Conventional advertising has become so widespread and intrusive that some repel more potential customers than it attracts. People are as keen as ever to buy good products. But, they’ll only choose companies with brand authority that make convincing value-based arguments rather than sensationalized sales pitches.
Content marketing is the way to go since it provides value to everyone while showcasing your expertise. These are the eight tools you’ll want to explore and rely on if you want your content marketing efforts to pay off.
- Content and Customer Relationship Management Systems
You can’t establish your business’s online presence without a dedicated digital location. It needs a website, so your top priority is a content management system (CMS) that makes creating and evolving one easy.
Customers value personalized engagement, which is hard to pull off once you have hundreds of them and even more leads. A CRM solution simplifies the tracking and maintenance of these relationships. It lets you automate most strategies that keep people interested in your brand and increase sales figures.
We lumped these two together since they’re indispensable for any content marketing effort and often come as a package deal.
- Content Idea Solutions
Timely, relevant contributions are what make successful content marketers stand out. Even the best of us sometimes have trouble coming up with content ideas or capitalizing on what’s hot right now. Luckily, specialized tools exist that help inform your brainstorming sessions.
They scour the internet for trending topics or content relevant to the keywords you put in that performed well in the past. Once you know what to focus on and when you can hit the ground running and contribute original content more easily.
- Password Manager
Content strategies mostly contain social media. That’s why brands often have multiple accounts across channels like LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and many others. Most of the time, more than one person accesses these accounts. Thus, it only is convenient to set similar passwords if not the same ones, for all social media accounts. Even more so, when a password contains generic information about you or the brand, it becomes more memorable for the team.
Yet, doing this leaves you critically vulnerable to malicious actors online. As you wouldn’t leave your apartment door ajar for thieves, you shouldn’t use the same weak passwords repeatedly to give hackers any chance of stealing your information. In this case, if one of the passwords gets compromised, other credentials remain safe.
Here, password managers can do the heavy lifting for you and generate unique and complex passwords for each of your accounts. With password managers, the only password you ever need to remember is the master password.
- Metrics Tools
Marketing’s ultimate goal is to boost the bottom line. You can’t do so efficiently if you don’t establish a set of KPIs to track. Various tools can help with this, from ones that provide insights into your website’s performance to tools specializing in social media engagement metrics. You might even need to break out a good old spreadsheet if your business or niche depends on KPIs ready-made solutions don’t offer.
- SEO Tools
While your content should provide value to customers and prospects, it’s useless if it flies under search engines’ radars. Most people use generic terms rather than brand names when searching for products. Marketers know this, and more than 70% make SEO a core part of their content strategies.
SEO tools simplify the process. Some analyze your existing content and offer tips on optimizing it for targeted keywords. Others refine the keywords themselves, helping you find impactful ones that attract visitors yet have the least competition.
- Design Tools
Most people only skim articles no matter how good your copy is, but they’ll likely stick around longer if you enhance it with some eye-catching visual elements. Online design tools greatly simplify the creation of banners, infographics, and other website elements. They let users with limited design experience achieve decent results or help professionals put together stunning visuals faster.
- Project Management Tools
You can’t carry out elaborate content marketing campaigns without delegation. Project management tools ensure team members are always aware of responsibilities and time constraints, whether through tables, calendars, or Kanban boards.
- Social Media Management Tools
An active social media presence is essential to reaching younger demographics. In fact, half of Gen Z and Millennial customers use it to buy products directly. Social media management tools provide a platform for handling all your interactions. They let you round up your company’s various social media accounts and interact with followers from one place. You can schedule posts far in advance and benefit from statistics on follower engagement & sentiment.
Final Thoughts & Privacy Concerns
While all these tools help content marketers to ease their operations, there are still areas they should be really cautious. One of which is GDPR, which is a law is all about protecting personal data and making sure people know what’s happening with their information. While some individuals are aware of information databases and their online footprint, and even opt out of data brokers, this is not a piece of common knowledge by the general public.
For marketers, GDPR means being super clear about how they collect and use data. It’s not just about following the law; it’s also about building trust with your audience. When you’re open about your data practices and let people choose what happens with their info, you show that you respect them and their choices.
This helps make your brand stronger and more trustworthy. So, embracing GDPR isn’t just a legal thing; it’s about being ethical and showing you care about people’s privacy.