Creating a content marketing strategy is the ultimate weapon of any business success. Therefore, Marketers understand the importance and acknowledge – Content as the King of the Marketing.
To make sure every beginner also understand why content marketing is important for business success, we have been sharing various information about content marketing through our Free Beginner’s Guide to Content Marketing.
What’s this guide all about?
In our beginner’s guide to content marketing, we have shared chapters explaining – what is content marketing, how to create the content marketing strategy for your business, how to maintain the consistency of generating valuable content through the use of content marketing calendar and how to identify your audience for content marketing strategy.
Continuation of this guide……
You can create content for your business, but it all may go in vain if you don’t know the right tools to generate and distribute the same valuable content. Therefore, in chapter 6 of our content marketing guide, we have decided to share the list of 20 content marketing tools that can help you with your marketing journey that too all – Free!
Yes, you have read right!
Here is the list of basic 20 free content marketing tools recommended by digital marketing experts especially for beginners. Have a look!
Tool 1: Grammarly
Whether you are an English Scholar or Grammar Nazi, there are times when you wonder whether if it’s “they’re,” “their,” or “there?” while creating any piece of content for your marketing campaigns.
With the help of Grammarly which is completely a free content marketing tool, you can comb over your content like anything and points our minute to minute grammar mistakes.
Along with picking mistakes, it offers context relevant suggestions and replacements with many variables.
Though if you need opinions like active-passive writing, you need to purchase the paid version. Otherwise, the free version is sufficient enough for checking your writings.
Go To Grammarly
Tool 2: Google Keyword Tool
Generating content for marketing strategies is incomplete without using the appropriate keywords in it. Using keyword tools like Google Keyword Tool, you will be able to research appropriate keywords for your content strategies and can pair them up to use in the headlines and body of your content.
Google search engine completely revolves around keyword usage. Therefore you need to create content marketing strategies by using the information which has an approximation of the search traffic certain keywords that users are currently using.
Make good use of this free content marketing keyword tool to create your content marketing strategies and make most of it.
Go To Keyword Tool
Tool 3: CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer
Being a content creator, one should understand the importance of your content’s HEADLINE.
If you have given full efforts in creating high-quality content, but don’t use the appropriate headline, then your piece of content would be useless.
By using CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer, you can analyze the effectiveness of headlines to create the Good Headline. This tool scores your headline based on the overall word balance, length, sentiment, and keywords.
Plus, it provides a Google search preview and email subject line preview so you know exactly how your content will appear to readers.
Go to Headline Analyzer
Tool 4: Canva
Canva is the easiest and safest free content marketing tool to create hassle-free creative designs. This tool specifically designed for non-graphic designers who even don’t know to use photoshop and other designing tools.
Practically speaking, design software is complicated tools that can take weeks/months to learn their usage.
However, by utilizing Canva, you can create beautiful creatives like flyers, presentations, Facebook covers, blog graphics, business cards, posters, invitations, banner, pamphlets, ebooks, infographics, cards, e-magazines, etc (all kind of online creatives) with the simplicity of their stand-out, drag and drop feature.
Go To Canva
Add-on Tool: PikWizard
PikWizard has over 100,000 completely free images on the site, over 20,000 of those are exclusive to all. They are also adding new images to our library daily and our ultimate goal is to get to more than 1 million images.
They’ve got A LOT of pictures of people, which tend to be rare in free stock photo sites. If you check out our site search for “office” or “meeting” and you’ll see the quality of the pics on the site. All of which are free to use without attribution.
Go To PikWizard
Tool 5: SEM Rush
This tool helps to identify how your competitors rank on Google. It has both the free as well paid versions. It also offers you a deep analysis to learn and engage with SEM (Search Engine Marketing) on your own site.
Also, it allows you to find keywords for your content marketing strategies as compared to competitors and let you spy on them quickly and easily to find out what’s ranking.
This content marketing tool is for organic traffic but you can also look at your competitor’s ads, compare domains and generate detailed analytics reports.
Go To SEMrush
Tool 6: BuzzSumo
Your content is of no use if it’s not strategizing with the right marketing plan. You will find various content marketing tools, but only a few of them are effective enough to generate serious results.
BuzzSumo is one of those effective content marketing tools that can majorly help content marketers in two ways, i.e.
- Analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor.
- Find key influencers to promote your content.
This tool is very easy to use and can only take a couple minutes to complete a search and better understand what it will take to compete with the top social media and search engine performers in your niche.
Go To Buzzsumo
For review: BuzzSumo Review
Tool 7: MailChimp
MailChimp is one of the easiest and recommended email marketing tool used to share your content to your email marketing list. The best part of this tool is it also helps to create and maintain your email marketing list.
You can share and create your exclusive business content through this tool and help to fuel up new subscribers to your email list as well.
In short, it can help you engage with your users, find a new audience and improve your brand awareness.
You can create a successful email campaign as per your business requirement in the form of beautiful drag and drop templates. Along with that, you can share these updates, sell products, or tell your audience something important or useful.
MailChimp has many features, but the ability to create an email list with subscribers who are engaged with your content should be the most effective for you. Also, you can track open rate and click rate in this service.
Go To Mailchimp
Tool 8: Kred
One of the most important and unavoidable tasks of every content marketer is to share content on the social media platforms.
Influencer marketing is also a quite common way these days to promote or share your valuable content on social media platforms. Many brands or businesses do it through influencers in the niche.
But for beginners, it not easy to find influencers in your domain. Kred is one of the content marketing tools that measure people influence analyzing their Facebook and Twitter activity.
It helps to find the right person or influencer for your brand. Also, this service gives you an opportunity to build your own status, improve it and promote your content easier by building trust and awareness.
Go To Kred
Tool 9: Evernote
Evernote is the multi-use organizational platform used by professionals which is widely famous as the way to remember everything from your business to personal life.
Using Evernote can help to keep track of your content ideas. You can create a content marketing calendar by using this tool from the computer or your mobile phone on the go.
Go To Evernote
Tool 10: Trello
Trello is another marvelous free tool for organizing everything from media to ideas on neatly organized cards.
You can streamline your content ideas as well as collaborate with your other teammates by gathering votes on particular cards to have real-time feedback on the best content to pursue further.
This tool can be very helpful in organizing your content marketing strategy by interacting with your sub mates at the same time.
Go To Trello
Tool 11: Tweriod
Tweriod is social media basically the Twitter tool that helps determine and analyze the best time to tweet your valuable content for your business.
The tool gets your content in front of more tweeters and comes in the form of a free simple report that outlines the best times to tweet.
Go To Tweriod
It is the world’s largest community for sharing your business or brand related valuable content in the form of presentations. This platform has over 60 million unique visitors per month. This tool is not specifically for presentations, it can also support documents, PDFs, videos, and webinars.
This content marketing tool helps your content to rank better in Google search results. It’s free and easy to use, all you need to do is sign up and share your content.
However, it has a loophole that it doesn’t allow live links in the description of the presentation. But this tool has more reachability, therefore, it allows brand visibility and creates awareness.
Go To SlideShare
Tool 13: Buffer
The end goal of your content distribution is to maximize the reach and impact of your content marketing efforts. With content schedule tools like Buffer, you can manage all your social media accounts on one platform.
Whether you’re posting to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, through this tool and you can queue up all your posts ahead of time as per your calendar as well.
Go To Buffer
Tool 14: ClickFunnels
This content marketing tool helps to create the effect of sales funnels that lead to conversions to sell your goods and services in a quick & easy way.
ClickFunnels is a user-friendly content marketing tool specially designed for beginners’ by offering a drag & drop interface and plenty of templates to work from.
The tool like ClickFunnel helps content creators with market research and audience segmentation. These are the basics to develop a successful content marketing as well as the sales strategy.
Go To ClickFunnels
Tool 15: Visual.ly
Creating a visual content for marketing campaigns is currently the most important step to put in these days. Readers are more prone to visually attractive content than normal texts.
Therefore, creating stunning visual graphics such as infographics, videos, etc. can be easily accomplished by using content marketing tool like Visual.ly.
With this, you can explore more than 30,000+ infographics templates that are already been created for the websites for inspiring content marketing.
Go To Visual.ly
Add-On Tool: Lumen5
Lumen5 is a video creation platform powered by A.I. that enables anyone without training or experience to easily create engaging video content within minutes.
Go To Lumen5
Tool 16: Marketo
While making your content marketing strategy and distributing through your various channels, you might come in a need where you feel to have a tool that can control as well tie all your content marketing efforts.
In this scenario, Marketo comes in the role play. From content marketing production to social media marketing, it can provide all the type of service any marketer can ask for.
It’s a predictive tool that can pinpoint your best content (including blogs, videos, website pages, etc) in interest on your website, boost results and target according to your audience.
You can also use it email marketing software to engage with customers and prospects, helping drive results with personalized emails.
Go To Marketo
Tool 17: Ahrefs
This is most admiring content marketing tools well acknowledged by digital marketers. Ahrefs helps to track all your backlinks, keywords, brand mentions and know what your competitors are doing, all together.
However, its more than a tool, like while signing up for Ahrefs, you gain access to seven distinct tools like Site Explorer, Positions Explorer, Content Explorers, Crawl Report, Ahrefs Alert, and Position Tracker.
You can basically stalk your keywords on various social media platforms and receive accurate data. It adds the ability to track keywords by language and country, while also seeing how well you perform on mobile devices.
Though it has only 14 days free trial, once you use it, you will understand the difference how it impacts your campaigns.
Go To Ahrefs
Tool 18: HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator
Creating a content is an idea. Sometimes, creator need help to generate ideas for creating the content. Even experts need help.
Therefore, this tool comes into your rescue where you can get idea heavily based on your audience interest, questions, pain points, objections, etc.
All you need to type three related nouns or words related to the general topic of your marketing strategy into the tool. It will generate at least five ideas for blog posts just like that.
Go To Blog Topic Generator
Tool 19: Asana
At first level, you may need hubs/communities/teams to collaborate and distribute your content to the audience. This flexible web and mobile app make facilitating workflow management and communication easier and more seamless.
With features like project templates, team pages, and visually engaging dashboards, Asana makes it easy to nix the chaos of team projects. The baseline version is free for up to 15 team members.
Go To Asana
Tool 20: Workflow
In the end, your content marketing strategy is nothing if you don’t follow the editorial calendars. You need one to maintain publishing consistency, plan ahead so you don’t miss a post, and stay organized. The best free option for your editorial calendar is Google Calendar.
Google Calendar: You don’t need to create a new account either (as long as you already have a Gmail); just create a new calendar for content. To do this, click the arrow next to My calendars and choose to Create a new calendar.
Go To WorkFlow
Conclusion:
We hope these content marketing tools will help to create your marketing strategies and distribute valuable content to your audience. There is ‘n’ number of marketing tools available in the market. You can try various free or paid versions as per your business or marketing team needs. Just make sure these tools solve your purpose.