To be efficient with content marketing, you need to pick the right tools. There are many tools that can you can use to help with content creation, promotion and management.

Selecting the right tools can make your job a lot easier, so it’s worth spending some time planning out which tools you want to use for your content marketing. Here’s a quick overview of some popular tools that people are using today.

Content Marketing Platforms
Conversion Optimization
Project Management
Email Marketing
Social Media
SEO

Content Marketing Platforms

Most people just use WordPress for blogging, but integrating a content marketing platform can be helpful. Content marketing software can streamline your inbound marketing efforts by providing all or most of the tools you need in one place.

Hubspot – Hubspot is the leader in inbound marketing software and also invests heavily in their own content marketing.

You can integrate Hubspot into your existing WordPress blog or you can use the fully hosted version of Hubspot to host your blog and website. Hubspot integrates blogging, email marketing, analytics, SEO, social media and other features into one software.

If you are looking for a comparison of inbound marketing software solutions, then check out these posts:

http://venturebeat.com/2014/11/07/hubspot-marketo-pardot-act-on-and-eloqua-lead-latest-marketing-automation-market-share-numbers/

http://www.thesaleslion.com/marketo-vs-eloqua-pardot-review-compare

Spokal – Another inbound marketing software that conveniently integrates into WordPress is Spokal. Spokal provides various features including keyword research, A/B split testing for your blog titles, scheduled social sharing and various other features.

Conversion Optimization

Getting traffic to your website is not enough. To be effective with content marketing, you also want to focus on conversion optimization, i.e., converting your website traffic into email subscribers and sales.

Split testing different layouts or offers and using analytics data to study your website visitors are some of the fastest and easiest ways to increase your sales. Here are a few popular conversion optimization tools.

1. Sumo – Sumo offers a suite of features to content marketers and bloggers to help them get more leads from their website traffic. Some features include social sharing buttons, email opt-in boxes that increase email subscribers and heat maps.

2. Optimizely – There are a good number of platforms designed to make split testing easy and optimizely is one of the more popular ones. Optimizely makes it easy to test out different ideas and get real data on which ones perform the best without having to code.

They offer a free starter plan as well as an enterprise plan that has more features.

3. Unbounce – Unbounce is a conversion solution for marketers that offers some nice pre-built mobile optimized landing page templates. No HTML or coding knowledge is required, making it easy for just about anyone to build, publish and test a landing page.

Pricing starts at $49 / month, but they also offer a free trial.

If you want to learn more about conversion rate optimization, then check out some of these resources:

17 Resources to Help You Learn and Master CRO – http://sujanpatel.com/marketing/conversion-rate-optimization

Conversion Optimization Best Practices – https://vwo.com/blog/conversion-optimization-best-practices

Beginner’s Guide to CRO – https://qualaroo.com/beginners-guide-to-cro

Email Marketing

While content creation and promotion can generate more traffic to your site, you should also invest in email marketing to keep in touch with your prospect and nurture leads. In fact, most content marketers focus heavily on getting people to sign up for their email newsletters.

Mailchimp – One of the most popular email marketing solutions is Mailchimp because it is free for up to 2,000 subscribers. Asides from being free, Mailchimp was designed to be easy to use.

This email list management tool is a good solution for new bloggers and other businesses that are just getting started in content marketing. It also provides useful data like how many people read your email or clicked links in it.

Lead Pages – One solution that is designed to get more leads is Lead Pages. Lead Pages offers many pre-built and tested templates that have been proven to maximize email sign ups. You can create landing pages in minutes without coding starting at $25 / month.

Their more advanced plans include A/B testing, the ability to upload your own custom templates and even professional coaching.

Infusionsoft – Infusionsoft is an advanced CRM that integrates with your website for streamlined content marketing. You can keep track of your contacts and leads, automate email follow ups and sell products and services online.

Infusionsoft starts at around $200 per month, so it may be pricey for solopreneurs, but is affordable for businesses that are already generating revenue and looking to scale.

Drip – Drip is a lightweight email marketing and automation system that is designed to provide advanced email marketing features at a lower cost. It is also created with usability and ease of use in mind.

Optin Monster – Another commonly used lead generation plugin worth mentioning is Optin Monster. This plugin is specifically designed for WordPress and allows marketers to capture emails with various email opt-in boxes, including pop-ups, slide ins, after post widgets and more.

Optin Monster also provides split testing so that you can test different email boxes against each other to see what works better, analytics and even some animation features to make your email boxes more noticeable to visitors.

Project Management

When scaling content production and promotion, proper project management is crucial. There are many project management systems that you can choose from, but here are a few that are worth looking at.

CoSchedule – CoSchedule was designed to help editors manage their content marketing calendar. CoSchedule allows you to plan content creation and schedule social media sharing in one calendar.

Active Collab – Active Collab is a project management system that has a one time purchase price option. If you are looking for a general project management tool without a recurring monthly cost, then installing the self hosted version of Active Collab might be a good choice for you.

Trello –  Trello is another software that you can use to collaborate with your team. The free version allows you to create “cards” that your team can view and share with other team members. This provides a simple and intuitive way to keep track of tasks among your team members.

Social Media

Promoting your content through social media is another important activity. Luckily, there are several useful tools that you can use to manage your social media marketing.

Buzzsumo – Buzzsumo is a powerful tool that allows you to enter keywords and see the most shared content for those keywords. It also displays who shared the post and you can even export the data.

With their paid plans, you can get content alerts and more in depth content analysis. Their agency and enterprise plans even offer API access.

Buffer – Buffer is an easy to use social media scheduling tool that you can use to schedule tweets with the click of a button. Simply install the browser add-on and connect it to your Twitter account and you can fill up your Twitter feed with content to share throughout the day.

Scheduling content prevents your followers from getting overwhelmed with too many updates at once and allows you to reach more people throughout the day.

Hootsuite – Hootsuite offers a similar service to Buffer and allows you to schedule social media posts throughout the day. Their free plan allows you to manage up to 3 social profiles, but with their paid plans, you can add more profiles and have other team members manage your social media.

Mention – Mention is a useful tool to get email alerts whenever someone mentions you on your blog or social media. You can also set up mentions for keywords or competitors to see where they are getting mentioned.

Social Media tools directory – There are tons of social media tools out there. Ian Cleary from Razor Social created a searchable social media tools directory here where you can find a variety of tools including image creation tools, platform specific apps and more.

SEO

Finally, if you are creating website content, then optimizing your content for search engine traffic is important. Search engines can send you ongoing traffic, even after your articles are published.

As you create more content, you can get increasingly more traffic from the search engines. Here are some tools that you may want to look into for SEO:

Keyword research tools post – Keyword research is still important and although Google’s tools only reveal some data, there are lots of other ways to get the keyword information that you need. In this post, I created a list of over 90 keyword research tools and ideas.

Scrapebox – One of my favorite tools for SEO is Scrapebox, which is a great deal for a one time cost of under $100. It uses the Moz API and with this tool, you can find out who linked to similar blog posts and get social share counts for web pages.

SEM Rush – If you’re looking for a more advance SEO tool, then check out SEM Rush. This tool provides keyword research, competitive analysis data, position tracking, ad data and more.

Content Marketing Guide

One of the best things to do when coming up with a content strategy is to examine what other successful content marketers are doing. While there are plenty of businesses that are doing well with content marketing, I’ve included a few examples of companies that have not only achieved a significant traffic and sales increase, but who have also become thought leaders.

1. Buffer

Target Audience: Since Buffer’s paid products start at only $10 a month, Buffer is essentially targeting anyone who is interested in social media marketing. It should come as no surprise that much of their content is about how to market effectively with social media.

Content Strategy: Data driven content that showcases interesting data about social media and provides actionable insights. Buffer has expanded into two blogs, Buffer Social which is about social media and Buffer Open which covers other business ideas.

Buffer started off their content marketing with a lot of guest posting on other sites, but nowadays focuses mostly on creating high quality content on their own site and getting it syndicated through other popular media sites.

Buffer also publishes an occasional guest post on their blog.

On Site Publishing Frequency: About once a day on Buffer social, excluding weekends and a few times a week on Buffer Open.

2. Kissmetrics

Target Audience: KissMetrics cost thousands each month and is target towards companies that are produce a good amount of revenue and want to increase their bottom lines with better analytics. Most of these companies are already generating revenue, have a good basic understanding of online marketing and are looking for more advanced marketing topics to help them grow their businesses even further.

Content Strategy: The Kissmetrics blog covers more basic topics like marketing, but also focuses on other areas like managing & hiring, and running a business with employees. Note that they are not targeting solo bloggers or people just starting out in business.

Neil Patel has written a good amount of the posts on here, but KissMetrics also allows guest posters to contribute.

Since KissMetrics is a high priced product, conversions are an important focus.

KissMetrics uses webinars to help sell their product to potential customers that arrive on their blog. A carefully placed call to action directs target prospects to sign up and learn more about the product.

On Site Publishing Frequency: Daily

3. Wordstream

Target Audience: Since Wordstream is a tool that helps people with PPC, they are targeting people with an interest in PPC advertising and Adwords.

Content Strategy: Wordstream publishes a lot of content on their blog and gets a good amount of traffic from SEO. While a lot of their content is about PPC advertising, they do also write on SEO, which is a topic that many PPC enthusiasts are also interested in.

Like KissMetrics, Wordstream also uses webinars to educate prospects about its product and convert some of those prospects into customers.

On Site Publishing Frequency: About a post a day. Sometimes two posts on the same day.

4. Help Scout

Target Audience: Help Scout is a help desk software system that streamlines the user experience for customers. It can automatically tag and organize emails without requiring a ticket number.

Content Strategy: Customer service is one topic that appears on the Help Scout blog, but they also write about other business topics. Rather than creating a ton of content, they focus more on creating quality content that their target audience will find interesting and useful.

Publishing less frequently on the blog prevents readers from getting overwhelmed with content.

To grow its readership and traffic to the site, Help Scout also does a good amount of publishing off site on other blogs and media channels. High traffic marketing blogs and news sites like Entrepreneur are some places where you’ll see Help Scout’s content.

On Site Publishing Frequency: 2-3 times per week

5. Moz

Target Audience: Moz offers inbound marketing analytics starting at $99 / month. A free trial is offered, but the product is targeted towards growing companies and agencies that have a marketing budget.

Content Strategy: Moz has a core team that gathers data and performs analysis on digital marketing data. The Moz blog is a resource for anyone looking to learn how to marketing online effectively and keep up with the latest actionable online marketing tactics.

They also have YouMoz, which allows individual users to create and share their own case studies and marketing related content. Quality standards are fairly high, but due to Moz’s brand recognition in the online marketing space, they are able to get lots of additional free content which sends them even more search engine and social media traffic.

On Site Publishing Frequency: A few posts a week on the main Moz blog and a few per week on YouMoz

6. Referral Candy

Target Audience: Referral Candy allows e-commerce retailers to increase the revenues using an automated system to incentivize customers to refer other people to the store. This SAAS makes it easy for e-commerce owners to realize additional revenue without the complexities of setting up their own affiliate program.

With pricing starting at $25, their aim is to onboard any e-commerce owner that is generating sales. They charge either a flat monthly rate or a percentage of sales, whichever is higher.

Content Strategy: Referral Candy focuses on content to help e-commerce store owners, including case studies, marketing tactics and articles about referral marketing. It’s also had a good amount of success from creating infographics from successful expert roundups from other blogs.

On Site Publishing Frequency: A few posts a week

7. Hubspot

Target Audience: Hubspot is the leader in inbound marketing software by attempting to integrate all the tools you need for content marketing into one system. Pricing starts at $200 per month, so they are targeting revenue generating companies and agencies that want to get results with inbound marketing or sales.

Content Strategy: Hubspot creates a large amount of content including multiple posts each day. Their channels include marketing, sales and agency. Each channel creates content for that segment of their target audience.

With their large audience and frequent content creation, SEO and social sharing probably drive a good amount of traffic to their site as well as create brand awareness.

On Site Publishing Frequency: Several Posts a day

8. Social Media Examiner

Target Audience: Social Media Examiner targets anyone interested in learning about social media marketing. To make money, they have a yearly conference called Social Media Marketing World which features some of the most well known experts in social media. Tickets cost over $1,000.

Content Strategy: Social Media Examiner publishes a daily post about social media marketing. Their team creates some of the posts, but most of their content comes from guest contributors that are known experts. They also make good use of tags to create content feeds that are well optimized for SEO traffic.

On Site Publishing Frequency: 1-2 Posts a day

9. WP Curve

Target Audience: WP Curve offers a low priced service that WordPress bloggers and business owners can use to outsource their site maintenance. Unlimited WordPress tweaks start at $70 / month.

Content Strategy: WP Curve incorporates a few different types of content on their blog. Perhaps the most powerful component of their content strategy is sharing their business journey as it unfolds, including income reports that show how much they are earning and growing each month. This approach probably draws in many entrepreneurs that are looking for ideas to grow their own businesses.

SEO is another consideration and some posts are targeted towards popular keywords to drive search engine traffic. High quality guests posts are allowed and podcasting is another traffic driver.

On Site Publishing Frequency: A few times a week

10. Groove HQ

Target Audience: Groove is a help desk software starting at $15 a month that is designed to take the complexity out of managing a help desk. Their target audience is businesses that require a help desk in order to manage customer support emails effectively.

Content Strategy: Groove writes about customer support topics, but also shares lessons learned from growing the company. The customer support blog directly targets the interests of their target prospect while the growth blog targets a broader audience of people interested in business.

One unique feature of Groove’s blog is that it is essentially a live case study where readers can follow along as the company attempts to grow to $500,000 a month in revenues.

On Site Publishing Frequency: About once a week on their small business blog and once a week on their customer service blog

If you want to look at some more examples, check out this post by Kapost that features 50 examples of successful content marketing operations including some big brands.

Content Marketing Guide