If you are looking for the top content marketing tools to create content that actually drives, engages, and converts your audiences, you’ve come to the right place.
In this digital-driven era, content marketing is still “the king” for one straightforward reason: it is what people actively seek out and fosters leadership and an expert reputation for brands.
Consumers worldwide are exposed to advertisements, marketing emails, push notifications, ad banners everywhere and every day — yet they consider the majority of such promotions interruptive and irrelevant. Over 41 percent of Americans use an ad blocker on browsers and don’t want their inboxes filled up with promotional spam.
Content, instead, is not promotional and is designed to attract, engage, convert and retain high-intent audiences you might not otherwise be able to reach. And it’s never been more popular than it is now ー if you’re not doing it, then your competitors are probably already doing it. The growing importance of content marketing leading into 2024 is proven by data:
- 66% of marketers will increase their content marketing budget in 2022.
- 87% of marketers said that video contents provide positive ROI
- Publishing 16+ blog posts per month results in 4.5X more leads when compared to publishing 0-4 monthly posts.
But at the same time, information available online is exploding, and content is in a state of supply surplus — meaning that the vast majority of content doesn’t stand out and ends up down the rabbit hole of the Internet. To achieve the most excellent ROI on the content strategy, marketers must keep an eye on the evolving content marketing landscape. What worked last year may not be enough to get you ahead in 2024. In order to help you research, generate, optimize, and analyze the most qualified, personalized content, we collected 15 essential content marketing tools for you below.
First Step: Content Research
1. BuzzSumo
Content marketing use cases: Content research in social, Inspiration, competitor research, influencer marketing, digital PR
Pricing: 30-days free trial. The Pro level service starts from $99 a month.
BuzzSumo is an all-in-one platform that allows you to comprehensively, intuitively, and easily create your entire content marketing strategy, primarily focusing on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. With this tool, you can see the most popular and shared articles on the site and social media in your industry and the most likely ones to engage your target audience, get content insights and monitor your performance. Plus, the powerful platform can further help you identify influencers in the trending topic area to boost your influencer marketing strategy.
2. Ahrefs
Content marketing use cases: organic search traffic, topic backlink, and competitor research
Pricing: 7-day free trial for $7, starts at $99 per month
Ahrefs is another all-in-one SEO tool here to help you get content ideas, rank higher, and improve your SEO performance. More specifically, it allows you to analyze your competitors with site explorer, get inspired with keyword ideas, or learn from a topic’s top-performing content through organic traffic, backlinks, and social networks, and finally track your website ranking progress with the rank tracker. It is also very data-driven, showing you a variety of important data metrics and points that help you better leverage analytics in your strategy.
3. KeyWord Surfer
Content marketing use cases: Keyword research with data metrics
Pricing: Free (pay per credit for keyword metrics)
Keyword Surfer is a free Chrome extension that can enable you to see estimated global and monthly search volumes and generate keyword ideas for anything you typed into Google. It is more interesting that once you install the extension, it also shows the estimated traffic number for the domains in the search results and the number of domain quality backlinks, which is not possible in Keywords Everywhere, another paid keyword research tool.
4. SEMRush
Content marketing use cases: Competitor analysis, keyword research, backlinks
Pricing: Starts at $119.95 per month
SEMRush is among the most popular SEO tools that can help you improve your SEO by doing competitive research, seeing what keywords your competitors are using, doing backlink analytics, tracking rank, and analyzing your overall on-page and tech SEO performance. SEMRush gives you a unique look at your site’s metrics, which is beneficial for your content marketing and paid advertising strategies. In addition, the scope to access over 2 million keyword ideas and to create object lists by topic really helps you develop a clear content strategy.
5. Feedly
Content marketing use cases: Industry news and trends, topic inspiration
Pricing: Free
Using advanced AI technology, Feedly intelligently filters what might be important for you and your team, and flags valuable insights from everywhere, including news sites, blogs, Twitter, and newsletters. And it is entirely free to use. You can also organize, curate, and share key industry insights with your team and work together on your own content strategy.
6. Statista
Content marketing use cases: Infographics, reliable statistics, and charts needed
Pricing: starts at $4.5K per year
If you want to develop marketing content, especially backed up with convincing data, Statista is one of the best choices for you to subscribe to and find reliable sources. It is especially useful for B2B marketers who want to leverage data points to form their opinions and deliver lead-generating messages. Statista extracts data from various credible sources including market research, scientific journals, industry publications, and other databases. Otherwise, if you subscribe to each publication separately, you may have to pay higher costs for the information you need.
Second Step: Content Writing, Design, and Production
7. Grammarly
Content Marketing Use Cases: Improve content writing
Pricing: Free version+Premium version starting at $30/month
Grammarly helps you eliminate writing mistakes and find the right words to express your ideas. It optimized your content from grammar and spelling to style and tone. You can get real-time suggestions from Grammarly while writing. You can also install the extension to Chrome and use it while writing in Google-powered suits such as Google Docs.
8. Wordtune
Content marketing use cases: Refine, optimize texts
Pricing: paid plan start at $9.99 per month
Wordtune is an AI-powered Google extension that can help you reframe your syntax and turn your original content into more concise, engaging, well-written messages. You can also use the ideas generated from it as an inspiration for your A/B testing on the content. By applying and testing different ideas with the same meaning, you can better get an idea of what your audience would prefer.
9. Vidyard
Content Marketing Use Cases: Streaming, live webinars, video marketing,
Pricing: Both offer a free version, and paid plans start at $15 per month
Video channels and content are becoming more and more critical in this digital world. Vidyard is one of the leading video platforms that allows companies and businesses to create, record, and analyze video content for different business scenarios ranging from sales to marketing. Companies that use it can immediately access an online video hosting service that is ads-free, free of storage and bandwidth restrictions, and includes integrated tools for video creation and sharing. Videos can also be easily customized, personalized, and delivered.
10. Viamaker
Content marketing use cases: Video editing
Pricing: FREE
According to Wyzowl Research, 85% of people want to see more videos from brands in 2021. Therefore, video marketing is an essential strategy that every marketer should know in 2024. There are so many different channels, including Youtube and Tiktok, for marketers to create the most exciting video content to interact with consumers. Video editing tools then become very essential. Viamaker is a video editing app from Bytedance. The awesome part about it is that it is a free, all-in-one video editing app that truly lets you create engaging videos. There are many built-in advanced features such as beautiful filters, special effects, and an extensive music library for your BGM. Download it on your phone and start to create your own video!
11. Clearscope
Content Marketing Use Cases: Blogs, and articles optimization, especially for search.
Pricing: Starts at $170 per month
Clearscope is a content optimization tool that you can use with Google Docs to help you improve your writing in real-time. It can not be more perfect for marketers to stay within the writing system and benefit from using the tool simultaneously. This intelligent tool will generate reports and grade your article based on word count, proper keywords, headers, and give you a readability score. By referring to the score, you can then edit, proofread and improve your overall content assets.
Third step: Content Optimization and Analytics
12. Google Search Console
Content marketing use cases: Competitor research, site optimization, technical SEO
Pricing: Free
Google Search Console is especially useful for technical SEO analysis, and it is another free tool that marketers can utilize. The analytic tools and reports help the team measure website’s Search traffic and performance. It can also help marketers identify, debug technical issues leading to a website’s poor presence in Google Search, such as crawbility, indexing, HTML problems and help you fix issues. You can optimize your website based on the information within the platform.
13. Uberflip
Content marketing use cases: improve the site content experience.
Pricing: $1200/month.
Uberflip really helps provide your visitors with a seamless experience with your content and site. As “the #1 content experience”, Uberflip can be leveraged for all types of marketing including B2C, account-based marketing, demand generation marketing, and sales engagement. Using the platform, you can create personalized visitor site experiences and increase engagement level with the enhanced relevancy with them. In addition to personalized destinations, the platform also lets you manage your content assets all from one central location, making a unified workflow all in one place. Although the pricing is not affordable for every business, companies with high marketing budgets can consider investing customized.
14. Google Analytics
Content marketing use cases: Website analysis
Pricing: Free
Every website should be linked to Google Analytics to track, measure, and analyze the website performance and discover insights. It serves as the center with all the website-relevant data, allowing marketers to make strategic decisions based on it. It can also be used as a content marketing analytics tool. There are so many useful metrics and data points within it. For example, you can gauge which sources perform better to generate higher traffic and conversions and then optimize them. Behavior reports are extremely useful for content analysis because it is analyzing specific pages and contents, and give you an overview of page views, unique page views, average time spent on each page, bounce rate, and exit rate. You can also review how the content is performing by page URLs, titles, search terms, or events. More importantly, it contains an amazing feature that allows you to track user behavior flow and see their entire journey on your website. You can visualize the path visitors traveled from one page to the next, discovering what content is most engaging.
15. Inspectlet
Content marketing use cases: Website analytics
Pricing: Free version + paid plans starting at $39.00 per month
Although data metrics such as session duration and bounce rates can provide you some insights on how your visitors engage with your website, it’s still hard to actually analyze and tell where and why they start to engage with your content, not convert. Inspectlet is a good solution to this problem. It records a video of user behavior so that you can precisely know their journey on your website, how long they stayed, where they clicked around, how they engaged with your content, and what actually made them convert or complete your goal.
Strategic content marketing allows companies to prepare and deliver relevant and desirable information that consumers actually seek. Before creating any type of content, a good practice for a marketer is to always understand the target audience well enough, know what they want to look at, and then provide them with relevant and timely content that will have a high chance to incite the readers to click through and read/watch the content end to end.
To do so, devote your time to research. Comprehensive and solid research is the first step and the foundation of developing your content strategy. Leveraging these content marketing research tools above can help you get a better idea of what your audience is interested in. After identifying the right topic you are going to elaborate on, you should then use content writing and design tools to help you create high-quality and valuable content. Lastly, use intelligent analytics tools to keep track, measure, and optimize your assets to achieve the best impact and ultimately help your business grow.
If you want to read more about content strategy, make sure you check out this amazing expert guide to successful content marketing strategy
