Content marketing tools

From the strategy to the implementation, to the first positive results; the journey is not always smooth and the process is often arduous. Content marketing strategies are no different. Content marketing is not a sprint, but more like a marathon that goes from the strategic focus, the setting of goals, research, planning, production, up to the distribution and to the measuring of overall success.

To make the entire process easier and more efficient, most marketers use software. We’ll introduce you to the most popular content marketing tools and show you how you can enrich your content marketing.

This article was last updated in May 2021.

The internet is full of valuable information and fascinating stories. So how do you find relevant items that will interest and intrigue potential customers? What is suitable for multi-value content campaigns? These content marketing tools inspire, reveal trends, and deliver keyword ideas.

The keyword planner is a part of Google Ads – the world’s largest search engine advertising system. The free tool is the first point of contact for marketers worldwide for keyword ideas and traffic forecasts.

Answer the Public is a consumer insight tool that arranges the search terms suggested by Bing and Google according to categories like what, where, who, when, how, and why and visualizes them as a search cloud.

Feedly serves as an RSS reader, primarily used for managing the RSS feed of different blogs and news portals, which makes it a valuable source for content ideas. Feedly gives you the option to design a personalized news desk; one that will then provide interesting and relevant content heavily based around the main topic of your content marketing strategy.

Buzzsumo is a search engine for the social web that enables you to search social networks for different formats, like texts, graphics, videos, and interviews to identify trend topics and keywords. So-called influencers -– potential brand ambassadors for content – can be tracked down with the help of content marketing tools.

Visual.ly offers data visualization and infographics. Users specify the topic and a design team creates graphics, videos, charts, diagrams, and infographics.

Influencer marketing tools are web applications and online platforms that allow you to interact with influencers and assess their value for concrete marketing campaigns. Are you active in influencer marketing? Then we recommend that you take a look at the following tools:

With Influma you can observe discourse on social networks, analyze which topics are working well on which channels, identify opinion leaders and, if necessary, network with brand ambassadors and multipliers.

Hypr contains data on more than 10 million influencers in all relevant social networks and enables you to carry out demographic, psychographic and geographical analyses of opinion leaders and their target groups.

Onalytica is an influencer relationship management software. The tool allows you to identify influencers, contact them and manage influencer programs.

The platform Kred provides you with influencer metrics and evaluates potential brand ambassadors on the basis of two key figures. The influencer score is derived from mentions, retweets, replies as well as the number of followers an influencer has and therefore allows conclusions to be drawn about the potential an influencer has to influence other Internet users. The activity of an influencer in social networks is measured by the outreach level.

Content curation is a form of content marketing that does not focus on your own content. Instead, third party content available on the net is selected, rearranged, and enriched with comments presented on your own website or in social networks. The following tools will help you to curate your content marketing campaign:

Paper.li is a content curation platform on which you can collect content from the net and prepare it for distribution in the form of an online newspaper to readers on your own website or in social networks.

Content marketing suite e Triberr is aimed at bloggers and small businesses who want to expand their content offerings with content curation. Users use the tool to research relevant topics, attract influencers, curate their contributions, and test them with online communities (known as “tribes”).

Sniply is a URL shortener that allows you to enrich shared third-party content on the internet with calls-to-action to attract readers to your website. Tracking tools and A/B tests round off the range of functions.

Scoop.it is an all-in-one solution for content discovery and curation. Create, share, collect and arrange content, and publish the result either directly on the platform, on your own website or on social networks.

The all-in-one solution Curata also combines content discovery and curation. The tool evaluates content on the basis of machine learning algorithms and provides you with a relevance score. A text editor and an image database are available for the preparation of content. Depending on your needs, the content is published in the system’s own CMS or through external software.

With the following tools, you can select content according to the individual needs of potential customers, place it in the right place at the right time and therefore increase the conversion rate of your online offers.

OneSpot is intended as an individualization platform. The tool supports you in supplying potential customers with personalized content based on their preferences. The product portfolio includes website and email customization and strategic content analysis.

Interaction Studio formerly known as Evergage, is a real-time personalization platform from Salesforce that uses machine learning algorithms to mine customer data. This software can be used to better understand and target customers and interested parties with tailored marketing messages.

Kibo Personalization (formerly Monetate) relies on an AI-powered personalization engine to individualize advertising messages, enabling automated one-to-one communication with customers and interested parties.

With trbo, online store operators offer every website visitor an individual shopping experience. The cloud-based tool is based on a machine learning approach that enables website operators to address potential customers with individual advertising messages despite being automated.

Demandbase is a targeting and personalization platform for B2B marketing. The functional spectrum of the software includes tools with which companies can be analyzed, segmented and addressed with personalized advertising measures based on characteristics like industry, turnover, customer status or product selection.

Do you rely on email marketing? Then you should consider using professional newsletter tools to distribute your content. They allow you to create creative messages based on templates, personalize email campaigns, and share content quickly and easily with your subscribers. The following tools have proven to be successful in content marketing:

With the email marketing tool MailChimp, you can create creative newsletter campaigns and always send emails at the right time thanks to data-based automation. The range of functions includes an intuitive template editor, analysis features and interfaces to various CRM systems.

The email marketing software GetResponse supports you in sending email newsletters, online surveys, follow-up emails and autoresponders – if required also automatically based on customer data. A landing page editor and tools for webinar marketing are also available.

Sendinblue (formerly known as Newsletter2Go) is an email marketing software from Germany that can be used to develop professional newsletters and SMS campaigns or landing pages and send them automatically. The software is GDPR-compliant if you are a business interacting with customers based inside the EU.

The email marketing software CleverReach is specialized in target group-oriented email campaigns. The range of functions includes a filter that cleans address lists of invalid or erroneous addresses.

A picture is worth a thousand words. In content marketing, high-quality image content is ideally suited to attract the attention of potential customers and to stand out from the mass of text-based web offers. Do you think that creating professional graphics is expensive and time-consuming? Not necessarily. With these tools, you can create impressive infographics, illustrations, logos or other design projects for your content marketing campaign even without the appropriate basic knowledge or a trained team of experts.

Piktochart is an intuitive graphic tool for beginners. The software provides various templates for design projects, which can be individualized with a few clicks.

The graphic tool Infogram focuses on data visualization and offers you numerous templates for diagrams, maps or infographics as well as more than 1 million pictures and icons.

Use PicMonkey to edit images for your content marketing campaigns or create graphics and collages from scratch. The tool supports you with various templates, icons, fonts, filters, and effects.

The online tool Easelly provides users with templates for infographics, which, according to the developers, enable every user to virtually present ideas, data, or processes.

The online platform zsuite includes the graphic tools youzign, gifzign, mockzign, and logozign. This allows you to create graphics, GIFs, mockups and logos based on templates in a fast and uncomplicated way.

Videos convey emotions better than any other medium and are therefore an integral part of content marketing. With these video tools, you can put your recordings in the limelight and bring video content to the big screen:

With Magisto, you can create impressive videos for your content marketing campaigns in just a few minutes. The tool offers an AI-supported video editor as well as solutions for the cross-channel distribution of video content.

Wirecast by Telestream is a production software for live streaming videos. In addition to live streams, the tool is also suitable for webinars, webcasts, sports reporting, educational videos, and social media content.

With Camtasia, TechSmith offers a complete solution for screen recording. The tool includes a pixel-perfect screen recorder and various video editing features.

The video platform Knovio focuses on the organization and exchange of video content for internal communication, training and online presentations. In addition, the tool supports live broadcasts of events like conferences.

Slowly but surely, speech-based interaction is establishing itself as an attractive alternative to the mouse and touch screen. Content marketers should also jump on the bandwagon. The following tools help you to serve the increasing demand with appealing audio content:

Audacity is a free, cross-platform open source audio editor with integrated recorder. With this tool, you can mix and edit audio files on any number of tracks. The software supports the import and export of all common audio formats.

Podbean is an online platform for podcast hosting. In addition to uploading and administration, the range of functions also includes the publication and marketing of self-created podcasts.

ePodcast Creator is a recording and audio editing software designed specifically for podcast creation. The tool also offers an RSS feed creator and FTP client for publishing and distributing your podcasts.

SoundCloud is one of the world’s most popular music and podcast streaming platforms with around 175 million users worldwide. With SoundCloud, they not only present their audio content to a large international audience, but also receive detailed statistics and direct feedback from the SoundCloud community.

Interactive content increases user engagement and, when used correctly, can provide you with interesting information about your target audience, their preferences and interests. The following content marketing tools rely on gamification to provoke user interaction:

With Contest Factory, you can create interactive content for social media platforms, mobile devices or the world wide web in no time at all. The product portfolio includes gamification formats like surveys, instant lotteries and hashtag campaigns as well as photo, video, audio and writing competitions.

Use SnapApp to provide interactive content to your target audience. SnapApp’s question-based content formats help you better understand your audience and gain important information for your lead management.

Use the quiz creator Qzzr to elicit relevant information about your customer’s needs, wishes and preferences, to refine customer profiles and to strengthen their commitment with self-made question and answer games.

Votigo offers you a cloud-based social marketing suite that specializes in creating and distributing interactive content on the mobile web and social networks. Use sweepstakes, competitions or coupons to generate leads or increase existing customer’s commitment.

The success of a content marketing campaign depends on the organization of each individual step. Campaign management is where all the threads come together. The task is to shape the collected topic proposals, to concretize the planning and to draw up a binding content or editorial plan at the end. To maintain an overview of all these tasks, it is advisable to use appropriate management tools, especially for large-scale content marketing campaigns.

Trello is a classic project management tool that is ideally suited for organizing and planning smaller content marketing projects. The individual tasks within a campaign can be structured, precisely scheduled and assigned to specific editors using a map-based dashboard.

Asana is a project management software originally developed by Facebook co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein to optimize Facebook’s internal processes. Today, the tool is one of the leading applications in the areas of task management, productivity and collaboration.

The makers of Evernote call their tool a “virtual memory”. Evernote allows project teams to store, organize and archive to-do lists, documents, and notes. Another feature is the possibility of saving content from RSS feeds and other sources, which can be tagged for later targeted access to topic-relevant articles.

Pocket is a popular bookmarking service among editors, writers, and bloggers. They use Pocket for research purposes to store web content clearly sorted by keywords.

Content collaboration tools serve the central administration of content, enable editorial teams to edit content on a division of labor basis and ensure that all members always have access to the current version of centrally stored content formats. We recommend the following tools for collaborative management of content marketing campaigns.

Google Drive is the file hosting service from Google LLC. The tool enables users to store data centrally on the network and provides project teams with a web-based office package that enables them to jointly edit text documents, data tables, or presentations.

The developers of Contentbird understand your product as a content workflow platform that supports marketing teams with data-driven methods in the research, planning, creation, and distribution of content.

The creators of GatherContent call their product a content operations platform. The tool allows marketing teams to manage content in one central location and can be integrated into a CMS or content delivery tool as needed.

Those who can no longer manage their content marketing campaign manually due to its size can rely on marketing automation tools. These automate content selection and distribution, thus enabling a needs-based approach to customers.

With the lead management tool Pardot from Salesforce, marketers react to potential customers’ activities with automated marketing measures. The tool is specially designed for the automation of B2B marketing processes.

Adobe’s marketing automation platform Marketo includes lead management, email marketing, existing customer marketing and mobile marketing. The tool supports marketers in prioritizing potential customers based on demographic or behavioral considerations and enables them to establish long-term customer relationships through personalized campaigns.

Eloqua, Oracle’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) marketing automation platform, helps marketers automate lead generation marketing campaigns. The tool is designed for B2B marketing and supports even complex cross-channel campaigns.

Act-on is a marketing automation platform that enables the coordination of inbound and outbound marketing campaigns throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

HubSpot is a cloud-supported all-in-one solution for marketing, sales, and customer service. The software is available in the five modules CMS Hub, Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Operations Hub, and Service Hub or as a software suite covering all areas.

Just as important as the research is also the professional execution of the stated subject ideas. In order to stand out of the crowd, content should not only be relevant and engaging to the user, it should also be of the highest quality production-wise. The following tools help marketers to ensure the impeccable quality of the text content they offer.

The add-on app LanguageTool checks texts for correct spelling and grammar. Can your text editor do that? Certainly not to the same extent as LanguageTool. The extension for MSWord, LibreOffice, Firefox, Chrome, Google Docs and many other applications recognizes more than 1,800 error patterns. .

WriteWell offers copywriters proven templates for various content formats like essays, university theses, memoirs, or cover letters. The tool is primarily aimed at pupils and students but is also suitable for the creation of corresponding texts in content marketing.

Focused work, no chance of distractions to increase output and quality – this isn’t easy for many copywriters. The Forest app helps you improve your motivation and self-discipline by blocking access to classic time wasters, e.g. Facebook or Twitter, for a fixed period of time.

Grammarly is an automated proofreader that checks for errors relating to spelling, grammar, and punctuation. The tool is able to check for over 250 types of these errors, and also offers the possibility to enhance vocabulary and suggest citations. There is also the option of downloading the browser extension, which is compatible with Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. The basic version of the editor is available for free, with the additional possibility of paying for a premium version.

WriteBox is a tool for all those who get really distracted by everything during content production – even the user interface of the writing program. With the help of the online tool, you can write your texts on a completely white page, without any interface. Especially for blog posts, which are mostly kept simple and don’t need any common text editors’ additional features, the program offers itself to work focused.

You don’t want to create content for your content marketing campaigns yourself? No problem. On these platforms, you will find the right copywriters for every format, from social media to professional articles.

The online platform Textbroker brings clients and authors together. On the self-proclaimed text exchange, you book freelance copywriters and editors thanks to the valuation-dependent price model always matching your quality requirements and the available marketing budget.

Scripted  is an online marketplace for freelance copywriters and editors in the English-speaking world. Choose from many profiles to create your favorite marketing text, blog article, or social media post.

Zerys is an all-in-one platform for text creation. Use the tool to plan content and find suitable copywriters or transfer the entire content creation process to a Zerys content project manager.

Once the brainstorming, coordination and production have been completed, reality sets in. Time to bring content to the users. Depending on the focus and communication strategy, your text content, videos, and graphics will now find their way to your advertising partners websites, social networks or directly to your customers via email. Various content marketing tools can help keep you on track here too.

Buffer helps marketers to target the important social media channels with content. The tool determines the ideal publication time based on user commitment and automates content distribution based on user-defined processes.

The social relationship platform Hootsuite enables marketers to centrally manage various social media channels, research content using hashtags, streams and keywords, rearrange them and share them with the community on a time-controlled basis if required. In addition, team management functions as well as analysis and monitoring tools are available.

With the native discovery network Outbrain, marketers promote your content on well-known publishers’ websites. The providers include many high profile names around the world, including CNN, Slate or US Weekly.

The file hosting service SlideShare focuses on creating and sharing presentations and infographics. The platform provides the ideal opportunity, particularly in B2B, to prepare content that is tailored specifically to your target groups while demonstrating your own expertise.

In the world of marketing, nothing works without measuring your success. For that reason, analysis and monitoring are very highly rated and valued. This means that it is no real surprise that there is a big market for tools that are meant to help measure the success of content marketing, keeping an overview of all relevant figures and statistics. Some of the top content marketing tools include:

Google Analytics, the world’s most widely used web tracking tool, provides content providers with detailed information on how Internet users interact with web content. Integrated into a website, Google Analytics outputs, KPIs and website statistics that can be used to measure the success of marketing campaigns, among other things.

Matomo (formerly known as Piwik) is an open source web analytics platform that is a good alternative to Google Analytics, especially from a data protection perspective. Unlike the market leader, Matomo offers the option of sorting all user data on its own server.

Socialbakers is used to analyze and measure the success of social media campaigns. The AI-supported social media marketing suite provides marketers with various analysis tools that can be used to measure the response to content media campaigns in social networks.

The social listening platform Talkwalker offers various tools with which internet trend topics can be identified, analyzed and evaluated. The possible applications range from campaign monitoring to crisis management.

Chartbeat combines website tracking with social media monitoring and provides content providers with detailed information on how internet users interact with website or social media content.

Our selection shows that the market for content marketing tools is large and diverse. The range extends from browser add-ons for special applications to enterprise platforms with a comprehensive range of functions.

The trends seem to be focusing heavily on automation. Numerous tools are based on machine learning algorithms, which are effectively sold as AI (artificial intelligence). Nevertheless, a data-supported marketing campaign is only as good as the team that outlines the relevant processes and implements the automatisms.

When it comes to selecting tools, less is often more. “Too many cooks spoil the broth” – meaning that you should be wary of not involving too many software programs in the content marketing process. For bigger companies, there is also the option of an all-in-one solution. Providers like HubSpot, Eloqua, Pardot, or Marketo will attempt to guide companies through the entire marketing process. Having an overview over all important files and information is a big advantage – but also one that comes at a price.