Software Tools to Help You with Content Marketing
With the rise of the internet and technology becoming cheaper, the amount of daily content consumption is only rising. Content marketing is starting to shift from a marketing tactic to a marketing strategy.
There’s a reason why Netflix had a budget of $6,000,000,000 to create content. They want to own the attention and the audience.
However, before I go into the software tools that you can use to help with your content marketing, let me quickly go over why content marketing is becoming so important for your business.
Importance of Content Marketing
I am currently reading ‘Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses Are Turning Marketing Cost Into Profit’ by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose. So far, this is an amazing book that every marketer or entrepreneur should read. Even if you do not agree with their stance, it helps to have different perspectives in your mind.
They believe that creating owned media is becoming less of a marketing tactic and more of a marketing strategy and in the near future, it will become a business model.
They do acknowledge the fact that the space is getting extremely crowded with content and so they advocate for creating quality content that can stand out from the crowd.
By creating quality and valuable content, you can start to amass an audience and there are many benefits to building an audience and keeping their attention. In their book, they talk about the 4 C’s which are competency, campaign, customer value, and cash.
“Audiences can provide for multiple lines of value. They provide campaign value, enabling smarter marketing and advertising. They provide for competency value, enabling the acquisition of data to make us a smarter business. They provide customer value, helping us develop more loyal customers who will advocate for our brand. And audience can provide cash value, enabling us to make marketing a profitable venture.” — Robert Rose
In short, these are the benefits of creating quality and valuable content:
- Better quality feedback and data from the audience
- Smarter campaigns that help your audience better than the competition
- Intense brand equity and loyalty from the audience
- Generate revenue from marketing activities alone
So now that I’ve went over the benefits of content marketing, let’s go over software tools for content marketing.
If you rather watch the video version of this article, I made a complementary video to go with this article:
Software Tools for Content Marketing
Creating quality content is the focus here. You want to be able to create content that is so valuable and in-depth that readers or viewers want to share it with others, creating somewhat of a viral effect.
This is what Brian Dean at Backlinko suggests to do and so does Neil Patel. They both write huge articles that deliver massive value to their audience. I aim to do the same and I’m only getting better at doing so through practice.
So when you’re creating quality content, your main focus should be to create quality content. Other things should not matter as your main bottleneck is going to be the quality of your content.
Using software tools to help take some of the other tasks off of your back can help you focus on what is important: creating quality content.
Software Tool #1: Buffer
Buffer allows you to schedule content, engage with your audience, and analyze your content performance. They have three distinct services: Buffer Publish, Buffer Reply, and Buffer Analyze.
With Buffer Publish, you can schedule content to be published at a certain time. For example, a common technique to create quality content is to batch produce content as you can ride creative momentum.
After you’ve created your content, you can schedule it to be published at certain times on a multitude of platforms. As of writing this, Buffer supports auto-publishing for Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook Pages, Instagram Business Accounts, and LinkedIn. This way you don’t have to focus on publishing and you can keep your focus on creating amazing content.
Buffer Reply allows you to stay on top of engaging with your audience by replying to their comments and such. Remember, it’s important to engage with your audience as social media is a two-way street. You can no longer just post and sit around, you must actively engage with the community.
Buffer Analyze allows you to analyze your content’s performance. This is important to get feedback on what type of content to create going forward. Some pieces of content will not resonate with your target audience and it is your responsibility to deliver them what they want and less of what they don’t want.
You can start by using the tool for free, however, you will be limited to how many social media accounts you can connect and how much content you can schedule beforehand.
Software Tool #2: Google Keyword Planner
Sometimes you’re just absolutely stuck on new content ideas. You can use Google’s Keyword Planner tool to help you come up with new ideas. Just as a heads up, you will need an AdWords account to access the tool.
You can input certain keywords into the tool and it will recommend related keywords and eventually if you follow keywords that interest you, you can generally land on a topic that you can create some content for.
You can also use this tool to analyze how much interest there already exists in the marketplace for a certain topic as Google will give you monthly search volume estimates.
Take advantage of this free tool by Google to come up with new ideas and also analyze the relevancy of the keywords you use for your content.
Software Tool #3: Google Trends
Want to know what is trending around the world? You can use the Google Trends tool, which is also free, to research which topics are trending and start to create quality content around that.
For example, once I saw that Elon Musk’s interview with Joe Rogan was trending and so I made some content around that and saw more than usual initial traffic to my content.
By riding trends, you can get a quick boost to your content and if your content is high quality, you might even gather some subscribers or followers. Do this over and over again and you can build your audience this way.
Take advantage of another free tool by Google that can help you come up with content ideas and ride trends in the marketplace.
Software Tool #4: Buzzsumo
This is yet another tool to help you understand what is trending throughout the marketplace. It offers more data than Google Trends, however, it does require you to purchase a membership.
With this tool you can see articles from other blogs around the internet and you can check to see what articles are doing hot. You can then check out their content and determine if you can provide more value on top of what they are already providing. If so, you have a content idea.
You can also get alerts about certain keywords or if a company publishes a new article. This allows you to stay on top of your competitive analysis.
Software Tool #5: Kred
Want to get an estimate how much influence you wield on the internet? There’s a tool for that and it’s called Kred.
They generate a score for you based on your online activities and how much engagement you receive on your content. This is a quick and dirty way to measure your influence.
Now, influence cannot be completely measured with a number, however, this is a rough method to guesstimate how much influence you have.
Software Tool #6: Trello
Trello is an amazing free productivity tool that you can use to organize tasks and if you are working with a team, you can add them to your Trello boards and make it extremely to collaborate and delegate out tasks.
You can have due dates on certain tasks which will send you e-mail reminders when due dates are approaching and if you download the mobile apps, they can also direct notifications to your phone.
You can delegate tasks to members by adding them to cards. This way they can easily which tasks they need to get done by clicking on ‘Cards’ in the dropdown menu by clicking on their profile image.
Trello can also integrate into many other software tools such as Slack, Google Drive, and many others. This makes it very easy to integrate what you already have going on into Trello.
I personally use Trello every single day to organize which tasks are high priority and get them done first before I move on to less important tasks.
Software Tool #7: MailChimp
Want to start building an email list so you can directly email your audience? MailChimp is the tool to get started with. There are many others such as Aweber and MarketHero, however, from my experience, MailChimp is the most beginner friendly.
You can import email addresses if you have already been collecting them using some other service. You can also create quick forms so new members can sign up.
You can create whole email marketing funnels if you plan to sell a certain product to your audience. You can also keep them in a general mailing list to drive them to your new content. Your choice on how you want to use it.
Software Tool #8: ManyChat
If you fear that email marketing is dying, then you can use ManyChat to deliver value through Facebook Messenger.
As more people are engaging on social media, it makes sense to go where the attention is and ManyChat makes it easy to start developing your own Facebook chatbots.
There is a free version with limited capabilities, however, if you upgrade to ManyChat PRO, you can get many more features that can help you expand your audience.
Software Tool #9: OptinDev
Just as a disclaimer, this is a tool that I’ve created myself. As I started using ManyChat, I noticed that there was no quick way to create beautiful opt-in pages where you can just input your ManyChat code into and start building an audience on Facebook Messenger.
That’s why I created OptinDev. It’s a quick opt-in page builder which is completely GDPR-compliant so you don’t have to worry about regulations. You just input your ManyChat code, your text, and you’ll have a clean opt-in page ready to go in under 3 minutes.
You can also add Google Analytics to the opt-in page and check how your page is doing.
As of writing this, the software is in beta testing so it’s completely free to join. However, once spots fill up, it will move into a freemium model.
Software Tool #10: ClickFunnels
Want to create a multitude of landing pages that you can drive traffic to? ClickFunnels is your answer.
You can create beautiful and simple landing pages to drive traffic through. For example, if a visitor goes on your landing page and signs up, you can drive them to a version of your thank you page and check if that version of the landing page can do better to generate up-sells.
They also have a very solid affiliate program and the CEO Russell Brunson has a few books that can teach you much more about digital marketing.
I highly recommend checking out ClickFunnels if you are looking to become extremely proficient in digital marketing. However, there is a steep pricing curve so be ready for that.
Conclusion
Creating valuable content is becoming less of a marketing tactic and more of a marketing strategy and a whole business model.
Massive companies like Netflix, Amazon, Red Bull, Virgin, etc. are all pouring more money into creating valuable content and there’s a reason for this.
Don’t get left behind by thinking short-term with vanity metrics such as impressions, reach, or even return-on-investment.
Jeff Bezos didn’t build one of the largest companies in the world by thinking short-term and neither should you. Take advantage of the internet and the tools listed in this post and think long-term.
Let’s Discuss Your Strategy
I enjoy discussing business strategy and learning about new perspectives in business. If you want to talk about how you can use and apply content marketing in your business, feel free to reach out to me.
It’s @sunnychopper on pretty much every social media platform…even Xbox Live. If you rather email, my email is ishy.singh@gmail.com.
Let’s discuss content marketing, technology, and business. Looking forward to it.
