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Digital marketing success doesn’t have to be a complicated endeavor, achievable only by large corporations with massive budgets. It’s actually quite simple—market your content directly to your target audience. Of course, when you factor in the sheer number of options available to consumers, that’s easier said than done.
Thankfully, content marketing isn’t a solo mission devoid of any assistance along the way. Matched with crucial content marketing tools, your knowledge and experience in this realm is more than enough to vastly improve your content creation and increase your success rate in getting—and maintaining—clients.
In this blog, we’ll examine the content marketing tools you absolutely need to guide you through the digital marketing wilderness.
What Are the Advantages of Using Content Marketing Tools?
The point of content marketing is to drive qualified leads to content that is relevant to them. Tools in the content marketing sphere make this effort easier, more successful, and more efficient.
What’s more, these digital marketing industry mainstays help you design content to provide answers to visitors’ questions, which opens the door to highly qualified prospects who are more likely to buy services or products.
Content marketing tools save time and money by streamlining content creation, improving the quality of content, and getting you in front of your target audience. Not only that, content marketing tools will lend a hand in getting visitors to engage with you, help you create content that reaches buyer personas, and nudge visitors toward a buying decision.
Essential Content Marketing Tools
When examining the building blocks of what makes up the frame of digital marketing, it becomes immediately clear that one cannot simply list an array of catch-all tools. Content marketing consists of many different aspects—hidden support beams that are crucial to the structural integrity of the entire edifice.
Content marketing runs the gamut from blogs and emails to design and analytics. And each of these sections boasts tools expertly calibrated to give agencies the ability to compete in this crowded marketplace.
Research
In content writing, the work begins before you even start writing the blog or other piece of content. Oftentimes, this requires a lengthy research process. This enables you to generate content ideas, identify the most targeted keywords, scope out the competition, and cater to a specific audience.
There are dozens of content research tools available that can help you streamline the process and come up with unique content ideas on a regular basis.
Semrush
Semrush is not just a keyword research tool for SEO content marketing. It goes well beyond the basics of producing lists of vaguely related keywords, instead suggesting highly specific keywords that your competitors are already utilizing.
However, Semrush boasts many other powerful capabilities beyond simple keyword lists.
Other standout features include:
- Long-tail Keywords
- Ad Group Ideas
- Yearly Keyword Trends
- CPC Distribution Statistics
- Complete Keyword Research Toolkit
- Keyword Difficulty Analysis
- Organic Traffic Insights
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a research tool used by teams across the digital marketing spectrum. Keenly adept at keyword research needs and tracking content you create, it includes keyword research tools, SERP analysis, backlink and search traffic analysis for any domain or page, and much more.
Other features include:
- Keyword Difficulty Score
- 1,000+ Keyword Suggestions
- Globally Supported Interface
- Click Metrics
- Extensive SERP Overview
Google Keyword Planner
A somewhat simpler keyword tool that serves basic needs while being user friendly, Google Keyword Planner serves up a few baseline features. But despite its perceived lack of flash, it’s one of the most accurate sources of keyword data—makes sense, as it’s actually from Google.
Features most effective for business websites include:
- “Top of Page” Bid Range for Commercial Keywords
- Accurate Search Volume
Design
It’s a well-known fact across industries that to keep your audience engaged, you must wow them with artful designs—after all, we live in a visual world. The attention span of internet users has plummeted over the last 20 years, with the average user navigating away from a website after a scant eight seconds.
That’s right: We now have a shorter attention span than goldfish.
So, the best way to reel in users and keep them in the net is to enrich your marketing content with infographics, GIFs, striking photos, and engaging colors—whatever works!
Here are two of our favorite content creation tools:
Canva
Canva enables you to design amazing content of all types, including infographics, presentations, social media posts, newsletters, logos, and even YouTube intros. This online graphic design tool streamlines the design process, instantly giving you a top-of-the-line, in-house design team.
Canva’s top features include:
- Stock Elements
- Photo Library
- Curved Text Generator
- Wide Range of Templates
- Online Video Recorder
- Video Trimmer
- Easy Integration With Analytics Tools Such as HubSpot
Unsplash
Stock photos are often the difference between a site that looks professional and one that just looks … meh. Unsplash is highly regarded among digital marketers that work with critical design tools, as it provides a rich stock library of high quality images and photos free to use and share under the Unsplash license.
The platform has more than 207,000 contributing photographers and generates 17 billion photo impressions per month.
Analytics Tools
An in-depth overview of your content performance over a period of time offers invaluable guideposts for your trajectory. Analytics tools give you just that, making it possible to manage and study metrics data so you can determine the ROI of marketing efforts and identify opportunities for improvements and changes.
Analytics tools can gauge the success of:
- Blogs
- Landing Pages
- Calls-to-Action (CTA)
- Site Performance
- User Experience
Here are some of the best hubs for marketing analytics.
Google Analytics
In more and more ways, it doesn’t get much bigger than Google. In fact, Google Analytics is the top analytical tool used by marketers, according to a HubSpot survey. And it’s easy to see why. Google Analytics enables you to track purchases, form submissions, and site metrics, while also giving you a better understanding of your target audience.
And the best part? It’s free. That’s a major advantage, especially since the tool gives you the power to measure these crucial metrics:
- Users
- Sessions
- Pages per Session
- Devices
- Source/Medium & Social Media Platforms
- Pageviews, Unique Pageviews
- Average Time on Page
- Landing Pages
- Bounce Rate
- Audience Location
- Audience Engagement
- Mobile Traffic Behavior
- Traffic Sources
- Social Media Traffic
HubSpot
HubSpot Analytics provides tools to help you enhance your marketing strategies with high-end sales techniques and methodologies. The cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software assists in the alignment of sales and development of effective marketing strategies.
Helping foster sales enablement, HubSpot Analytics boosts marketing ROI. What’s more, it utilizes Inbound Marketing strategies through a seemingly endless treasure trove of support systems and knowledge centers.
HubSpot’s best analytical features include:
- Automated CRM Database: Automatically updates customer profiles to track and measure each individual’s engagement and customer journey, and moves them along their customer lifecycles.
- List Segmentation: Groups contacts in your CRM database with similar qualities according to their customer profiles.
- Automated Workflows: Responds and adapts in real-time and automatically logs and displays engagement performance analytics.
- Email Analytics: Tracks your audience’s engagement, providing an overview of performance so you can understand the top-performing topics and best times and days to deploy emails.
- A/B Testing: Measures the performance of email content, layouts, visual elements, number of links included, levels of personalisation such as in CTAs, subject lines, and more.
- Paid Ad Tracking: Ad integration helps marketers measure and analyze the performance of their Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn ads.
- Dashboards: Enables data-driven marketing, complete with reports on customer lifecycles, key trends over time, contacts in each stage of workflows, and the quantity and quality of your website traffic on a page-by-page basis.
Hypha HubSpot Development: All the Tools, Talent & Expertise You Need for Success
When you don’t engage with widely available essential content marketing tools, it’s nearly impossible to achieve any success in the crowded marketplace of e-commerce. Wrangling the right tools while also keeping any business afloat can be a difficult task, however. That’s why your best option is to partner with a digital marketing agency that has all of these tools—and more—in their back pocket.