Marketers claim that content marketing is the future of digital marketing. Don’t believe them. Content marketing is already “present”.

If you haven’t heard about content marketing, then we highly recommend you to read this article. Maybe you are already implementing this method even without knowing about it.

So what is it?

Content marketing is a marketing channel for creating and distributing content to attract the target audience. The primary goal of it is to induce a consumer to desirable actions, to involve him/her in your conversion scenario. Content marketing provides information to your potential customer at the right time and the right place.

Every business faces the following problems:

• Do you have good prices? – Your clients don’t even know about it.
• Do you think your product has a competitive advantage? – Your clients don’t even know about it.
• Do you have a unique solution to a common problem? – Your clients don’t know that a solution even exists.

Your ideal customers are looking for solutions on the internet, they are looking for information on how to improve their businesses and make them more effective.

Let’s give an example.

Your website literally bombards a visitor with pop-up windows that asks them to BUY IT, START MEMBERSHIP, SIGN IN.

Why would a person trust you to buy your product? So far you haven’t provided any benefit to your client and expect him to purchase or start a membership. Be nice to your prospects. Use content marketing, which is another nicer approach to clients.

Do you want to know how?

Let the consumer make his/her own choice. Instead of asking him/her to purchase, prepare a blog explaining all different products in the same category including your and your competitor’s products. A consumer will choose himself. After all, your product is the best on the market, isn’t it? )

Do you feel convinced that content marketing is worth implementing to your marketing strategy? We prepared an effective action plan for you! Here is a list of content marketing tools, that will help you boost your results.

Step 1) Generate ideas

Step 2) Manage your content in Content Management System

Step 3) Create posts, gifs

Step 4) Distribute content

Step 5) Analyze performance

These are the best tools for content marketing:

1. Buzzsumo
2. Headline Analyzer
3. Ubersuggest
4. Hubspot CMS
5. Canva
6. Gifox
7. Sociality.io
8. Mailchimp
9. MashShare
10. Ahrefs
11. Google Analytics

Generate Ideas

We recommend you select a topic based on the following criteria:

• Potential interest from the audience of the site
• The ability to organically mention your product/service in the article
• Traffic potential
• Articles on this topic aren’t yet available on the internet

Buzzsumo: Find the most shared content and key influencers

“BuzzSumo gives you insight into what content is working, and the influencers amplifying it.” – Buzzsumo.

Buzzsumo is a tool for content research, competition analysis, back-linking, and outreach research. Why is it important?

Not every content is important to create. Focus on topics that will bring you more traffic, shares, and most importantly potential to outrank competitors.

For example, you have an idea to write “10 tips on Content marketing”. Buzzsumo shows you powerful content insights, and displays the most shared content across all social media, and shows you detailed analysis reports.

You can track your competitor’s performance and do a detailed comparison. Also, you can find out how many people clicked on their content, how many times it was shared, outreach and etc.

Headline Analyzer

Unfortunately or fortunately the success of content depends on the first 5 words. Optimized headline improves click-through rate.

The process of creating an excellent headline is very straightforward. Write down 20 headlines, and then check each one in the Headline analyzer. The goal is to choose the best one, which scores higher than 70. Note that perfection is unattainable, and it is simply impossible to get 100.

Ubersuggest

It’s true that companies sometimes may get lost in the black hole of producing content ideas to share on social media. To give it a rise to your content strategy, you can easily reach content pieces that are popular on social media with the help of Ubersuggest.

Moreover, when it comes to generating ideas on content marketing, Ubersuggest offers you engaging insights into your competitors’ strategies and popular organic keyword phrases on your market. Thus, you will get the opportunity to generate more ideas by using its keyword suggestion tool.

Manage your content in Content Management System

A content management system (CMS) is a platform where teams manage web content, contribute to creating, edit and publishing.

Features of CMS:

• Allows users to create and format content together with team members
• Stores content in one place
• Allows you to manage roles and permissions: admin, editor, author
• Publish content as well as schedule it

Hubspot CMS

Hubspot CMS allows you to edit, create blog posts, landing pages, site pages, emails with ease. You’ll be backed by a world-class content delivery network to serve your content all across the globe in the fastest way possible.

Hubspot optimizes your content to all devices: mobile, tablet, laptop. With SSL (Secure Socket Layer) built-in, you’ll secure your website with a safe browsing experience for your visitors and benefit from better search rankings.

Moreover, our favorite feature is personalization. Show your users content that they would want to see. You can tailor your content to individual visitors based on their location, device, language, or by any detail stored in your HubSpot CRM, from demographic information to contacts’ interactions with your brand.

Create Posts, Gifs

Canva

Canva is a drag-and-drop tool that helps you to transform your ideas into visual content. The platform claims that you only need 23 seconds to learn.

It has a wide range of pre-designed templates for presentations, social media posts, videos clips, icons as well as photo filters, hundreds of fonts.

Gifox

Gifox is simply the best application for GIFs creation. Gifox is a completely new way of continuous screen capturing with window selection mode.

If you ever used any application to create gifs, you know that quality is usually bad. In Gifox you choose the quality you need. Advanced compression options provide complete control over output quality and file size.

For example, take a look at GIFs used in this blog post. Aren’t they great?

Distribute Content

Creating content without distribution is like graduating from Harvard and then becoming a monk in Indonesia.

The distribution of content is an extremely vital part of content marketing. Here is a simple list of channels you can use for content distribution:

• Social networks: Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn
• Q&A websites and forums
• Comments of articles with similar subject
• Sending emails

The social media channel is particularly well suited, since you can reach a wide audience, share with your subscribers, publish in social media groups/communities, use paid promotions of posts. Especially free methods such as posting on your personal page or Facebook/LinkedIn groups can be very effective ways of attracting people to read your content. Take a look at our article; The ultimate guideline to grow your followers on LinkedIn Company Pages.

Sociality.io

Sociality.io is an all-in-one social media management platform, where you can:

• Publish – All contents in one calendar
• Engage – All comments and messages on one screen
• Listen – All your data on one platform
• Report – All reports are ready within a few minutes
• Competitor Analysis – All competitors in one report

Social media management systems allow you not only to distribute content via social media channels but also to listen and monitor engagement rates. Sociality.io platforms provide all user’s reactions and comments on one dashboard, making it easier for you to analyze each content’s performance.

MailChimp: Email marketing

With channels such as email-mailing, it can be difficult to build a customer list. But in order to achieve complete content distribution, this step is crucial.

MailChimp is one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies, making it into Forbes Cloud 100 list. Millions of customers use it. We love their freemium plan!

We recommend you to read their own content, which includes step-by-step tutorials, blogs, and marketing guidebooks, that can help you to improve your email marketing strategies.

There are countless features, but the most notable one lets you build an email list with subscribers who are truly engaged with your content. Plus you can track them.

You can also monitor metrics such as average open and click rate, as well as your average email, subscribe and unsubscribe rates.

Sender: Email marketing

Building an engaged audience requires a strategic blend of compelling content, smart segmentation, and personalized communication. That’s where Sender’s email marketing software shines.

With its advanced segmentation, Sender empowers you to group your audience based on their behavior and preferences. That way, you can target them with personalized email marketing campaigns that hit the mark every time. 

The drag-and-drop email builder with responsive templates makes it simple to create professional emails that look great on any screen in minutes.

Thanks to Sender’s detailed analytics and reports, monitoring key metrics is a breeze. You can keep an eye on your open, click-through, and conversion rates to understand your audience’s behavior. You also get clear insights into your email list’s growth so you can fine-tune your strategy.

In a nutshell, Sender is positioned as one of the best and most affordable email marketing tools, with powerful features to grow your business.

MashShare: Social Share Buttons

In order to increase your traffic through social media channels, it is necessary to integrate social sharing buttons on your website. It is a simple yet powerful way to increase blog traffic.

MashShare is a tool to add social media share buttons for WordPress. It is easy to set up an eye-catching “Share it” button. Such buttons will encourage visitors to spread the content you spend so much effort creating.

Analyze performance

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a tool that helps you to find website backlinks and their parameters, analyze competitors, build your own strategies.

The analysis provides information on the number of links, referring domains, IP addresses of sites, the number of text links closed in the nofollow attribute, delivered via a redirect or image.

Why do you need all these parameters? If you learn to analyze those numbers, you will learn why your competitors are ranking so high and what you need to do to outrank them.

It is a tool that measures how your content performs. Did you gain backlinks? How often was it shared across social media?

You’ll know the information is up to date because Ahrefs crawls five-billion web pages every day.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics brings you to your target audience. You need information about your customers: how old they are, their interests, location, how they engage with your content.

You have an ideal customer for your product.

So, all is left is to analyze whether he/she liked your content, and which ones had higher conversion rates.

How does it work? Machine learning discovers insights from your data. Do you want to know which customers have high revenue potential? Google Analytics will tell you.

What is great about google analytics is its free plan and a free course at Google Academy.

Analyze data wisely.

You can also check our article about What is influencer marketing? Learn how to leverage your business.

Conclusion

You need content marketing. The main mistakes of the majority of those who decide to try content marketing in practice are the lack of a long-term strategy and the expectation of quick results.

In content marketing, there are no secret techniques that are accessible only to elite marketers. You need two things to get successful results: systematic work and an understanding of your target audience.

Creating and sharing high-quality content consistently doesn’t mean direct sales of your product, yet in this way, you will not only influence a targeted audience but also build trust with potential customers. In the long term, the time and effort that you spend on content marketing will return as a customers’ attention and action.