Content marketing is a lot of work.
The days of writing an impressive blog article, hitting publish, and watching your page views skyrocket no longer exist. You could write the best article to ever grace the internet and still get less than 100 views.
Queue content marketing tools.
At the Traffic & Conversion Summit this year, Roland Frasier, Founder of War Room, did something pretty wild.
He opened his toolkit and gave us a peek into how he’s not only publishing impressive content—but getting the views too. We’re still not sure if we’re more mesmerized by his toolkit or the luxury hotel rooms he finagles his way into, but for now, we’ll focus on content marketing tools.
Here are 16 content marketing tools to use in 2019 that will help put your content above the rest.
Hawkeye
Paid: $$$
Content marketers use Hawkeye to replace their content brainstorming meetings. Instead of hoping a content idea will stick, Hawkeye is able to prove your audience will love it through data-driven insights. This content marketing tool is an AI software that also helps you create better content, understand why content on a specific topic is doing so well, and compare your content to your competitors.
Using Hawkeye you can:
- Find trending topics to create content on
- Figure out what made a piece of content perform well
- Compare your content to other competitors in your niche
- Improve your published content library
GroupHigh
Paid: $$
This content marketing tool is for digital marketers who are utilizing blogger and influencer campaigns. Using GroupHigh, you can search through blogs by traffic, SEO, following, location, and other tags. This tool also lets you see which blogs have linked to your competitors.
GroupHigh offers:
- Blog search through 50 million websites (with filtering)
- Influencer search (with filtering)
- Analytics on each website and influencer (SEO and content statistics)
- Earned media reports
VASTCLICKS
Paid: $
VASTCLICKS is a link shortening tool that has a tracking pixel for building a retarget list. Each link has impression and click analytics. VASTCLICKS also lets you A/B test calls to action to see which CTA is performing the best for each link.
Content marketers are using VASTCLICKS to:
- Shorten URL links to publish on social platforms
- Retarget users who click on their link
- Analyze data
- A/B test link CTA
StoryBase
Paid: $
StoryBase gives you the Google search data of your target audience. Using this content marketing tool, you can create content that answers the questions your audience searches most often. They also offer content analytics and an optimizer to improve your content’s SEO ranking.
Using StoryBase, you can:
- Find content ideas
- Track your website’s organic growth
- Analyze content
- Optimize published content
MarketMuse
Paid: $$$
MarketMuse is another AI content marketing tool. Using this tool, you can automate SEO research, find content gaps, optimize published content, create content briefs, and analyze content as it is published.
Content marketers use MarketMuse to:
- Find new content topics and subtopics
- Write briefs for staff or freelance writers
- Analyze published content for a specific topic
- Optimize existing content
- Find the internal links to use in each piece of content
Expertise Finder
Paid: $$$
Expertise Finder is a content marketing tool specifically for colleges and universities who want to increase their exposure, faculty, and student numbers. This tool has an “Expert Directory” where you can place your staff. Media companies can search through the directory for an expert related to a topic they are covering. If that expert is one of your faculty members, your college’s exposure will increase.
Use Expertise Finder if you are a college looking to:
- Increase the number of applications sent by prospective students
- Hire new faculty members
- Have your faculty members featured on news platforms and publications
Swiped.co
Free
If you’re a marketer who needs inspiration (and analytics), you are the customer avatar of the Swiped.co weekly newsletter. Every week Mike sends out “swipes” from top marketers, copywriters, and businesses. For example, “Ads using the ‘disruption’ hook” or “Ad message testing from Shopify.”
Swiped.co is for content marketers who want to:
- Improve their copy
- Find the copy working best right now
- Get copy inspiration
BuzzSumo
Paid: $$
Would this be a content marketing tool article without mentioning BuzzSumo? This tool helps you find the most shared content online. For each topic, it’ll show you what article has been shared the most, so you can figure out what content you need to create around that topic.
BuzzSumo has features that let you:
- Discover new topics to write about
- Curate new content
- Analyze insights
- Research and plan for your content calendar
- Compare competition analytics to your own
AnswerThePublic
Paid: $$
AnswerThePublic turns keywords into questions you can answer in your content. For example, if you search “content marketing,” AnswerThePublic will show you all of the questions that have been searched for related to content marketing, starting with who, what, where, when, why, and how. The content marketing tool also shows you prepositions (ex. content marketing is, can, with, to, for, near) and comparisons (ex. content marketing versus social media). Using these search questions, you can create content that answers your avatar’s questions.
Use AnswerThePublic to come up with content ideas based on search queries of keywords.
Sniply
Paid: $
Using Sniply, you can share other people’s content and place your call to action on the website page. Yeah—you heard that right. When a user clicks on the website page, they’ll see a pop-up in the bottom left-hand corner with your personalized CTA. You can see your click-through rate (CTR) for your shared links as well.
Use Sniply to:
- Add your own promotions to any other website page
- Track the analytics of your shared content
Society of Professional Journalists
Paid: $
The Society of Professional Journalists is a platform that connects you to professional journalists. SPJ has a code of abiding ethics for journalism. Their freelancer directory has expert content writers for hire.
SPJ is a content marketing tool for businesses needing to hire freelancers for news style articles.
Help a Reporter Out
Paid: $
Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a content marketing tool for exposure—reporters post the content they are looking for. If you have a story related to a topic a journalist wants to cover (and they like your story), you can land some media coverage. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Mashable all use HARO.
Use HARO if you want to get more exposure and build brand awareness.
Crowdfire
Paid: $
Crowdfire is a mix of a content finding tool and a social media manager. You can find, schedule, and manage content all under the app. They also customize posts for your other social accounts, for example automatically turning an Instagram post into a Facebook post.
Use Crowdfire if you’re a social media manager or business owner who wants to:
- Find content ideas for social media posts
- Pre-schedule content
- Customize each post for every social platform
JustReachOut
Paid: $$$
This is a platform for businesses with a PR strategy. JustReachOut connects you with journalists, publications, podcasts, and other press opportunities. They also have a PR strategy builder and pitch templates.
Using this content marketing tool, you can:
- Make a list of relevant journalists and influencers
- Conversation starter, subject lines, and pitch templates
- Review open rates of your emailed pitches
Getmemedia.com
Paid: $
Getmemedia.com collects advertisements so you can get inspiration for your next campaign. They focus on marketing, advertising, sponsorship, promotion, and experiential ideas. The platform is free for marketers and a “small subscription fee” for agencies.
This marketing tool is for marketers or agencies that want to see what content ideas are currently being used.
Designrr
Paid: $
Designrr is the solo content marketer’s best friend. This tool repurposes blog posts, podcasts, videos, PDF’s, show notes, flip books, and website pages. For example, an article can be repurposed into a dynamic flip book, a podcast can be turned into an ebook, and a YouTube video can be turned into a blog post.
Using Designrr, content marketers can repurpose content with pre-made templates.
Content marketing is a lot of work—until you automate it.
Now data can tell us what articles to write, AI can make a brief for it, content marketing tools can optimize it for SEO, and little elves can schedule the publish time.
Use this content marketing toolbox to amplify your content marketing strategy.
