According to research from The Drum, the compound annual growth rate of content marketing would climb by $217.3 billion from 2016 to 2021. You might be wondering why different brands are spending so much money on content marketing. This is the answer.

Content marketing delivers enormous value that brands can’t get from other traditional types of marketing. For a start, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates three times as many leads.

Content marketing is about communicating brand, call to action, and providing unique selling points to customers, using a combination of publishing tools, apps, or software. Whether it’s business to business (B2B) or business to consumer (B2C), the content of your marketing needs to be clear and targeted.

In the old days this could be as simple as a slogan on a poster, but these days with the profusion of digital and social media there are so many different ways to connect with a buying audience. There is no longer a best way to reach an audience, simply many different ones, all with varying degrees of targeting, action, and success.

Strong articles and other features can pre-sell your audience to buy into your brand, product range, or a particular product, especially if targeted at an already receptive audience.

While no content marketing tool can replace a solid strategy and talented humans, having the right tech stack can certainly help you get the job done better, easier, and more efficiently. For example, if you’re looking to analyze your business permanence, growth and indices, it is best suggested to use tools & software like marketing analytics dashboards, as created by expert developers like “Marketing Reports” or any other firm. It can help track your key business metrics, and present it to you in the form of graphs and charts. This eventually helps you in making future business decisions and formulating organizational growth strategies.

There are hundreds of content marketing tools available, some free or cheap, and some very expensive. They also serve tons of different purposes, from content ideation to production to promote optimization, and more. The content marketing technology landscape is growing every year.

This is exciting since it means that if you have a problem, you can probably find a software solution to help you solve it. But it’s also overwhelming. That is why this article will provide the needed tools for you to excel in your content marketing career.

1. Buzzsumo
2. Feedly
3. Hootsuite
4. Buffer
5. Mailchimp
6. Canva
7. Linkedin Slideshare
8. Trello
9. Audacity
10. Powtoon
11. Thinglink
12. Pocket
13. GIMP
14. Twitter
15. Storify
16. GoToMeeting
17. Optimizely
18. Placeit
19. TrackMaven
20. TweetDeck
21. Google Docs
22. Mixpanel
23. SEMrush
24. Sprout Social
25. Uberflip
26. Piktochart
27. Constant Contact
28. Post Planner
29. Mention
30. Alltop

1. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a great multi-purpose content marketing research tool.

One of the main things it can do is help you analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor. You can see metrics like social shares, backlinks, and which influencers are sharing as given piece of content.

They also have great influencer reports so you can see who the thought leaders are for a given topic area.

2. Feedly

No content marketer can do without Feedly. It’s one of the best ways to keep track of sites and topics you want to follow, all in one place. Check it daily to keep up with the news, find items to share, and research new topics to round out your content calendar.

3. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of many tools referred to as a “Social Media Management System” or tool. It helps you keep track and manage your many social network channels. It can enable you to monitor what people are saying about your brand and help you respond instantly.

You can view streams from multiple networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ and post updates or reply directly. With so many networks for businesses to manage, it’s no doubt Social Media Management tools have become so popular and relied upon by many companies today.

If you manage the updates for your business’ social networks, it’s highly likely that you will have heard of Hootsuite. In a survey from monitoring tool Pingdom, Hootsuite came up as the top Social Media Management System, with over 20% of companies using it to manage their social media empires. TweetDeck was second and SocialEngage third.

Hootsuite was launched back in 2008 by Invoke Media and since then has accrued an impressive array of features.

4. Buffer

Buffer is a software application for the web and mobile, designed to manage accounts in social networks, by providing the means for a user to schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Instagram Stories, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, as well as analyze their results and engage with their community. It is owned by remote company Buffer Inc.

The application was designed by a group of European expats in San Francisco, most notably Joel Gascoigne and Leo Widrich. Gascoigne is currently the CEO of Buffer. By December 2019, the team had reached 90 people working remotely from 15 countries in different parts of the world, more than 4.5 million registered users and over $16 million in annual revenue.

5. Mailchimp

MailChimp is often the first newsletter tool that springs to mind, possibly because they have great marketing and a charming monkey-fied aesthetic. But I guess I’m not the only one, as they claim to send roughly 10,800 emails out every second over their platform.

They offer a free plan, with which you can send up to 10,000 emails a month to 2,000 subscribers. This is good news for personal and SMB accounts, as most of the tools and templates are accessible on this free account. Another feature accessible through their free account is their in-built CRM.

If you’re an SMB looking for an all-in-one solution then this could be just what you’re looking for. They also have pay-as-you-go options, which work out to be cheaper for low-volume clients, whilst also giving you some included extras such as automation and integration options.

6. Canva

Canva is a graphic design platform that allows users to create social media graphics, presentations, posters and other visual content. It is available on web and mobile and integrates millions of images, fonts, templates and illustrations.

Users can choose from many professionally designed templates, and edit the designs and upload their own photos through a drag and drop interface. The platform is free to use, and paid subscriptions like Canva Pro and Canva for Enterprise offer additional functionality. Users can also pay for physical products to be printed and shipped.

As of 2019, Canva last raised at a $3.2 billion valuation and has over 20 million users across 190 countries.

7. Linkedin Slideshare

LinkedIn SlideShare is an American hosting service for professional content including presentations, infographics, documents, and videos. Users can upload files privately or publicly in PowerPoint, Word, PDF, or OpenDocument format.

Content can then be viewed on the site itself, on handheld devices or embedded on other sites. Launched on October 4, 2006, the website is considered to be similar to YouTube, but for slideshows. It was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012.

The website was originally meant to be used for businesses to share slides among employees more easily, but it also has expanded to become a host of many slides that are uploaded merely to entertain. Although the website is primarily a slide hosting service, it also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars. SlideShare also provides users the ability to rate, comment on, and share the uploaded content.

The website gets an estimated 80 million unique visitors a month and has about 38 million registered users. SlideShare’s biggest competitors include Zoho.com, Scribd.com, Issuu and edocr. Some of the notable users of SlideShare include The White House, NASA, World Economic Forum, State of Utah, O’Reilly Media, Hewlett Packard and IBM.

8. Trello

Trello is a web-based Kanban-style list-making application which is a subsidiary of Atlassian. Originally created by Fog Creek Software in 2011, it was spun out to form the basis of a separate company in 2014 and later sold to Atlassian in January 2017. The company is based in New York City, U.S.

Users can create their task boards with different columns and move the tasks between them. Typically columns include task statuses such as To Do, In Progress, Done. The tool can be used for personal and business purposes including real estate management, software project management, school bulletin boards, lesson planning, accounting, web design, gaming, and law office case management. A rich API, as well as email-in capability, enables integration with enterprise systems, or with cloud-based integration services like IFTTT and Zapier.

9. Audacity

Audacity is a free and open-source digital audio editor and recording application software, available for Windows, macOS, Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems. Audacity was started in the fall of 1999 by Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg at Carnegie Mellon University and was released on May 28, 2000 as version 0.8.

As of May 16, 2020, it is the most popular download from FossHub, with over 90.3 million downloads since March 2015. Previously, downloads were served from Google Code and SourceForge, with a combined total in excess of 110 million downloads. Audacity won the SourceForge 2007 and 2009 Community Choice Award for Best Project for Multimedia.

In addition to recording audio from multiple sources, Audacity can be used for post-processing of all types of audio, including podcasts by adding effects such as normalization, trimming, and fading in and out. Audacity has also been used to record and mix entire albums, such as by Tune-Yards. It is also currently used in the UK OCR National Level 2 ICT course for the sound creation unit.

10. Powtoon

Powtoon is a web-based animation software that allows users to create animated presentations by manipulating pre-created objects, imported images, provided music and user created voice-overs. Powtoon uses an Apache Flex engine to generate an XML file that can be played in the Powtoon online viewer, exported to YouTube or downloaded as an MP4 file.

Powtoon is also available on the Google Chrome Store and has an application on Edmodo.com. Some of the popular Powtoon integrations are HubSpot, Google Sites, Google Drive, Panopto, YouTube, Facebook and SlideShare.

11. Thinglink

ThingLink is a free and user friendly digital tool that provides users with the ability to turn any image into an interactive graphic. Create multiple “hot spots” on specific parts of an image and turn that image into a multimedia launcher.  Include video, record audio or provide a link to any website with the click of a button. Easily embed an interactive ThingLink graphic into any blog or website. ThingLink is a truly amazing tool that allows users to pack a lot of content into a small space.

12. Pocket

Pocket, previously known as Read It Later, is an application and web service for managing a reading list of articles and videos from the Internet. Released in 2007, the application was originally only for desktop and laptop computers and is now available for macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Kobo eReaders, and web browsers. Pocket was taken over by Mozilla, the developers of the Firefox web browser, in 2017.
The application allows the user to save an article or web page to remote servers for later reading. The article is then sent to the user’s Pocket list (synced to all of their devices) for offline reading. Pocket removes clutter from articles and allows the user to add tags to their articles and to adjust text settings for easier reading.

13. GIMP

GIMP ( GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image retouching and editing, free-form drawing, converting between different image formats, and more specialized tasks.

GIMP is released under GPLv3+ licenses and is available for Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.

14. Twitter

Twitter is an American microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as “tweets”. Registered users can post, like, and retweet tweets, but unregistered users can only read them.

Users access Twitter through its website interface, through Short Message Service (SMS) or its mobile-device application software (“app”). Twitter, Inc. is based in San Francisco, California, and has more than 25 offices around the world. Tweets were originally restricted to 140 characters, but was doubled to 280 for non-Asian languages in November 2017.

Tweets are publicly visible by default, but senders can restrict message delivery to only their followers. Users can tweet via the Twitter website, compatible external applications (such as for smartphones), or by Short Message Service (SMS) available in certain countries.

Users may subscribe to other users’ tweets—this is known as “following” and subscribers are known as “followers” or “tweeps”, a portmanteau of Twitter and peeps. Individual tweets can be forwarded by other users to their own feed, a process known as a “retweet”.

Users can also “like” (formerly “favorite”) individual tweets. Twitter allows users to update their profile via their mobile phone either by text messaging or by apps released for certain smartphones and tablets. Twitter has been compared to a web-based Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client.

15. Storify

Storify was a social network service that let the user create stories or timelines using social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Storify was launched in September 2010, and had been open to the public since April 2011. Storify was shut down on May 16, 2018.

In September 2013, Storify was acquired by Livefyre, in turn acquired by Adobe Systems in May 2016.[8] The standalone service was discontinued on May 16, 2018, with users being directed to “Storify 2” as part of the Adobe Experience Manager Livefyre product.

Media organizations used Storify in coverage of ongoing news stories such as elections, meetings and events. Poynter.org recommended using Storify for covering social movements, breaking news, internet humor and memes, reactions and conversations, and extreme weather. CBC used Storify to cover the 2011 London riots, TRT World used Storify to cover the UK general election 2015 and Al Jazeera has a show called “The Stream” that collected perspectives on news stories using Storify.

The main purpose of Storify was to allow users to create stories by importing content from various forms of media into a timeline. Users were able to search for content related to their story from sources such as YouTube, Twitter (one of the more popular ones), Instagram, Flickr, and Google, as well as other stories on Storify, and then drag that content into their own Storify story timelines. Users could add comments to the links that they provided within their stories, and could also embed URLs in their stories. Users could also embed their own Storify stories for content syndication elsewhere on the internet.

16. GoToMeeting

GoToMeeting is a web-hosted service created and marketed by LogMeIn. It is an online meeting, desktop sharing, and video conferencing software package that enables the user to meet with other computer users, customers, clients or colleagues via the Internet in realtime.

In late 2015, Citrix announced plans to spin-off the GoToMeeting business as a stand-alone subsidiary with a market value around $4 billion. In July 2016, Citrix and LogMeIn announced plans to merge the GoTo family of products.

GoToMeeting is designed to broadcast the desktop view of a host computer to a group of computers connected to the host through the Internet. Transmissions are protected with high-security encryption and optional passwords. By combining a web-hosted subscription service with software installed on the host computer, transmissions can be passed through highly restrictive firewalls.

17. Optimizely

Optimizely is an American company that makes customer experience optimization software for other companies. The Optimizely platform technology provides A/B testing tools, in which two versions of a web page can be compared for performance, and multivariate testing. Optimizely also enables personalization, which may be used for making data-driven decisions. The personalization capability can be used for serving online advertising.

The company’s headquarters are in San Francisco, California with offices in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Cologne, Germany, London, United Kingdom and Sydney, Australia.

18. Placeit

A design and mockup generator that will create beautiful imagery for you! Sit back and promote your brand like the pros! New templates added daily. Generate realistic still and video product shots in seconds

Easily drag and drop your mockup screenshots into realistic mobile and desktop environments.

• Interactive Video – Showcase interactive demos in animated live environments
• Blender – Mix devices and backgrounds to get your perfect environment
• Still Shots – Place your image within our beautiful still shots

19. TrackMaven

TrackMaven is the only marketing analytics platform that gives marketers the ability to do both across all of their digital channels.

TrackMaven’s marketing analytics platform integrates with all the tools marketers are already using to measure their performance — including social networks, web analytics providers, and all major advertising, marketing automation, and CRM platforms — so it’s clear to see what works and what doesn’t in one centralized view.

TrackMaven can also show where its customers are winning and losing in their industry by tracking your results against competitors, peers, and influencers. Marketing leaders from hundreds of the world’s best brands use TrackMaven to understand the full impact of their marketing on over 20 digital channels.

20. TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a social media dashboard application for management of Twitter accounts. Originally an independent app, TweetDeck was subsequently acquired by Twitter Inc. and integrated into Twitter’s interface.

It is similar to Twitter’s now removed[when?] “Dashboard App”.

Like other Twitter applications, it interfaces with the Twitter API to allow users to send and receive tweets and view profiles. It was the most popular Twitter application with a 23% market share as of June 2010, following only the official Twitter website with 45.7% share for posting new status updates.

It can be used as a web app, MacOS app or a Chrome app

21. Google Docs

Google Docs is a word processor included as part of a free, web-based software office suite offered by Google within its Google Drive service. This service also includes Google Sheets and Google Slides, a spreadsheet and presentation program respectively.

Google Docs is available as a web application, mobile app for Android, iOS, Windows, BlackBerry, and as a desktop application on Google’s ChromeOS. The app is compatible with Microsoft Office file formats. The application allows users to create and edit files online while collaborating with other users in real-time. Edits are tracked by user with a revision history presenting changes.

An editor’s position is highlighted with an editor-specific color and cursor. A permissions system regulates what users can do. Updates have introduced features using machine learning, including “Explore”, offering search results based on the contents of a document, and “Action items”, allowing users to assign tasks to other users.

21. Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a business analytics service company. It tracks user interactions with web and mobile applications and provides tools for targeted communication with them.

Its toolset contains in-app A/B tests and user survey forms. Data collected is used to build custom reports and measure user engagement and retention. Mixpanel works with web applications, in particular SaaS, but also supports mobile apps.

23. SEMrush

SEMrush is a software as a service (SaaS) company based in Boston that sells online visibility and marketing analytics software subscriptions. It was founded by Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitry Melnikov as an SEO tool and a browser extension before adopting the SaaS model.

The software can provide intelligence data including website traffic information, keywords, projected AdWords spend, site audits, topic research, lead generation, and other SEO-related data.

The company’s customers include eBay, Quora, Booking.com, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and BNP Paribas.

24. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a marketing management tool aimed at helping individual entrepreneurs, small and growing businesses, full-service and niche agencies, as well as enterprise corporations, integrate and partner with social media platforms.

Instead of updating and working with every single one of your profiles individually on the providers’ websites, you can use Sprout Social as a one-stop location where you can manage everything associated with your social media marketing, including content curation, publishing, scheduling, and reporting and analytics.

25. Uberflip

Uberflip is a content experience platform that aggregates all of your content (blog articles, eBooks, videos, whitepapers and more) so you can create, manage and optimize tailored content experiences for every stage of the buyer journey.

By providing marketers with the tools they need to boost engagement, generate leads and fuel demand generation they can better leverage content to meet their goals. Uberflip also integrates with the user’s marketing automation platform in order to bridge the gap and improve the process between content and demand generation.

26. Piktochart

Piktochart is a cloud-based application that allows users to easily create infographics.  Users can embed interactive maps, charts, videos and hyperlinks in a Piktochart infographic. To create an infographic, you start by choosing a blank or pre-designed template, or theme, and then add information.

Piktochart provides a library of icons, images, fonts, and other design tools. Icons and images are organized by subject, including education, entertainment, people, and shapes. Once completed, each infographic can be saved for future editing, and the finished product can be exported as a PNG, JPEG, or PDF file.

27. Constant Contact

Constant Contact provides a range of intuitive marketing applications designed to help small businesses and nonprofits expand their customer bases and nurture relationships. Solutions include email marketing, event marketing, social campaigns and reporting, survey management and offer management—all of which are available either independently or as part of an integrated suite called the Constant Contact Toolkit.

Constant Contact’s email marketing application allows businesses to import customer data from spreadsheets or email clients, such as Gmail and Microsoft Outlook. Email sign-up forms can be personalized and embedded on web pages or on Facebook to capture new contacts and build email lists.

The system offers hundreds of customizable email templates with drag-and-drop elements and also includes real-time reporting features to track email opens, clicks, forwards, social shares and more.

Constant Contact offers both online and in-person seminars and training to help users improve their marketing efforts.

28. Post Planner

PostPlanner is a Facebook app that helps page administrators and group administrators automate their Facebook property. There are tons of helpful features help users to make most out of their Facebook marketing effort.

Before we delve into the details of some of the most notable features of PostPlanner, let’s take a look at a quick feature list of this useful Facebook app:

• Post queue: You set a time for posting, and add status updates in the queue. With two hours of work, you can easily automate a month’s work on your Facebook pages.
• Targeting: This is of the most notable features of this app. Apart from queuing your post, you can also set a target audience for your post. For example, you can target a country- specific audience while scheduling or queuing your post.
• Post link as image: Images work much better than direct links on Facebook, and with one click you can publish a post link as an image. This will not only increase the visibility of your link, you will also get more CTR.
• RSS feed automation: You can automate publishing from the RSS feed. This is handy, but somehow I prefer manual posting to auto-posting. It is a good idea to link your feed with your Pocket app feed, and use it to share your best content.
• Status idea engine: Status idea engine will help you to post quick updates using PostPlanner status ideas. There are unlimited questions and status ideas that can be used. The best part is that this will help you to increase engagement and communication, and thus obtain more “Likes”. The perfect way to beat Facebook EdgeRank!
• Trending content: Using this feature, you can find the top trending content on the web based on any keyword. This is very helpful toward finding readable content on your pages and groups.
• Post to the list: If you administrate many pages or groups, and you want to share the same content on all of them, you can use this feature of PostPlanner to do exactly that. Simply create different list,s and share the same content on all of them. You can also manually share the same content on multiple pages or group, if you choose, and you can post to the groups that you have joined.

These are just few of the many features offered by this app.

29. Mention

Mention is used by more than 200,000 professionals to manage their online presence.
Create alerts on your company name, your brand, your competitor, be updated in real-time about the most relevant mentions over the web and react, get statistics, collaborate with your teams around them.
– Media and social media monitoring: Monitor in real-time millions of different sources not to miss anything mentioning your keywords
– Anti-noise management: Turn on our smart anti-noise technology, sentiment analysis and priority inbox not to waste time with the noise.
– Smart actions: Connect your social accounts and react to any mention the smart way. Retweet a tweet that mentions you, share on Facebook any positive article about your company
– Team working: Share your alerts, assign tasks to the most relevant person in your team and manage the activity of everyone.
– Customized stats: Analyze your online presence and the impact of your actions to finally make your communication data-driven.

Choose the plan that fits your need, get 14 days of free trial and start changing the way you manage your online presence.

30. Alltop

Alltop is a website content aggregator. What does that mean exactly?

Basically, Alltop collects blog posts and content from popular websites’ RSS feeds, and puts them into one single place. In more simple terms, the site can be thought of as a type of “online magazine rack.”

Alltop is run by Will Mayall, Kathryn Henkens, and well-known marketing executive, Guy Kawasaki.
Alltop provides a very simple way to scan through the articles listed on popular websites.

That means, you can go to one place, and view the latest posts for all of your preferred blogs. You can then click through on the links to be taken directly to a blog. Truly, the simplicity of Alltop is it’s strength. It’s no-frills, but sometimes, that’s all you need to get the job done.

Here are few key facts you should know about Alltop:

• Alltop is text-based. Don’t expect lots of images, photos, or graphics here.
• Alltop shows the five most recent blog posts for a blog. It’s an easy way to keep track of the latest, most recent posts.
• Alltop is free. No payment or fees are required to use the site, but you do have to create a user profile in order to use the site.
• Not all blogs will be listed on Alltop. The site is choosy when it comes to selecting which sites be listed. On the plus side, you can make blog requests. Just complete their submission form in full (hint: you have to be logged in to do so) and they’ll look into your blog suggestion.
• Once you select blogs for your custom page, they are there permanently. Unfortunately, at this time you can’t move the order of the blogs as they appear on your home page.

Finally

Most B2B marketers are using content marketing within their marketing strategy. If you aren’t, chances are you probably plan to start soon.

These 30 content marketing tools are the easiest ways to get the most engagement out of your content without spending a ton of time and energy.

Just pick the ones you want to try and see which of them brings in the best results. Each of these tools relates back to content marketing in one way or another.

Whether you’re just starting out in the content marketing world, or you’re a pro, these resources are essential for taking your content-engagement rates to the next level.