To reach a wide audience and to appeal to your established audience; keeping them hooked to your website or blog, you have to create extraordinary content. Extraordinary content is content that is useful to your audience and content that creates traffic and converts leads increasing your sales revenue. In the digital marketing world, content marketing is at the heart of all operations hence the phrase; Content is King!
Why not use ads that run under the somewhat successful Pay Per Click Ads? Well, there are more members of your audience using ad blockers. So, your ads and new innovative products won’t reach your audience. That bitter truth leaves you with content marketing. The upside of content marketing is that it is one of the most important SEO marketing techniques hence the advocacy by 53 percent of the best digital marketers of today.
Did you know that about 88 percent of organizations used content marketing in 2016 alone? More than 70 percent of companies are injecting more resources into content marketing in 2017. This, therefore, means that you will only get to be the best Vancouver injury lawyer if you employ a content marketer or a digital marketer that understands its importance. When applied correctly, content marketing increases the traffic to your site significantly.
This may seem like a lot, and it is; which means that you already feel like a failure since there are a whole host of techniques necessary for the success of content marketing, SEO, and all the marketing strategies. However, you aren’t alone. Despite the effectiveness of this marketing technique, few companies and individuals grasp its importance. By going through this, you are already a step ahead of your competition. To get you (marketer or entrepreneur) started, let’s look at the basics of content marketing.
What is content marketing?
It refers to the marketing technique that involves creation and sharing of relevant online materials. In most cases, the materials don’t promote your brand products/ services explicitly but only intend to evoke interest in what your brand deals with. Content marketing involves more of content creation. If you’ve shared an image on social media and created a small caption to go with it, then you have created content.
Content marketing isn’t focused on pitching products. Its main role is to inform your audience and also offer real value helping you gain the trust and the interest of your audience.
What are the main forms of content marketing?
Social media, blogs, webinars, websites, and podcasts are the main forms of content marketing/ creation.
Why is the content creation/ marketing critical to the success of online marketing?
- It creates a connection and helps you reach your audience through the use of social media.
With a large percentage of internet users using social media to market and inform their audience, it is clear that this is an important part of content creation. The content shared helps you connect to your audience better as you can personify the content. Content also helps improve your reach, eventually growing your business and improving your brand’s image.
- Content creation makes you a resource
Most people look up to Google for information. So, by creating high-quality content on your webpage, you become a resource to your audience.
- Content increases your visibility
Creating more blog posts which meet the industry’s highest standards will deepen the depth of your website making you more visible. More web pages equal more depth and Google loves deep websites and ranks deep website higher than others. This also means that you will keep Google’s bot active as it will crawl your site more.
- Higher traffic
More blog posts mean higher visibility, more leads and higher traffic to a website. More content means you have a higher chance of driving traffic to your site.
With all these benefits, wouldn’t you want to know the best possible way of creating high-quality content to drive up traffic and sales to your website or blog? Well, keep reading.
15 Most Popular Free Tools for Content Marketing Campaigns
Below is a list of the most popular content marketing tools available for you.
- Buzzsumo
This is the must-have tool in the content creation and content marketing world. It is the tool that lets you create top-quality and winning content. You can use Buzzsumo to find and view highly shared and content across social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest.
You can also use Buzzsumo to analyze then compare your content’s performance with your competitor’s content. This is made possible by the presence of cool features like the ‘View Sharers’ which shows the details of the person who shared your content on social media, say Twitter, the leading social media platform for determining your outreach.
You also have Buzzsumo Alerts which lets you know when a phrase or a keyword gets mentioned on the web. Therefore, it is an excellent tool for content optimization and keyword research.
The only downside of Buzzsumo is its high pricing model though it remains a great investment in digital marketing.
- Scribe
Despite the high pricing model and the need for improvement of the pricing model, Scribe is an excellent content creation tool. The key to the creation of excellent content with a high readability and reach is research.
Once you start blogging, you will realize that almost everything you are thinking about has been written before yet, you still have to create content which will interest your audience. For that, you will have to research and identify the topics your audience looks for. You will also have to identify new ways of making your content better. Scribe give you all that information.
You will have to use Scribe’s Social Research function as it will help you ensure that the content is optimized for web use and sharing on social media.
- Ahrefs Content Explorer
As mentioned above, the key to creating great content is researching to identify exactly what your audience wants. The Ahrefs Content Explorer is the tool that makes content creation for different topics possible. It uses social media shares, backlinks, and organic traffic.
The leading content marketers and copywriters use the content explorer for research purposes. It is easy to use because all you have to do is to input any keyword into it and you will have a list of all the popular articles. The articles rank according to their performance metrics.
Other than the organic search traffic that gives insights into the number of visits an article received, it also uses referring domains to establish the total number of unique websites that link to that article.
Some filters simplify research. The filters include language, backlink, traffic, domain rating, social shares, and the word count. You can also use it to establish link building opportunities.
- Bloomberry
Bloomberry allows you to research for the right keyword. It also facilitates content optimization leading to the success of your SEO strategies.
This tool allows you to find keywords used by your customers. It allows you to use those keywords in your content. Its effectiveness comes from the fact that it crawls content from big sites like Amazon, Reddit and forums like Quora to find answers to commonly asked questions.
- WordPress PopUp
The best way for you to drive more visitors to your site is through the creation of content worth your readers’ time. The WordPress PopUp is a plugin that makes all that possible as it lets you build high-quality, attractive and customer-specific content. This plugin encourages your readers to read your content. You can also use it to give additional content to your readers or to grow your mailing list.
Since you can add tweaks to the structure of the website, the color, and the style, and also add images, you get to reach your target audience faster.
- Canva
This is a visual content creation tool. It is one of the cheapest tools that allows professionals and amateurs to create visual content with its zero pricing model and the $1 cost of stock images and illustrations.
The main features of Canva include the presence of templates with preset dimensions which allow you to create numerous cover images, posts, and ads for use on different social media platforms. It has images and illustrations going for a dollar each.
- PicMonkey
If you aren’t into Canva, you can use PicMonkey, the other advanced visual content creation tool. You can use PicMonkey to create and edit high-quality and attractive visual content which you can use on your social media platforms.
Unlike Canva, PicMonkey lets you share your content on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest and Flickr directly.
The only downside is that it lacks gridlines which make it hard for you to line up the elements.
- Grammarly
This is one of the leading writing and editing tools for content marketers and copywriters. For your content to sparkle, Grammarly checks for spelling and grammatical errors. You can also use Grammarly for text optimization and readability.
You can also make your writing flawless by using the Calmy Writer in place Microsoft Word as it is simpler and more streamlined.
To increase readability of your content, you can use Hemingway which is an advanced online editing tool that highlights complex sentences and phrases.
- MarketMuse
This is an advanced content optimization and marketing tool for analysis. It scans your content and then it compares that content to other content on the internet. In case it notes that your competitors use a keyword which you don’t use, then it alerts you of a content gap. It also takes note of your LSI keywords. In the process, it helps improve your rankings.
This is a content finding and saving tool which enhances the effectiveness and the success of your content marketing strategies.
Flipboard lets you view images, videos, social media updates, blog posts and any other form of content from one place. You get to organize and save all the interesting content on your site using the flip feature.
- Feedly
This is also a content finding, and saving tool which lets you subscribe to RSS feeds of blogs. You can also see all your blog posts at a centralized location. The best part is that you can integrate Feedly with other digital marketing apps like Hootsuite, Buffer and LinkedIn.
You may also opt for Google Drive, iCloud, or Dropbox.
- CoSchedule
Created content must be shared on all sites with your target audience. While sharing content on all the sites you have is a sharing option, it is only practical when you have all the time in the world. We all know that you don’t have that time and that is where CoSchedule steps in.
CoSchedule is a pristine tool that lets you create your marketing calendar. You can also use it for social media scheduling and analytics. The requeue feature allows for social automation leaving you with the main task of creating high-quality, interest-piquing content.
You will also access the Workflow Management feature and other integrations. Therefore, your content marketing campaigns are simplified as you just have to queue your blog when it is ready. It comes with an editorial calendar which lets you schedule the blog posts.
- ShareThis
This free and easy-to-install tool comes with social media buttons which allow you to share your content across the large platforms such as WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, or Drupal.
ShareThis also gives you access to social analytics so that you can determine the performance of your content on the different social media platforms.
The only downside is that it lacks an image sharing option. Shareaholic is an alternative to ShareThis. It allows your content to reach as many platforms as possible and to reach most of your audience. This content sharing tool has multiple share buttons for Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+, and LinkedIn among other sites. It also comes with social media analytics.
- SumoMe
With email marketing as an important part of digital marketing, you have to keep your customers in the know. Since emailing is professional and personal, your customers are more likely to read your emails.
To share your content via email, you need an emailing list, and SumoMe lets you build up an emailing list. With it, you get to convert your visitors into subscribers easily. It has an efficient way of building and doubling your subscribers.
You can also use to generate traffic from your social media platforms.
- OptinMonster
This is another tool that lets you get more people on your email list. With increase in visibility as the advantage of content marketing, you will be in a better position having a big mailing list. With OptinMonster, you can build an endless subscription list of potential customers. You can create attractive forms with it to increase the conversion rates.
You also get different kinds of forms including pop-ups, floating headers, footer bars, after post forms, sidebar forms, welcome gates, scroll-triggered boxes.
Conclusion
With these nifty tools for content marketing campaigns, you will be able to create high-quality, targeted, and relevant content that meets that needs of your audience. Since creating fresh and useful content is a big challenge to most marketers and copywriters, using these tools simplify the whole process.
Keep in mind that content is still king. So, you should create content that makes your audience feel smarter and content that positions you as a leader. Your content should also strengthen your relationship with your customers, foster loyalty, building SEO, encouraging customer engagement and increasing your revenue.
Content creation, editing, sharing, storage, and planning tools will result in successful content marketing.