Are you looking for content marketing tools to drive your content marketing plans?
One of the content marketing questions I get asked most often is how a small business can get started with content marketing on a limited budget.
While there are a ton of ways we could discuss how to be successful with content marketing, at some point you have to get down to the dirty job of producing content.
Luckily there are plenty of affordable content marketing tools to help drive your content marketing plans, no matter what size your business is. And no matter what size budget you may have.
Here I have listed some of my favorite content marketing tools to help you assess your current ranking on the important keywords your potential buyers are using, which keywords you should be using, and which topics are resonating for your audience around those keywords.
These are the tools we use to help our clients develop an effective content marketing strategy that delivers real business growth.
I also have listed my favorite image resources to make sure your written content is supplemented with the right visual appeal that today’s audiences are looking for.
And finally, I have listed out the content marketing tools I use for sharing content.
So without further ado, here’s my list of 22 free content marketing tools.
22 Content Marketing Tools
Content Ideas
- BuzzSumo is a great, if not a must-have, tool for content marketers to identify what content and keywords are working well, which platforms and channels are driving social sharing and engagement, and who the key competitors and influencers are in your space. The results you get are also a great source of inspiration for content ideas.
- Feedly lets you find and read content in less time by organizing them into collections which appear in your feed. It’s a great tool to stay up-to-date on the latest news in your industry and to see how much social sharing each piece of content is getting. With a Pro account, you can easily schedule and share posts with Hootsuite or Buffer.
- Quora is a fantastic online community for content marketers to use and find out what kinds of questions their target consumers are asking for blog inspiration.
- Twitter is another great tool to see which topics are trending and hashtags that are relevant to your industry and target audience.
- DrumUp is a content marketing tool that pulls up recommended content based on the set of keywords you set up on the platform. You can also add RSS feeds to get content from the websites you regularly visit. DrumUp is also a social media management tool that lets you schedule and share content via the platform.
- Flipboard curates and showcases content from various trusted sources and websites based on the topics of interest you follow. You have the option to save the content you like and the tool presents it in an online magazine format for you to view.
Image & Graphic Creation
- StockSnap is one of the best places to find free, quality high-resolution photos which you can use, modify and distribute without attribution, even for commercial purposes. The site allows you to sort by date, views, number of downloads and favorites as well as which images are trending. Hundreds of new images are added every week.
- Pexels is a repository of over 10,000 free, quality hand-picked stock photos, with at least 1,500 new photos added every month. Like StockSnap, all photos can be used and modified without asking for permission and attribution.
- Unsplash has over a hundred collections of beautiful stock images donated by various photographers around the world, which you can use with no copyright restrictions.
- Iconmonstr is another repository which has over 3,400 free icons you can use without copyright restrictions.
- Canva makes graphic design simple and quick for everyone. You can use the online program and its huge collection of free templates and graphics to create everything from blog and social graphics to presentations, flyers, posters and infographics.
- PicMonkey is a great online photo editing tool if you are looking to make basic editing or special effects, like cropping, resizing, color adjustments and filters.
- GoAnimate allows you to easily create animated videos yourself, without the big price tag that comes with creative agencies or if you don’t have the internal resources for it. The online platform allows you to drag and drop characters, props, backgrounds, styles, sound effects and even voice record audio files to go along with your animated videos.
- Life of Pix is one of my favorite sources of free, high-resolution photos donated to the public domain by the Leeroy ad agency with no copyright restrictions.
- Gratisography is another favorite of mine that offers free high-res photos from Ryan McGuire. New pictures are added every week. Some of the photos are a little quirky which is fine by me. Images are free of Copyright restrictions.
Content Sharing & Management
- Hootsuite is still my top choice for social media scheduling and sharing. You can manage all your social media accounts, monitor hashtags, track and respond to mentions all in one place.
- Sprout Social is a social media management platform that allows individuals and businesses to manage social sharing, engagement and communications across Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Google+. Like Hootsuite, the platform also offers social media analytics tools to help you measure and report on your performance.
- Spredfast is another social marketing and engagement platform for scheduling and sharing content, social listening and analytics.
- Buffer is a social media scheduling tool that helps you find your most optimal times to share content throughout the day so you can get the most out of every post. With the paid plans, you can add RRS feeds to find and mark content you want to share and add them to your queue.
- Outbrain is a content promotion tool that promotes your content across a wide network to help you to reach your ideal audience, and an analytics dashboard allows you to track and optimize campaigns.
Analytics, Keyword Discovery & SEO
- Google Analytics is one of the must-have tools content marketers should include in their toolbox. You can track everything from your website traffic to visitor demographics to help you improve your pages.
- Google Search Console is another must-have tool for checking how often your website appears in Google search results and test if Google can successfully “understand” your content, to help you improve your site’s SEO and search performance.
- MozBar is a browser extension that generates instant SEO metrics and insights into keywords and other page elements based on the websites you are visiting.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider. If you are looking to do a content audit of a larger website, you can download this is small desktop application to “spider” your websites’ links, images and more from an SEO perspective. This video offers a quick overview
- Google Keyword Planner allows you to search for keywords and get their historical search volume statistics or traffic forecasts for specific lists of keywords. It’s a great resource to have in your content marketing toolbox to help you create content around commonly searched keywords and terms.
- Google Trends: I’m on this site almost every day just looking at the trends of various keywords, especially for our customers. You can also look at what’s trending if you want to do a “What [current event] means for [your target keyword]” type post such as this one.
- Keyword Tool gives you 750+ long-tail keyword suggestions based on the term you search for. You can also look at the questions related to your keyword users are searching, which can be used for content marketing topics. With a Pro account, you’ll also get additional insights into the search volume, CPC and AdWords competition for the keywords you search.
- Keyhole also allows you to track any keyword, hashtag or url as well. It shows the top posts, influencers and users for a sampling of data.
- Hubspot Website Grader allows you to gain insights into how well your website is performing, including SEO, mobile and security, and the areas you could improve to optimize your performance.
- SEMrush is a great tool we use to track keywords across organic search and paid campaigns, you can also use the tool to measure the performance of your website and get insights into your competitors’ digital marketing strategies. Keep in mind that free users only get 10 queries though.
- Keyword Finder helps you find long tail, low competition keywords to guide your content marketing plans.
- keywordtool.io is a great resource because it allows you to enter your keyword and see top related searches. But it also allows you to view questions and also to see top keywords and questions on YouTube, Bing and across mobile app stores.
- Uberflip (formerly Snapapp) is an interactive content marketing tool that can help you scale your ABM initiatives across various accounts.
Content Management Tools
- WordPress is what we use on this website. WordPress powers nearly two-thirds of all websites around the world and is free. You still need to design your site but with various templates, hundreds of thousands of plug-ins and so many developers, you can pretty much do whatever you want with WordPress. Some other options include Drupal, Magnolia, Hubspot, Adobe, Sitecore and Episerver / Optimizely.
- DivvyHQ is our tool of choice for managing calendars and workflows across our various clients. It offers much more functionality than the generic project management tools. Divvy helps move your content marketing strategy from an idea into accountability across your content planning and writing with real deadlines and deliverables.
RELATED: Here you can see my list of some of my favorite Digital Marketing Tools.
If you are ready to get more traffic to your site with quality content, published consistently, check out our Content Builder Service. Set up a quick consultation, and I’ll send you a free PDF version of my books.
Get started today – and generate more traffic and leads for your business!
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