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.
These tools can make your content look like you’re an enterprise business (even if you’re a one-person team) and give you all the data you need to get the traffic and conversions that scale your business.
From graphic design tools, content ideation platforms, and analytics—check out the top 9 content marketing tools of 2021 below.
Canva
Free Plan with Paid Plans starting at $12.99/month
The first thing you’ll read after creating your Canva account are the two words you see above: Design Anything. Canva’s not kidding. With their full suite of graphic design tools, content marketers can make high-quality, on-brand graphics for their socials, paid ads, and articles. Canva also has templates for each type of deliverable so they can be brand-friendly with the click of a button.
Content marketers need Canva to:
- Create high-quality graphics for their content
- Tap into hundreds of templates for each type of deliverable
- Easily add their branding to each graphic
AnswerThePublic
Free with Paid Plans starting at $79/month
AnswerThePublic is your look into what Google sees each time someone hits enter on a new search. You’ll get a huge (we’re not exaggerating at all) list of questions your audience has asked based on the keywords you search. For example, if you want to create content for ecommerce business owners that leads them to hire your agency to handle their marketing you’d search: ecommerce marketing. AnswerThePublic will show you everything people have searched around that term so you can have hundreds of content ideas proven to be of interest to your customer avatar.
Use AnswerThePublic to:
- See what questions your customer avatar is asking
- Figure out what the biggest pain points your customer avatar has
- Create content your customer avatar actually wants to read
Quora
Free
Similar to AnswerThePublic, Quora is your insight into the mind of your customer avatar. It’s a way around running focus groups if you don’t have access to your avatar yet. As a question and answer website, you’ll find hundreds of questions asked on each topic. For example, if your customer avatar is a SaaS business interested in running Facebook ads, you can use Quora to see what the questions people are asking about Facebook ads are. You can niche down even further and find what SaaS business owners are asking about Facebook ads.
Quora helps content marketers:
- Figure out the problems their customer avatar has
- Make high-quality content that’s proven to answer their questions
- Get more eyes on their brand by posting answers to the questions to Quora
Google Trends
Free
Google Trends is a free tool that shows you what people care about right now. Specifically for your niche, you can ideate high-performing content ideas based on trends and industry news. For example, in the graph above we can see that the best time to write about the iOS 14 update. This is the update that asked iOS users if they wanted to be tracked across platforms for each app using tracking on their devices. Now that searches for iOS 14 have tapered down, we can tell the topic won’t perform as well.
Use Google Trends to:
- See what’s trending in your industry
- Plug that into AnswerThePublic or Quora to find out what questions are being asked
- Create content (and repurpose it across your platforms) that answers the main questions your customer avatar has
Hemingway Editor
Free
Copy and paste your written content (articles, emails, copy, etc.) into Hemingway Editor to make sure that it’s: readable for your audience, doesn’t use too many adverbs, avoids passive voice, and is easy to read. These are the types of edits that will make your content stand out as enjoyable and interesting to read while helping you avoid run-on sentences or the use of unnecessarily “big” words.
Hemingway Editor helps content marketers:
- Write at the grade level best suited for their audience
- Keep their content interesting by avoiding too many adverbs or too much passive voice
- Become known for creating high-quality, enjoyable to read content
Grammarly
Free with Paid Plans starting at $25 per member/month
We want to personally thank Grammarly for making us look like a true wizard of words. The reality is, Grammarly is catching our silly grammar mistakes and sometimes even rewriting our sentences so they sound better (…AI is here). Our favorite part of Grammarly is the ability to set what type of edits you want to make based on the voice of your writing. They won’t try to make your writing overly professional if you don’t want it to be (like our articles).
Use Grammarly to:
- Fix grammar and spelling mistakes in your writing
- Improve sentence structure
- Edit your content based on the person you’re writing it for
SEMRush
Free with Paid Plans starting at $99.95/month
Let’s talk about SEO. We know you’re not throwing spaghetti at the hypothetical content wall and hoping something sticks. You’re being strategic about the content you post and making sure that it can bring in the traffic, subscriptions, and conversions you’re looking for. That’s why SEMRush has continued to be such a popular tool among content marketers. With SEMRush, you can get more views on your content and track the data that helps you get even more views.
SEMRush is great for content marketing because:
- You can run SEO audits and track SERP positions daily
- Make your content SEO-friendly before hitting publish
- Check the traffic and analytics of your competitor’s websites
Google Analytics
Free
Google Analytics is a content marketing tool you need to start using before you actually need it. As soon as you set up your website (or if you’re reading this and haven’t set it up yet), add your Google Analytics pixel. Once you’re ready to start content marketing, you’ll have months of data to work off of and will be able to launch a solid strategy because of it. With Google Analytics, you can see how many page views you’re getting, the source of your traffic, conversions, demographics, and so much more.
Use Google Analytics to:
- See how much traffic your content is getting
- Analyze the click-through rate on different pieces of content
- Find out what your main traffic sources are
Monday
Paid Plans starting at $8 per seat/month
It’s time to talk about organization. The other tools mentioned above have helped you create great content that your audience cares about. Monday will help you make sure that you hit publish on all of those ideas. Organization is key to your content success because content marketing comes with a lot of moving parts. With Monday, you can build out your editorial calendar, assign tasks to each team member, and add updates to each task to make sure they’re moving along the pipeline.
Content marketers love Monday because:
- They can create an editorial calendar that’s shared with their team
- Assigning tasks to team members avoid the need for extra communication in another platform (ahem, Slack or email)
- Adding updates to tasks helps keep the content lead in the know about the status of each assignment and the overall project
Content Marketing Tools That Are Worth The Money (Or Resources)
Don’t let your content dreams be dreams. You can tap into traffic and conversions, get qualified leads, and grow your business. All you need is the right set of tools to help you make your content look top-notch and the analytics to keep it answering your customer’s questions.
Here are the top 9 content marketing tools of 2021:
- Canva
- AnswerThePublic
- Quora
- Google Trends
- Hemingway Editor
- Grammarly
- SEMRush
- Google Analytics
- Monday
Feel free to test out each tool with their free trial offers or by purchasing one month at a time to make sure it’s the right fit for your needs. And remember the most important part of content marketing…
A/B testing.
Forever and always.
