Any shrewd business owner understands the importance of content marketing. Sharing valuable content with your customers across multiple channels has limitless benefits for your brand. But – and this is a big but – sourcing, producing and publishing quality content writing can be extremely time-consuming.
Fortunately, there are hundreds of tools designed to help you streamline, simplify and scale your content marketing strategy. Here are our favourite 5 bulletproof content marketing tools:
1) Percolate
You’ve probably heard the old saying, “You have to percolate to accumulate”. OK so we may have tweaked that slightly but Percolate is a great tool for fine-tuning your content marketing efforts and thereby increasing revenue.
Touted as the “first fully comprehensive content marketing platform”, Percolate takes brands through the entire content marketing cycle. From planning and sourcing to curating and scheduling, Percolate helps businesses publish consistently on-brand, high quality content.
Percolate is especially useful for large companies who struggle to find relevant content to share across their various channels. Percolate has been designed with a collaborative approach in mind, so whole marketing teams sign-in and work together to craft excellent content.
Bonus tip: You can request a demo before you commit to signing up and see how this program really works.
2) NewsCred
NewsCred performs in a similar way to Percolate but seems to be much more straightforward. The tagline, “Simplify and scale your entire content marketing process” sounds very appealing to us!
With a ‘highly intuitive’ and comprehensive editorial calendar tool, planning and scheduling content has never been easier. NewsCred also offers real-time content recommendations based on detailed analysis from all your social channels. This takes the guesswork out of sourcing content ideas and helps you hit the nail on the proverbial head every time you post. Measuring tools, integrated publishing platforms and even content sourcing options, NewsCred really seems to cover everything, but it comes at a price (from $2950/month).
3) Addvocate
Addvocate takes a hands-on, collaborative approach to sourcing and creating content. The idea is that all employees, regardless of job title, produce content for the brand through sharing ideas and feedback.
Employees become ‘advocates’ for the brand, hence the name. Addvocate provides in-depth moderation and monitoring tools so you can see exactly who and what is having the biggest impact. This helps fine-tune content and boost employee confidence whilst building authentic ‘real people’ connections with customers.
4) Buffer and/or Hootsuite
Buffer and Hootsuite are both excellent social media scheduling tools. Which one you choose is really a matter of personal choice.
Buffer’s features include: simple scheduling, multiple social media accounts, team member access and most helpfully; detailed analytics.
HootSuite has very similar features: scheduling, analytics, multiple accounts, contacts etc. However, HootSuite is free if you have less than five social media accounts (ideal for small businesses and individuals), whereas Buffer starts at $25/month.
5) TrackMaven
TrackMaven collects data from hundreds of different sources to give you an overview of what your competitors are doing across paid, owned and earned media. Keep an eye on the competition without having to do all the legwork and research yourself.
The content marketing channels you can track include; ads, SEO, PPC, Social Media, YouTube, news and press. You can find out what the competition is doing right – and wrong – and you can benchmark your own marketing efforts against theirs.
TrackMaven is quite simply a fool-proof way to get ahead of the competition.
