Content marketing tools

From the strategy to the im­ple­ment­a­tion, to the first positive results; the journey is not always smooth and the process is often arduous. Content marketing strategies are no different. Content marketing is not a sprint, but more like a marathon that goes from the strategic focus, the setting of goals, research, planning, pro­duc­tion, up to the dis­tri­bu­tion and to the measuring of overall success.

To make the entire process easier and more efficient, most marketers use software. We’ll introduce you to the most popular content marketing tools and show you how you can enrich your content marketing.

This article was last updated in May 2021.

The internet is full of valuable in­form­a­tion and fas­cin­at­ing stories. So how do you find relevant items that will interest and intrigue potential customers? What is suitable for multi-value content campaigns? These content marketing tools inspire, reveal trends, and deliver keyword ideas.

The keyword planner is a part of Google Ads – the world’s largest search engine ad­vert­ising system. The free tool is the first point of contact for marketers worldwide for keyword ideas and traffic forecasts.

Answer the Public is a consumer insight tool that arranges the search terms suggested by Bing and Google according to cat­egor­ies like what, where, who, when, how, and why and visu­al­ises them as a search cloud.

Feedly serves as an RSS reader, primarily used for managing the RSS feed of different blogs and news portals, which makes it a valuable source for content ideas. Feedly gives you the option to design a per­son­al­ised news desk; one that will then provide in­ter­est­ing and relevant content heavily based around the main topic of your content marketing strategy.

Buzzsumo is a search engine for the social web that enables you to search social networks for different formats, like texts, graphics, videos, and in­ter­views to identify trend topics and keywords. So-called in­flu­en­cers -– potential brand am­bas­sad­ors for content – can be tracked down with the help of content marketing tools.

Visual.ly offers data visu­al­isa­tion and in­fograph­ics. Users specify the topic and a design team creates graphics, videos, charts, diagrams, and in­fograph­ics.

In­flu­en­cer marketing tools are web ap­plic­a­tions and online platforms that allow you to interact with in­flu­en­cers and assess their value for concrete marketing campaigns. Are you active in in­flu­en­cer marketing? Then we recommend that you take a look at the following tools:

With Influma you can observe discourse on social networks, analyse which topics are working well on which channels, identify opinion leaders and, if necessary, network with brand am­bas­sad­ors and mul­ti­pli­ers.

Hypr contains data on more than 10 million in­flu­en­cers in all relevant social networks and enables you to carry out demo­graph­ic, psy­cho­graph­ic and geo­graph­ic­al analyses of opinion leaders and their target groups.

Onalytica is an in­flu­en­cer re­la­tion­ship man­age­ment software. The tool allows you to identify in­flu­en­cers, contact them and manage in­flu­en­cer programs.

The platform Kred provides you with in­flu­en­cer metrics and evaluates potential brand am­bas­sad­ors on the basis of two key figures. The in­flu­en­cer score is derived from mentions, retweets, replies as well as the number of followers an in­flu­en­cer has and therefore allows con­clu­sions to be drawn about the potential an in­flu­en­cer has to influence other Internet users. The activity of an in­flu­en­cer in social networks is measured by the outreach level.

Content curation is a form of content marketing that does not focus on your own content. Instead, third party content available on the net is selected, re­arranged, and enriched with comments presented on your own website or in social networks. The following tools will help you to curate your content marketing campaign:

Paper.li is a content curation platform on which you can collect content from the net and prepare it for dis­tri­bu­tion in the form of an online newspaper to readers on your own website or in social networks.

Content marketing suite e Triberr is aimed at bloggers and small busi­nesses who want to expand their content offerings with content curation. Users use the tool to research relevant topics, attract in­flu­en­cers, curate their con­tri­bu­tions, and test them with online com­munit­ies (known as ‘tribes’).

Sniply is a URL shortener that allows you to enrich shared third-party content on the internet with calls-to-action to attract readers to your website. Tracking tools and A/B tests round off the range of functions.

Scoop.it is an all-in-one solution for content discovery and curation. Create, share, collect and arrange content, and publish the result either directly on the platform, on your own website or on social networks.

The all-in-one solution Curata also combines content discovery and curation. The tool evaluates content on the basis of machine learning al­gorithms and provides you with a relevance score. A text editor and an image database are available for the pre­par­a­tion of content. Depending on your needs, the content is published in the system’s own CMS or through external software.

With the following tools, you can select content according to the in­di­vidu­al needs of potential customers, place it in the right place at the right time and therefore increase the con­ver­sion rate of your online offers.

OneSpot is intended as an in­di­vidu­al­isa­tion platform. The tool supports you in supplying potential customers with per­son­al­ised content based on their pref­er­ences. The product portfolio includes website and email cus­tom­isa­tion and strategic content analysis.

In­ter­ac­tion Studio formerly known as Evergage, is a real-time per­son­al­isa­tion platform from Sales­force that uses machine learning al­gorithms to mine customer data. This software can be used to better un­der­stand and target customers and in­ter­ested parties with tailored marketing messages.

Kibo Per­son­al­iz­a­tion (formerly Monetate) relies on an AI-powered per­son­al­isa­tion engine to in­di­vidu­al­ise ad­vert­ising messages, enabling automated one-to-one com­mu­nic­a­tion with customers and in­ter­ested parties.

With trbo, online store operators offer every website visitor an in­di­vidu­al shopping ex­per­i­ence. The cloud-based tool is based on a machine learning approach that enables website operators to address potential customers with in­di­vidu­al ad­vert­ising messages despite being automated.

De­mand­base is a targeting and per­son­al­isa­tion platform for B2B marketing. The func­tion­al spectrum of the software includes tools with which companies can be analysed, segmented and addressed with per­son­al­ised ad­vert­ising measures based on char­ac­ter­ist­ics like industry, turnover, customer status or product selection

Do you rely on email marketing? Then you should consider using pro­fes­sion­al news­let­ter tools to dis­trib­ute your content. They allow you to create creative messages based on templates, per­son­al­ise email campaigns, and share content quickly and easily with your sub­scribers. The following tools have proven to be suc­cess­ful in content marketing:

With the email marketing tool MailChimp, you can create creative news­let­ter campaigns and always send emails at the right time thanks to data-based auto­ma­tion. The range of functions includes an intuitive template editor, analysis features and in­ter­faces to various CRM systems.

The email marketing software GetRe­sponse supports you in sending email news­let­ters, online surveys, follow-up emails and autorespon­ders – if required also auto­mat­ic­ally based on customer data. A landing page editor and tools for webinar marketing are also available.

Send­in­blue (formerly known as News­let­ter2Go) is an email marketing software from Germany that can be used to develop pro­fes­sion­al news­let­ters and SMS campaigns or landing pages and send them auto­mat­ic­ally. The software is GDPR-compliant if you are a business in­ter­act­ing with customers based inside the EU.

The email marketing software Clev­er­Reach is spe­cial­ised in target group-ori­ent­ated email campaigns. The range of functions includes a filter that cleans address lists of invalid or erroneous addresses.

A picture is worth a thousand words. In content marketing, high-quality image content is ideally suited to attract the attention of potential customers and to stand out from the mass of text-based web offers. Do you think that creating pro­fes­sion­al graphics is expensive and time-consuming? Not ne­ces­sar­ily. With these tools, you can create im­press­ive in­fograph­ics, il­lus­tra­tions, logos or other design projects for your content marketing campaign even without the ap­pro­pri­ate basic knowledge or a trained team of experts.

Piktochart is an intuitive graphic tool for beginners. The software provides various templates for design projects, which can be in­di­vidu­al­ised with a few clicks.

The graphic tool Infogram focuses on data visu­al­isa­tion and offers you numerous templates for diagrams, maps or in­fograph­ics as well as more than 1 million pictures and icons.

Use PicMonkey to edit images for your content marketing campaigns or create graphics and collages from scratch. The tool supports you with various templates, icons, fonts, filters, and effects.

The online tool Easelly provides users with templates for in­fograph­ics, which, according to the de­velopers, enable every user to virtually present ideas, data, or processes.

The online platform zsuite includes the graphic tools youzign, gifzign, mockzign, and logozign. This allows you to create graphics, GIFs, mockups and logos based on templates in a fast and un­com­plic­ated way.

Videos convey emotions better than any other medium and are therefore an integral part of content marketing. With these video tools, you can put your re­cord­ings in the limelight and bring video content to the big screen:

With Magisto, you can create im­press­ive videos for your content marketing campaigns in just a few minutes. The tool offers an AI-supported video editor as well as solutions for the cross-channel dis­tri­bu­tion of video content.

Wirecast by Telestream is a pro­duc­tion software for live streaming videos. In addition to live streams, the tool is also suitable for webinars, webcasts, sports reporting, edu­ca­tion­al videos, and social media content.

With Camtasia, TechSmith offers a complete solution for screen recording. The tool includes a pixel-perfect screen recorder and various video editing features.

The video platform Knovio focuses on the or­gan­isa­tion and exchange of video content for internal com­mu­nic­a­tion, training and online present­a­tions. In addition, the tool supports live broad­casts of events like con­fer­ences.

Slowly but surely, speech-based in­ter­ac­tion is es­tab­lish­ing itself as an at­tract­ive al­tern­at­ive to the mouse and touch screen. Content marketers should also jump on the bandwagon. The following tools help you to serve the in­creas­ing demand with appealing audio content:

Audacity is a free, cross-platform open source audio editor with in­teg­rated recorder. With this tool, you can mix and edit audio files on any number of tracks. The software supports the import and export of all common audio formats.

Podbean is an online platform for podcast hosting. In addition to uploading and ad­min­is­tra­tion, the range of functions also includes the pub­lic­a­tion and marketing of self-created podcasts.

ePodcast Creator is a recording and audio editing software designed spe­cific­ally for podcast creation. The tool also offers an RSS feed creator and FTP client for pub­lish­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing your podcasts.

Sound­Cloud is one of the world’s most popular music and podcast streaming platforms with around 175 million users worldwide. With Sound­Cloud, they not only present their audio content to a large in­ter­na­tion­al audience, but also receive detailed stat­ist­ics and direct feedback from the Sound­Cloud community.

In­ter­act­ive content increases user en­gage­ment and, when used correctly, can provide you with in­ter­est­ing in­form­a­tion about your target audience, their pref­er­ences and interests. The following content marketing tools rely on gami­fic­a­tion to provoke user in­ter­ac­tion:

With Contest Factory, you can create in­ter­act­ive content for social media platforms, mobile devices or the world wide web in no time at all. The product portfolio includes gami­fic­a­tion formats like surveys, instant lotteries and hashtag campaigns as well as photo, video, audio and writing com­pet­i­tions.

Use SnapApp to provide in­ter­act­ive content to your target audience. SnapApp’s question-based content formats help you better un­der­stand your audience and gain important in­form­a­tion for your lead man­age­ment.

Use the quiz creator Qzzr to elicit relevant in­form­a­tion about your customer’s needs, wishes and pref­er­ences, to refine customer profiles and to strengthen their com­mit­ment with self-made question and answer games.

Votigo offers you a cloud-based social marketing suite that spe­cial­ises in creating and dis­trib­ut­ing in­ter­act­ive content on the mobile web and social networks. Use com­pet­i­tions or vouchers to generate leads or increase existing customer’s com­mit­ment.

The success of a content marketing campaign depends on the or­gan­isa­tion of each in­di­vidu­al step. Campaign man­age­ment is where all the threads come together. The task is to shape the collected topic proposals, to con­cret­ise the planning and to draw up a binding content or editorial plan at the end. To maintain an overview of all these tasks, it is advisable to use ap­pro­pri­ate man­age­ment tools, es­pe­cially for large-scale content marketing campaigns

Trello is a classic project man­age­ment tool that is ideally suited for or­gan­ising and planning smaller content marketing projects. The in­di­vidu­al tasks within a campaign can be struc­tured, precisely scheduled and assigned to specific editors using a map-based dashboard.

Asana is a project man­age­ment software ori­gin­ally developed by Facebook co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Ro­sen­stein to optimise Facebook’s internal processes. Today, the tool is one of the leading ap­plic­a­tions in the areas of task man­age­ment, pro­ductiv­ity and col­lab­or­a­tion.

The makers of Evernote call their tool a ‘virtual memory’. Evernote allows project teams to store, organise and archive to-do lists, documents, and notes. Another feature is the pos­sib­il­ity of saving content from RSS feeds and other sources, which can be tagged for later targeted access to topic-relevant articles.

Pocket is a popular book­mark­ing service among editors, writers, and bloggers. They use Pocket for research purposes to store web content clearly sorted by keywords.

Content col­lab­or­a­tion tools serve the central ad­min­is­tra­tion of content, enable editorial teams to edit content on a division of labour basis and ensure that all members always have access to the current version of centrally stored content formats. We recommend the following tools for col­lab­or­at­ive man­age­ment of content marketing campaigns.

Google Drive is the file hosting service from Google LLC. The tool enables users to store data centrally on the network and provides project teams with a web-based office package that enables them to jointly edit text documents, data tables, or present­a­tions.

The de­velopers of Con­tent­bird un­der­stand your product as a content workflow platform that supports marketing teams with data-driven methods in the research, planning, creation, and dis­tri­bu­tion of content.

The creators of Gath­er­Con­tent call their product a content op­er­a­tions platform. The tool allows marketing teams to manage content in one central location and can be in­teg­rated into a CMS or content delivery tool as needed.

Those who can no longer manage their content marketing campaign manually due to its size can rely on marketing auto­ma­tion tools. These automate content selection and dis­tri­bu­tion, thus enabling a needs-based approach to customers.

With the lead man­age­ment tool Pardot from Sales­force, marketers react to potential customers’ activ­it­ies with automated marketing measures. The tool is specially designed for the auto­ma­tion of B2B marketing processes.

Adobe’s marketing auto­ma­tion platform Marketo includes lead man­age­ment, email marketing, existing customer marketing and mobile marketing. The tool supports marketers in pri­or­it­ising potential customers based on demo­graph­ic or be­ha­vi­our­al con­sid­er­a­tions and enables them to establish long-term customer re­la­tion­ships through per­son­al­ised campaigns.

Eloqua, Oracle’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) marketing auto­ma­tion platform, helps marketers automate lead gen­er­a­tion marketing campaigns. The tool is designed for B2B marketing and supports even complex cross-channel campaigns.

Act-on is a marketing auto­ma­tion platform that enables the co­ordin­a­tion of inbound and outbound marketing campaigns through­out the entire customer lifecycle.

HubSpot is a cloud-supported all-in-one solution for marketing, sales, and customer service. The software is available in the five modules CMS Hub, Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Op­er­a­tions Hub, and Service Hub or as a software suite covering all areas.

Just as important as the research is also the pro­fes­sion­al execution of the stated subject ideas. In order to stand out of the crowd, content should not only be relevant and engaging to the user, it should also be of the highest quality pro­duc­tion-wise. The following tools help marketers to ensure the im­pec­cable quality of the text content they offer.

The add-on app Lan­gua­geTool checks texts for correct spelling and grammar. Can your text editor do that? Certainly not to the same extent as Lan­gua­geTool. The extension for MSWord, Lib­reOf­fice, Firefox, Chrome, Google Docs and many other ap­plic­a­tions re­cog­nises more than 1,800 error patterns. .

WriteWell offers copy­writers proven templates for various content formats like essays, uni­ver­sity theses, memoirs, or cover letters. The tool is primarily aimed at pupils and students but is also suitable for the creation of cor­res­pond­ing texts in content marketing.

Focused work, no chance of dis­trac­tions to increase output and quality – this isn’t easy for many copy­writers. The Forest app helps you improve your mo­tiv­a­tion and self-dis­cip­line by blocking access to classic time wasters, e.g. Facebook or Twitter, for a fixed period of time.

Grammarly is an automated proofread­er that checks for errors relating to spelling, grammar, and punc­tu­ation. The tool is able to check for over 250 types of these errors, and also offers the pos­sib­il­ity to enhance vocab­u­lary and suggest citations. There is also the option of down­load­ing the browser extension, which is com­pat­ible with Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. The basic version of the editor is available for free, with the ad­di­tion­al pos­sib­il­ity of paying for a premium version.

WriteBox is a tool for all those who get really dis­trac­ted by everything during content pro­duc­tion – even the user interface of the writing program. With the help of the online tool, you can write your texts on a com­pletely white page, without any interface. Es­pe­cially for blog posts, which are mostly kept simple and don’t need any common text editors’ ad­di­tion­al features, the program offers itself to work focused.

You don’t want to create content for your content marketing campaigns yourself? No problem. On these platforms, you will find the right copy­writers for every format, from social media to pro­fes­sion­al articles.

The online platform Text­broker brings clients and authors together. On the self-pro­claimed text exchange, you book freelance copy­writers and editors thanks to the valuation-dependent price model always matching your quality re­quire­ments and the available marketing budget.

Scripted  is an online mar­ket­place for freelance copy­writers and editors in the English-speaking world. Choose from many profiles to create your favourite marketing text, blog article, or social media post.

Zerys is an all-in-one platform for text creation. Use the tool to plan content and find suitable copy­writers or transfer the entire content creation process to a Zerys content project manager.

Once the brain­storm­ing, co­ordin­a­tion and pro­duc­tion have been completed, reality sets in. Time to bring content to the users. Depending on the focus and com­mu­nic­a­tion strategy, your text content, videos, and graphics will now find their way to your ad­vert­ising partners websites, social networks or directly to your customers via email. Various content marketing tools can help keep you on track here too.

Buffer helps marketers to target the important social media channels with content. The tool de­term­ines the ideal pub­lic­a­tion time based on user com­mit­ment and automates content dis­tri­bu­tion based on user-defined processes.

The social re­la­tion­ship platform Hootsuite enables marketers to centrally manage various social media channels, research content using hashtags, streams and keywords, rearrange them and share them with the community on a time-con­trolled basis if required. In addition, team man­age­ment functions as well as analysis and mon­it­or­ing tools are available.

With the native discovery network Outbrain, marketers promote your content on well-known pub­lish­ers’ websites. The providers include many high profile names around the world, including CNN, Slate or US Weekly.

The file hosting service Slide­Share focuses on creating and sharing present­a­tions and in­fograph­ics. The platform provides the ideal op­por­tun­ity, par­tic­u­larly in B2B, to prepare content that is tailored spe­cific­ally to your target groups while demon­strat­ing your own expertise.

In the world of marketing, nothing works without measuring your success. For that reason, analysis and mon­it­or­ing are very highly rated and valued. This means that it is no real surprise that there is a big market for tools that are meant to help measure the success of content marketing, keeping an overview of all relevant figures and stat­ist­ics. Some of the top content marketing tools include:

Google Analytics, the world’s most widely used web tracking tool, provides content providers with detailed in­form­a­tion on how Internet users interact with web content. In­teg­rated into a website, Google Analytics outputs, KPIs and website stat­ist­ics that can be used to measure the success of marketing campaigns, among other things.

Matomo (formerly known as Piwik) is an open source web analytics platform that is a good al­tern­at­ive to Google Analytics, es­pe­cially from a data pro­tec­tion per­spect­ive. Unlike the market leader, Matomo offers the option of sorting all user data on its own server.

Emplifi is used to analyse and measure the success of social media campaigns. The AI-supported social media marketing suite provides marketers with various analysis tools that can be used to measure the response to content media campaigns in social networks.

The social listening platform Talk­walk­er offers various tools with which internet trend topics can be iden­ti­fied, analysed and evaluated. The possible ap­plic­a­tions range from campaign mon­it­or­ing to crisis man­age­ment.

Chartbeat combines website tracking with social media mon­it­or­ing and provides content providers with detailed in­form­a­tion on how internet users interact with website or social media content.

Our selection shows that the market for content marketing tools is large and diverse. The range extends from browser add-ons for special ap­plic­a­tions to en­ter­prise platforms with a com­pre­hens­ive range of functions.

The trends seem to be focusing heavily on auto­ma­tion. Numerous tools are based on machine learning al­gorithms, which are ef­fect­ively sold as AI (ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence). Nev­er­the­less, a data-supported marketing campaign is only as good as the team that outlines the relevant processes and im­ple­ments the auto­mat­isms.

When it comes to selecting tools, less is often more. ‘Too many cooks spoil the broth’ – meaning that you should be wary of not involving too many software programs in the content marketing process. For bigger companies, there is also the option of an all-in-one solution. Providers like HubSpot, Eloqua, Pardot, or Marketo will attempt to guide companies through the entire marketing process. Having an overview over all important files and in­form­a­tion is a big advantage – but also one that comes at a price.