20 Best Content Marketing Tools

I hope you have heard about Pompeii? 

Once a beautiful city in Italy that faced the fury of a highly energetic (read ruthless) volcanic mountain, the Mt Vesuvius. You must be wondering what a city that got engulfed and destroyed under a pile of ash more than 2000 years ago has to do with content marketing. 

You see, Egyptians used papyrus to make sales messages and wall posters. Archaeologists have found commercial messages and political advertising campaigns in the ruins of Pompeii & Arabia. 

TLDR;

Advertising has been around since man learned the art of trade & business. Technology coins it fancy-ly as digital marketing & ad campaigns. 

Whether it was the old goldsmith who welcomed people to his shop with a shiny gold tooth in ancient Greece or the sales executive who enthusiastically pitched the USP of their product to you, marketing spreads the word and brings in business. 

Advertising spends accounted for about 2.2% of the US’s GDP (Woah!), so you can only imagine the numbers we are talking about here. 

But. How about thriving your business without burning a hole through your pocket? 

Yep, I’m referring to organic traffic & growth, the content marketing way! Drumrolls. 

via Moncho on GIPHY

A quick search through Google defines content marketing as… 

A type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.

If you’re here, you are either setting out to build a solid content marketing strategy for your business/brand or already have one in place and are looking for tools to make it more efficient. 

Be it either, we can safely say you’re at the right place. 

Ladies & gentlemen, without further ado, here are the 20 Best Content Marketing Tools. 

Top 20 Content Marketing Tools Worth Your Time

Here at Semrush, we follow a tried-and-tested content marketing algorithm which is executed systematically, step by step. 

We’ve listed the tools in the same order that comes in handy. Oh, some alternatives are thrown in between, as the cherry on top!  

Question DB: Gather Content Ideas 

Running out of content ideas? Or, looking for refreshing ones? You might definitely want to check Question DB out. 

What’s awesome?

Question DB brings out content ideas related to a topic you search along with the source if you need it. These are the questions racing through the minds of your audience. 

You can sort the results by popularity or date. Alongside listed are the top related keywords to dive deeper into things. Once you’re ready, hit the download button and save the ideas.

It’s not easy to manifest new ideas for your content from thin air. What if a tool could do that for you? 

And, we aren’t talking about peanuts here. The paid version brings as much as 800 search results.  Pricing: Freemium: $10/month.  

Exploding Topics: Find Topics in Vogue

In the world of ‘what’s trending,’ a tool like Exploding Topics is an excellent inclusion in your list of content marketing tools. 

As the tool says, it brings you the hot topics searched by millions before they fade out. 

What’s awesome?

Each result you see is sorted into 3:

• Exploding
• Regular
• Peaked

While the green-colored Exploding query means you need to get to work immediately, the blue-colored Regular are the mellowed search terms that may be growing steadily. The Peaked red-colored terms tell you about queries that have exhausted the interest already. 

You can manage the duration of the search. Go back in time to get historical data from 15 years or get what’s hot as recently as the previous month. 

Exploding Topics brings you a myriad of content categories such as beauty, business, company, design, e-commerce, education, fashion, finance, fitness, and more!

This content marketing tool brings monthly searches and growth over time, along with related searches for the particular keyword. Neat! 

An alternative you can try for this tool is Google Trends. Pricing: Free.  

Twinword 

This content marketing tool is one of our favourites!

Once you know the topics, the next step is to identify the keywords keeping in mind search volume, intent, and competition/difficulty with the keyword planner of Twinword.

What’s awesome?

Monthly search volume, location-wise queries, and advanced filters to sort your results to best fit the intent. 

You can perform unlimited searches and find related keywords to optimize the content effectively.  Pricing: Free  

Portent’s Blog Idea Generator

Before we go any further, a disclaimer. A hint of bias may come in here because I’ve used this tool extensively while blogging in the past and love it. You’ll see why! 

What’s awesome?

Enter your keyword and get cool blog titles and also interesting ideas to structure the flow of your blog or article with Portent’s Content Idea Generator.  

See the ‘See Another Title’ button? Keep hitting it until you find a convincing idea. Amp up your content marketing game with this simple tool. 

Psst, have a good laugh during a coffee break by reading the titles for funny ideas, such as Sushi. Call me a nerd, but you’ll thank me later. Pricing: Free  

PS: Along with the idea generator, you can use Coschedule’s Heading Analyzer to write better headings for your content pieces or improve existing ones after analysis. 

Google Docs: Spin Magic Easily

Nothing fancy. Just a clean, uber-efficient tool for whipping up content, sharing it seamlessly with your peers, collect comments & reviews easily, and dust the day off.

What’s awesome?

The many add-ons in Google Docs makes it easy to integrate with a variety of tools or extensions, making life pretty easy.  Pricing: Free  

While Google Drive is awesome when it comes to team collaborations, Evernote is an equally impressive content tool to make notes and maintain your personal to-do lists. 

Grammarly: Cross the T’s & Dot the I’s

For any marketer, content & grammar-check is like mac & cheese. Inseparable, and cooks up something amazing together. 

In case you miss a typo or the subject-verb agreement flies over your head, Grammarly is definitely a good bet on your content marketing tools list. 

What’s awesome?

It not only corrects the grammatical or spelling errors in your content, but also gives scores for clarity, engagement, and readability. Grammarly also computes the Flesch score for your content, which is the ease with which someone can understand it. Higher the score, the better. 

Plagiarism check. The tool scans through millions of webpages to find out any overlapping to keep you on the safe side. 

You can set Goals; which is pretty much informing the tool what you are writing and for whom keeping in mind the tone, consistency, all of it. The corrections are made accordingly.

You can also hire an expert to get help with your content pieces, although it can be a tad pricey.  Pricing: Freemium. Premium plans at $29.95 USD/month. 

PS: In case you want to get your Flesch score right and improve the content generally, Hemingway Editor is a great content marketing alternate tool. 

Yoast SEO for WordPress

A simple WP plugin that makes life a lot easier. Yoast helps you run through your SEO with a fine-toothed comb and set it right.

What’s awesome?

You can configure the SEO metas including the title, description, meta keywords at one go. 

The plugin also throws insights into the readability ease and pin-points where your content can be made more search-engine & user-friendly. For instance, usage of connecting words, passive & active voices, and more. This content marketing tool also gives you the Flesch score showing readability-ease.

It also rummages through your content database to see if any page exists that may potentially clash with the new one. 

Yoast also gives you insights on the link hygienity, keyword density and the ability to customize URL slugs. 

No-index, no-follow pages at one go. You don’t have to be a coding ninja to do SEO.  Pricing: Freemium. Pricing for one site comes to $89. 

Canva: For Free DIY Images 

Ever got exasperated with half-baked images that kill your otherwise lovely blog? I needn’t tell you the importance of having image breaks between chunky pieces of content. 

More than soothing the eyes, it increases the audience engagement. In case your designers are busy, here’s a tool that doesn’t quite halt your content marketing engine. Yes, I admit. I use Canva quite frequently and absolutely love it. 

You see the Work From Home poster above, that’s a custom template. Yep. 

What’s awesome?

Templates and beautiful designs that cover anything under the Sun. You can design one on your own or simply drag & drop a pre-made design. 

Upload your images, add texts, music, videos, customize backgrounds with ease. Add elements, shapes, and graffiti texts. 

Export easily in different formats such as PDF, PNG, JPG, and more.   Pricing: Freemium. Plan starts at $12.95/month.. 

Freepik: For Free Stock Images & Vectors

Freepik is a great tool to get stock images, vectors, icons and more. All the visual resources you need are available with this tool making it a must-have on your content marketing list. 

What’s awesome?

Multitude of stock images, vectors, templates that you can download in formats and use readily. 

Pretty straightforward to use.   Pricing: Freemium. Premium plan is priced at 9.99 EUR/month.  

As an alternative, you can always use Unsplash and Pexels to get free stock images. A mix of these 3 tools usually covers all my visual resource requirements with ease. 

Mixkit: Assets For Your Videos

Images are great, yes. Videos are even better. Not just for engagement, to improve your SEO & ranking. Try Mixkit.

It comes as no surprise that video marketing and YouTube SEO is playing a frontrunner role in content marketing these days. 

What’s awesome?

Many tools out there are priced over the roof to get decent assets for your videos. Mixkit offers free stock clips, videos, music, sound effects, and video templates to jumpstart your next video project. 

Download easily, at 1080p resolution. (Noice!) Pricing: Free  

As an alternative, you can also explore Pexels free stock videos too, although it’s not as exhaustive as Mixkit. 

Semrush: A better SEO Software 

Not to blow our own trumpet, but I’m pretty sure this tool up your content marketing tools list will be a great move.

What’s awesome?

Clean interface, is ridiculously easy to use, and gets the work done. 

The cherry on top is free tools- Bulk Domain Availability Checker, Domain Authority Checker, Backlinks Checker, and Backlinks Monitor. Combining them all, this tool seals the deal when it comes to growing & thriving your content marketing strategies. 

Oh, and Semrush is not just your content-marketing-tool-next-door that tracks positions of your pages & blogs on SERP; it helps you get there. Content distribution mechanism that lands you credible backlinks, the natural way. 

You know it, I do too. Shortcuts are absolute cop-outs in SEO. Google will find it sooner or later. 

via Grillax® on GIPHY Pricing: Plans start at $199/month.  

Buzzsumo: Content Performance Analysis

The list of content marketing tools would be pretty incomplete without Buzzsumo. A multi-purpose content research platform that helps you understand which content performs and resonates well with your audience. 

What’s awesome?

Easily understand the social media performance of a post or webpage. These include Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. 

An extension of the tool is available using which you can track the following metrics while on the webpage or blog. 

• Engagements
• Shares
• Pins
• Evergreen score
• Number of links
• Backlinks 

You can analyze any website to find the most shared content. A sneak peek at competitors and what makes them tick, just to help you go that extra mile to land quality leads and close deals. 

Discover more such content and drive traffic. Research content with multiple data points and understand what’s working for you. Identify backlinks from Buzzsumo. 

Find influencers who can cross-promote your content. Set an ORM, class apart and build a strong social presence.  Pricing: Plans start at $99/month.  

Hotjar: To Understand User Behavior 

Stepping up the analytics tracking for your website is this content marketing accelerator tool. 

Why do I call it an accelerator? Hotjar monitors user interaction and translates it into heat maps so you can understand how users interact with your content. 

What’s awesome?

Understand the real reasons behind the bounces. Where people spend time and don’t. 

Along with heat maps, Hotjar also has the feature of Recordings- you can view what your users see as they land on your website. 

Collect instant feedback, analyze sentiments, and survey users to know their perception about your brand.   Pricing: Freemium. Plans start at $39/month.  

Uberflip: To Measure Content Experience

A content experience platform that helps marketers to create & distribute relevant content such as blogs & articles at every stage of the customer buyer journey. 

What’s awesome?

View the funnel right from impressions, clicks, to conversions for all your content pieces. In this manner, you can understand the type of content that’s hitting home run using Uberflip.

Set up and run marketing campaigns easily and measure channel-wise performance effectively. 

Integrate with useful applications such as chatbots and automate marketing workflows. If you’re looking for a list of content marketing tools that offloads a huge chunk of work off your plate, you may definitely want to check this one out. 

In addition, the tool also helps you create hubs & streams, a collection of content basically, for your customers.   Pricing: Uberflip has two plans, Elite & Enterprise. You can contact their team to get customized quotes for the same.  

Buffer: For Social Media Distribution

Well, unless people see what you write, what’s the point in content marketing? And, the fastest way for people to reach what you write & publish is… yep, Social Media. 

But, hey juggling 4-5 platforms is not a child’s play. Not just that, managing the audience, tracking the performance of posts, and strategizing better for the future. 

via Friends on GIPHY

That’s where Buffer makes it to the list of content marketing tools with style. 

What’s awesome?

This tool comes in two parts: 

• Publish
• Analyze 

Publish is for scheduling your social media posts from a single point rather than hopping around from one to another, repeating the same activity.

Analyze is where you can see how the posts perform. The comments, reactions, shares, engagement rate, all of it is captured and recorded in the dashboard. 

With Publish, you can post things right away or schedule it for a convenient time. Oh yes, you can easily log off a little earlier than waiting for this one task to be done, especially on a Friday. Analyze helps you drill down the data post-wise and benchmark it for the future to measure progress. 

Source: Buffer  Pricing: Publish starts at $15/month while Analyze starts at $35/month.  

An alternate tool you can think about for managing your social presence would be Hootsuite. 

Aweber: For Email Marketing

Yes, marketing has evolved remarkably. Say from Neanderthals to Christian Bale. (Oh, cmon! I’m Batman)

Email marketing, however, has not left the scene though. In fact it’s as important as before, and I can go on a limb here and say even a bit more. 

You can be sure that email marketing will ensure your content would be seen by over thousands of people, all in your mailing list. 

This is exactly why your content marketing tool’s list requires Aweber. 

What’s awesome?

Easy to design templates for your emails. The AI bot does the major chunk of work; you’ll just need to brush the finishing touches. Drag & drop to create or simply choose from their custom templates library. 

Automate campaigns. If you have the same campaigns going out periodically, why waste time doing it manually? 

Track metrics with ease- open rates, bounces, CTRs, and more. A/B test to find the better email and leverage it for better results.  Pricing: Freemium. Paid plan starts at $16.15 /month.   

Hunter: Outreach & Link Building 

Remember that exasperation of hitting a blank wall while reaching out to the wrong people, when you build backlinks?

Well, an extension like Hunter on your content marketing list of tools will save you all the trouble and a bunch of time. 

What’s awesome?

Connect with anyone. Literally. 

Land on a webpage, open Hunter, and find out relevant email addresses of people in the company. 

Whip up your outreach message and hit them up. 

Collect verified email addresses from any company and peruse the confidence score to assess the extent of getting a response back. 

Save important details or profiles of any employee and sync it with your CRM. Talk about simple yet powerful convenience.   Pricing: Freemium. Starts at $49 /month.  

Infogram: Visualize Data Better

Being a marketer, I’ll be in a soup for saying this. But, numbers are scary. Projections for the next month needs me to gulp down 2 espresso shots. 

Is it easy to make sense of data and present it in a way that’s easily understood by all? As long as we are slaves of traditional tools, I say not. 

That’s where a content marketing tool like Infogram is a breath of fresh air, a sigh of relief, and the best thing since sliced bread. 

What’s awesome?

Represent complex data in a visually harmonious way, i.e, one glance at the chart is enough to help you get the big picture. (Pun intended!) 

Infogram’s content visualization tool lets you connect real-time data points to your projects. Woah. No more back & forths. Your graphics are auto-updated by this content marketing tool. 

Get started with custom templates or whip up one on your own. 

With Infogram you can easily create:

• Infographics
• Facebook posts
• Reports
• Slides
• Dashboards
• Posters
• Social media posts
• Email headers
• YouTube thumbnails
• Single map
• Single chart

… and wow your audience with cool animations and interactive visuals.   Pricing: Freemium. Pricing starts at $19/month, (billed annually).  

Biteable: Create Videos Like A Pro  

Yes, Mixkit covered bringing you different assets for your video marketing. However, to create one awesome video that’s gonna make your subscribers go gaga, you need a handy video making tool. 

One that doesn’t require you to have a certification course and many GBs of memory. Biteable seems to be a pretty awesome tool which fits that description. 

What’s awesome?

800,000+ real-life stock footage clips from diverse categories & domains to use as you go about with your video creation. Different formats for LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube. 

Get started with default templates, change the text based on your story, drag & drop with ease, or create a video entirely from scratch. Once done, export easily. 

  Pricing: Freemium. Pricing starts at $29/month, (billed annually).  

Podcastle.AI : Text-to-podcast AI Tool 

Are you a content marketer who is yet to step into the world of podcasts? The world is already there, so you better be too. 

Podcastle AI’s content marketing tool is a great place to start. And, progress rapidly. No kidding, this ain’t your ordinary podcast platform. 

What’s awesome?

Podcastle.ai converts text to podcasts. Be it an article or a news. 

And, not just that. The text-to-speech conversion is backed by AI & Machine Learning which helps to replicate emotions without a taint. All the human touch is, in fact, intact.  

Stuck in that insane traffic? Log on to Podcastle. Want to avoid that one talkative co-passenger on the bus? It’s podcast time, baby!  Pricing: Free.  

That’s a wrap folks! We hope these 20 content marketing tools make your life easier and are worth both your time and dime. 

Until we see you next time,

Cheers!