Marketing is never easy.
Sometimes, content marketing is laborious just because you spend the content resources and energy the wrong way. To succeed with content strategy, your brand needs to come forward and build up the reliability of a publisher. And that's not something small businesses or entrepreneurs are used to doing traditionally.
Most of the marketing campaigns now concentrate on the "inbound marketing" methodology. You must understand that it requires patience, extreme focus on generosity, establishing trust, and providing value. Thought leadership and dominating branding over the web (including YouTube, social media, and blog) is also the need of the hour for a publisher – more than ever before.
Obviously, all of the mentioned things are hard work.
Is there a smart approach that can be made somewhere easy down the line for you as a business owner? They say technology is a savior, so do tools exist that help to elevate your content marketing efforts?
This post is going to list out five kinds of web-based tools you can use to accelerate, streamline, and organize your content marketing efforts.
But first:
Merge Your Content Marketing with SEO and Backlinks
No search engine ever bought a product or service. Your website might get higher SERP placements, but you’ll only be successful when the audience is attracted by your offer.
Therefore, you should write to appeal to real people. Write what interests them, what appeals to them, and what helps them solve their problems. Do it in a way that engages them, and they’ll help spread the word for you on Twitter, Facebook, and other social sites. Word of mouth is far stronger than any search engine positioning will ever be.
People are often tempted to look for the quick fix, the new SEO idea that brings instant success, but more and more, they realize that a longer-term strategy is the best way forward. What’s more, it’s a method that can reduce a website’s reliance on search engine results while extending its reach.
Nevertheless, SEO should be viewed as a practice that continuously purifies the strategy and tactics used to connect consumers with brand content needed to buy. Don't isolate SEO optimization but rather add best search optimization practices to content marketing, public relations, and web development.
With the latest algorithmic developments, core web vitals, localization and personalization, and the power of referring data insights in Google Analytics 4, Google is proactively trying to put the best web pages in their search results.
No more you can hire someone from Fiverr or Upwork to do some blog commenting, article spinning, PBN links, or any other spamming link building. What works best is authority building through blogging and content marketing. Unfortunately, you will fail without planning diversified content strategy and an active community.
Content Aggregator Tools and Websites
To develop content, you’ll need an influx of incoming content. You’d basically need to read a lot to write as much as you ought to. How do you practically crawl over the web to consume so much information that’s spewed out every day? You get smart and use an aggregator tool!
- You can start with LinkedIn’s Pulse
- move on to Flipboard for your mobile,
- it (nexus of content curation),
- set up good sources through Feedly (an alternative for Google’s now-dead RSS reader), and
- finally, wade through Reddit
By working with these tools, you make content available to you at all times. Read, repurpose, develop content on your string of ideas, or gather information from other content on the web to make your brand of valuable content. Curation is a pill for content creation, and aggregator tools help you do just that.
Content - Creation, Organization, and Management
Organized efforts are a must for content marketing, and there are plenty of tools starting from project management to content organization. Google Drive is ubiquitous and plugs well into the workflows that most small businesses have. You might also want to check out Trello, Asana, and Basecamp for organizing projects, content, and teams. To actually create content, you can use tools such as one of the ubiquitous meme generators, Visual.ly, Issuu, or UberFlip.
If you are a business owner, you can use Evernote in a million different ways. Note ideas as you get them or jot down facts you can later repurpose as full-blown resource pages or social media updates. You might also use the web-clipper for content curation.
If you work with a team of social media managers and content developers or freelancers, you could bring your team aboard using Evernote for business and collaborate on ideas, content planning, blog posts, and a host of other things.
Social Media Content
Social media is big, and it’s a huge resource by itself. Using a tool like Paper.li, for instance, you can create stories using social media data. Use Buzzsumo to get some of the best content to share with your audience based on their interests and engagement behavior. You might also want to consider a tool such as Curata that can help you find trustworthy content quickly and curate this content to fuel your social media marketing efforts.
Even without any of these tools, you can still use the dripping content off social media updates and quickly whip up posts relevant to your business niche or industry. It’s quick, it can be credited, and it works for you in multiple ways. Don’t just create content for social media; make your content attract attention off social media too.
Tools for Audio, Video, and Visual Content
While writing posts and creating content based on text is easier, it’s not the end of the road. There are videos, slide decks, podcasts, magazines, and tons of other forms of content that you should create. There are tools for you to develop this kind of content too.
- Animoto or Vyond is ideal for creating short videos. Brian Dean's YouTube channel has over 228K views per month.
- Using Snagit or Camtasia, you can create screencasts to show off your products or provide courses.
- You can use Garageband & iMovie for video podcasting or launch audio tours with iAudioGuide.
- If you are into audio podcasts, you may consider tools such as BlogTalkRadio or Libsyn.
Digging into Popular Websites
Most of the popular publications now have tons of content already as “pillar content” or “resource pages.” You could visit Social Media Today for syndicated posts and resources. HootSuite has a special section with tons of resources too.
In addition to that, many other websites provide on-site tools for helping you to create even more content.
Alltop site is populated with the top articles, blogs, trends, and topics, searchable and sorted alphabetically just for you. To start curating content, find a page or type in a topic in the search bar that relates to your business (b2b, social media, content marketing, etc.). Once you do that, find the feeds for each source and add them to your feed reader. Alltop gives you browser plugins that will create OPML files that will let you directly import pages into a feed reader!
Further, you could literally create an endless flow of content based on ideas from comments, reviews, and user-generated posts on communities, forums, or rating sites. If you have anything to do with food and restaurants, for instance, you could use reviews from Yelp for first-hand information and then turn it into list blog posts. For technical niches such as hosting solutions or servers, you could make use of information from comparison engines such as Who Is Tool and cite them as sources for your blog posts.
Additional Tip: Landing Pages are as Important as Content
As the term implies, a landing page is just that, a page on your website or a website where potential customers land after clicking a link, possibly from your blog, a Facebook post, or YouTube video. In theory, your lead page is the last cog in the conversion process, which is why it is the most important in your sales conversion process.
Related to that is working out who your audience is. You need to understand your audience, to work out their aspirations, what they are trying to achieve, will your product or service help them do that? You need to try to get into your audience's head.
The final question you need to understand is how they found your landing page in the first place. Consider changing your message depending on where the visitor arrived from. A different message might be more appropriate for visitors that arrived from Google than from Facebook and brings us to a key difference.
Final Words
While it could be a daunting task to create so many forms of content and pump up your content marketing efforts, you also have a mind-boggling and never-ending list of tools to help you create content. Most of the tools are affordable, and you can also pick the tools that fit your purpose or budget.
The question is: the tools exist, and the list will continue to grow. How are you going to use them? If you are in business, which of these tools are you using currently? Which of these could turn you into a full-fledged business content publisher?