources from top designers in the business, you can train yourself and your team to use Canva to create graphs, edit Instagram posts, and feature your brand’s logo on anything you create. So, it’s a tool to create the immediate needed design and teach you how to do it yourself? That’s a powerful content marketing tool you should use.
3. FullStory
Ok, so you’ve got your projects organized and looking slick. Your new client has requested a ton of content, and you’ve delivered. A month later, though, they’re not sure what’s working and not working and why, and that various content now appears random and unfocused. How do you fix this?
The incredibly efficient software behind FullStory gives you…well, the full story. You are basically given the exact user journey: how they navigated through the website, what they lingered on and read, and where they got frustrated and bounced. You can filter your user attributes however you wish, whether by device or OS used, the inbound link used to find the site, or even the geographic location or other known demographic of the user.
Additionally, with this content marketing tool, you can examine the UX journey with a color-coded heatmap to see what’s hot and what’s not, and even pull buggy codes directly from a JavaScript log (your IT guys will thank you for this). The data you get from this very detailed UX recreation will help you refine your content, avoid ineffective posts, and, most importantly, keep your clients reassured that the content you’re serving up is on point.
4. FeedOtter
Now, you’ve got a bunch of relevant content, you know what’s working, and every team member is on the same page. Looks like you have to put someone on your marketing team to work, as there’s email pushes to schedule, newsletters to write, and other industry-relevant content to curate.
All this work can take up days of your time, or even take your team away from all the crucial content management they need to do. Consistency is key when marketing content, so look into using FeedOtter to automate your whole calendar. This content marketing tool allows you to plug in the right targeted content into your newsletter template, giving a personal touch (which is always a good customer relation move) while saving lots of time and headaches along the way.
You can schedule an email blast that includes that newsletter and other blog digests on a specific day, week, or month that works for each client, and there’s even a feature that stops the process if there’s no new content to promote. FeedOtter integrates with multiple existing content and email automated platforms, so onboarding is quick and easy. Get your content team back to the work they excel at, and leave the rest to FeedOtter.
5. Hemingway App
The results are in. You know what needs to change. Empower yourself and get it done.
Or
Hopefully, you may have seen the results, and even if you know what should probably change, you might want to consider possibly getting up the courage to give it the best shot you can at making it happen.
Which one works for you?
If you’ve taken basic literature courses, you have read Ernest Hemingway’s work. Tight, concise, and powerful sentences. Impactful imagery, and very few “weak” -ly adverbs. Now, this may or may not be your literary fiction style, but we can all agree that simple and direct language works the best in most content styles.
We love the Hemingway app for its ability to efficiently distill your copy into simple yet effective phrases. Just paste your copy into their editorial template, and it will point out your run-on sentences, passive voices, and excessive adverbs. If you do this regularly (and you read through the corrections), it will start to naturally adjust your writing style towards this sparse yet powerful style.
That was straight to the point.
Bonus: Marketing Automation Tools
There are a ton of marketing automation tools out there and instead of just naming one, we want to make sure that you’re aware that there are platforms to fit any brand size and budget. These tools will help you with your lead gen and nurturing programs, track leads, grow email lists, and run full-scale email marketing programs—just to name a few features. We like Pardot and AutoPilot but check out a few others to find the one that fits with your brand.
Do you have other content marketing tools we should know about? Tell us about your favorite tools on Twitter @Feed_Otter
