Content is definitely the future of marketing:
- Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates 3x as many leads.
- 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing.
- 41% of bloggers have said that videos are the best content format that gives them strong results from organic search.
Businesses who use the best content tools to maximize the efficiency and reach of their content will gain an edge over their competition.
In this article, we’ll take a look at 48 of the best content marketing tools that cover all aspects of your content marketing strategy.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a digital strategy that helps helps raise brand awareness, educate prospects, acquire and nurture relevant leads, and improves sales.
There are different formats used for content marketing, such as:
- Blogging
- Infographics
- Videos
- Images
- Social media posts
- Email content
- Webinars
- PDFs
- Lead magnets such as white papers
- Podcasts
As you can see, content marketing requires you to create and market different types of text, image, audio and video content formats. There are two basic steps that need to be followed:
- Create the content
- Market the content
It seems simple, but to do a great job, it takes time, know-how and effort. Thankfully, there is a lot of useful content marketing software that can help with all aspects of this task.
48 Content Marketing Tools by Category
Here are the top content marketing tools sorted by category to save you time and increase the efficiency of your work.
Writing Tools
2) Hemingway Editor
Hemingway Editor is a readability improving tool built for content writers to help them create error-free, user-friendly content.
Top Features:
- Hemingway Editor helps you in real-time by displaying unique color-coded errors in your content. For example, sentences highlighted in red means they are too complicated and thus very hard to read. It offers suggestions and simpler alternatives of complex words.
- It gives you the option to directly publish your content in WordPress, Medium and other platforms from the app itself.
- It provides a readability score for your content to help you understand your content quality. Your content should fall in the range of Grade 5-6.
- You can also export your content to various formats, including Word files, HTML, PDFs and others.
Pricing
Hemingway Editor is free to use. However, if you wish to install the desktop version of this tool, it will cost you $19.99 for a lifetime.
3) Grammarly
Grammarly is the most popular content writing tool, with over 10 million daily active users. It checks every piece of your content for grammatical errors and also gives recommendations to improve your content.
Top Features:
- You can quickly spot spelling errors in your content. Grammarly checks your content for grammar and punctuation errors like commas, fragment sentences, spacing, and alliterations.
- It provides a score for your content after analyzing the content quality and grammatical issues. The score is in the range of 0-100. The higher the score, the better the quality of your content.
- The Grammarly editor checks your content for correctness, clarity, engagement, and delivery.
- Grammarly also lets you check for plagiarism in your content after comparing it with millions of web pages on the internet.
- It helps you get the right tone in your content for a particular audience type and adjusts the level of your content (beginners or experts). For instance, it may correct “I think we could…” to “We can…” to sound more confident.
- It offers several app integrations, including MS Office. You can also download the free Chrome extension.
- It displays the word count and the total reading and speaking time of your content, which is a pretty useful feature as it provides more inclusive access.
Pricing
Grammarly has two pricing plans:
- The basic Grammarly editor is free to use.
- To use most of the features, including the plagiarism checker and to get useful content improvement suggestions, you have to choose the paid plan for $29.95 per month.
Dive Deeper: How to Write Content for People and Optimize It for Google
Keyword/Topic Research Tools
1) BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is one of the best content tools to identify relevant and popular topics. It has a database of over 5 billion articles which you can use to quickly discover content ideas in any niche to inspire your own blog posts.
Top Features:
- You can compare the content performance of the last five years to find topics and content formats that generated maximum engagement.
- BuzzSumo lets you search by domain to uncover the top content of your competitors.
- The BuzzSumo keyword tool generates thousands of useful keyword suggestions and displays the search volume, CPC, and search trends.
- You can spot viral content, see the performance of just-released content, and filter the top content based on any geographic location.
- You can check the number of links and social media shares of the best-performing content.
Pricing
BuzzSumo offers three pricing plans, which come with unlimited monthly searches:
- Pro: $99 per month for 5 users
- Plus: $179 per month for 10 users
- Large: $299 per month for 15 users
2) SEMrush Topic Research Tool
The SEMrush Topic Research tool lets you generate tons of relevant content ideas. You only need to enter your seed keyword, and the tool will display the top-performing content based on the number of social shares and backlinks.
Top Features:
- You can quickly analyze the top-performing content of your competitors just by entering their domain name.
- SEMrush helps you generate hundreds of long-tail, question-related content ideas to help you boost your website traffic.
- SEMrush also enables you to create a content marketing plan to keep track of your activities.
- To create SEO-friendly content, SEMrush offers various built-in SEO content templates along with useful recommendations according to your selected keywords.
Pricing
SEMrush offers two pricing plans:
- Guru: $199.95 per month with unlimited searches and 800 SEO content templates
- Business: $399.95 per month with unlimited searches and 2,000 SEO content templates
Dive Deeper: Why You Should Use Long-Tail Keywords in Your SEO Campaign
3) SEMrush Keywords Research Tool
The SEMrush Keywords Research Tool lets you generate thousands of keywords in seconds. With this tool, you can find keywords for both SEO and PPC. It also helps you pick the best keywords for your website by displaying the keyword’s trend.
Top Features:
- With the keyword difficulty score, you can quickly find easy-to-rank keywords for your website.
- Apart from your main keyword, SEMrush also provides various “related-keywords”.
- The SERP feature allows you to analyze how other web pages are ranking on the internet for the search query.
- To generate question-related keywords, you can use the “question keywords” feature.
Pricing
SEMrush offers three pricing plans:
- Pro: $99.95 per month
- Guru: $199.95 per month
- Business: $399.95 per month
Dive Deeper: SEO Keyword Research Made Easy in 2023
4) Ahrefs Content Explorer
Ahrefs Content Explorer helps you uncover the top-performing content in your niche with advanced filters like languages, publishing time, traffic value, social shares and number of words.
Top Features:
- Ahrefs displays the DR (Domain Rating), number of referring domains, organic traffic, traffic value and social shares of every topic that you research.
- You can also use advanced Google search operators directly in the search bar to get advanced filtered results.
- The tool lets you perform competitor content marketing analysis to uncover the strategies they are using for content marketing.
- With “Ahrefs Visual Chart,” you can check the content or topic trend of a past time period in a visual format.
- You can find broken link-building opportunities using Ahrefs’ advanced filter option.
Pricing
Ahrefs offers four pricing plans:
- Lite: $99 per month with 350 reports per week
- Standard: $179 per month with 700 reports per week
- Advanced: $399 per month with 3,500 reports per week
- Agency: $999 per month with 17,500 reports per week
5) Ahrefs Keywords Research Tool
With Ahrefs Keywords Research Explorer, you can find relevant keywords with high search volume and an estimated number of clicks. This is a top-notch keyword research tool which searches keywords on a total of 10 search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu and YouTube.
Top Features:
- Ahrefs keeps its search base up to date by using clickstream data.
- With a database of over 7 billion keywords, Ahrefs makes sure you never run out of topic ideas.
- To research keywords in various locations, this tool comes with the support of 171 countries.
- With the bulk search feature, you can conduct a search for 10,000 keywords in one go.
- Ahrefs also tells you how many times people are clicking on search results depending on the total search volume of the keyword.
Pricing
Ahrefs offers four pricing plans:
- Lite: $99 per month (with up to 175 keywords report per week)
- Standard: $179 (with up to 700 keywords report per week)
- Advanced: $399 (with up to 1,400 keywords report per week)
- Agency: $999 (with up to 7,000 keywords report per week)
Dive Deeper: 30 Ways to Come Up with Great Ideas for Your Blog Posts
6) Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is an easy-to-use tool that is especially suitable for newbies. Unlike Ahrefs or SEMrush that can be confusing to use, Ubersuggest offers limited options, and the interface is beginner-friendly.
Top Features:
- Ubersuggest displays top content with metrics like page title, URL, total visits, and social counts (Facebook and Twitter).
- You can apply some quick filters like include/exclude keywords, or Facebook and Pinterest shares.
- It also lets you check how many keywords are ranking for any particular web page.
- You can check the backlinks of the top-ranking web pages.
Pricing
Ubersuggest offers three pricing plans:
- Individual: $12 per month with 2,000 content ideas.
- Business: $20 per month with 5,000 content ideas.
- Enterprise: $40 per month with 10,000 content ideas.
Competitor Research Tools
1) Similarweb
Similarweb is an online competitor analysis platform which lets you analyze your competitor’s website traffic data.
Top Features:
- Similarweb displays both the global and country rank of any website.
- You can check the geographical data of your competitor’s website, which helps you to track the country that is driving the most traffic.
- You can also check the top referring websites to your competitor’s domain.
- Similarweb displays both organic and paid keyword data for the searched domain.
- You can check the social shares of your competitor’s website, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social channels.
- You can also find the interests of your competitors’ target audience.
Pricing
Similarweb is a free tool to use. However, you can also pay for an enterprise plan with extra benefits like unlimited searches and three years of data. Contact the sales team at Similarweb to get a pricing quote of the enterprise plan.
Dive Deeper: Beginner’s Guide to Discovering the Competition’s SEO Strategy
2) BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a must-have competitor research tool to reach your content marketing goals. With this tool, you can discover the content of your competitors that is performing best on the web. BuzzSumo is trusted by thousands of marketers, including top-notch companies like Expedia, HubSpot, BuzzFeed, and The Telegraph.
Top Features:
- The content research feature lets you uncover the best-performing content of your competitors so that you can use similar topics in your content campaign (known as the Skyscraper Technique).
- BuzzSumo has the world’s largest database of 5 billion articles which you can browse to find different types of content.
- To perform in-depth content research, BuzzSumo enables you to check content trends of the last five years.
- It notifies you by sending an alert whenever a competitor’s content acquires new links on the web.
- Apart from best-performing content, you can check the competitors’ most-shared content.
Pricing
BuzzSumo offers three pricing plans:
- Pro: $99 per month (for 5 projects)
- Plus: $179 per month (for 10 projects)
- Large: $299 per month (for 30 projects)
Dive Deeper: The Skyscraper Technique: How to Build High-Quality Backlinks to Your Content
3) SEMrush Content Marketing Platform
SEMrush doesn’t need any introduction; it’s one of the most popular marketing tools in the industry. Apart from SEO, SEMrush offers a complete content marketing platform.
Top Features:
- With the content gap feature, SEMrush enables you to find content pieces that are generating results for your competitors.
- You can check the brand mentions of your competitors and identify resources that mention them. You can then approach such resources to acquire mentions for your website.
- With the post tracking feature, SEMrush allows you to analyze the performance of the articles published by your competitors on their website.
Pricing
SEMrush two pricing plans:
- Guru: $199.95 (with 800 SEO content templates)
- Business: $399.95 (with 2,000 SEO content templates)
Dive Deeper: What Is Content Optimization? (And How to Ace It!)
Influencer Marketing Tools (Finding and Using Influencers)
1) Upfluence
Upfluence is a smart influencer marketing platform to find the top influencers in your niche. With a database of over 4 million influencers, Upfluence is the best tool to expand your influencer network. It is trusted by thousands of brands, including Amazon, Kayak, Verizon and ASICS.
Top Features:
- With Upfluence, you can find influencers for almost every social media platform including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.
- You can search influencers by social media platform, keywords, countries, audience and community size.
- The export feature enables you to create and export the influencers list in CSV or Excel format.
- To make it easy, Upfluence allows you to outreach influencers by directly messaging them, or you can also bulk email with various templates to speed up your process.
- You can check the detailed profiles of influencers and compare their ratings before selecting the right one for your goals.
- To filter only the best influencer, you can track and calculate your ROI, which helps you identify the influencer who is performing the best for your business.
- Upfluence offers secure payments in over 200 countries and 135 currencies worldwide.
Pricing
To get pricing details, you need to contact the Upfluence team.
Dive Deeper: The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your Business with Influencer Marketing
2) Heepsy
Heepsy is a tool designed for marketers to find potential influencers in every industry. It was founded in 2016 with the idea to help companies reach the influencers that best fits their needs. After Upfluence, Heepsy is the second-most popular influencer marketing platform.
Top Features:
- You can quickly filter and scan the profiles of hundreds of influencers from a database of over 7 million profiles worldwide.
- Heepsy offers in-depth influencer statistics of millions of profiles, including authenticity score, audience demographics, engagement level and follower count.
- The influencer search tool lets you filter influencers on the basis of category, location, demographics and engagement level.
- You can find the public contact details of influencers and send them your work proposal. You can even download the list as a CSV or XLS file.
Pricing
Heepsy offers four pricing plans:
- Free plan: with limited search results
- Starter: $49 per month (for small campaigns)
- Business: $169 per month (for medium campaigns)
- Gold: $269 per month (for large campaigns)
3) Mention
Mention is a social media monitoring and management tool to manage the social reputation and social engagement of your business with ease.
Top Features:
- Mention offers an influencer dashboard to connect with various influencers to build your business relationship.
- You can create a custom campaign to collaborate with several influencers in a short period of time.
- You can also monitor your competitors’ influencer marketing strategies and find opportunities to improve your own marketing efforts.
- Mention displays “Influencer Scores” for every influencer, which helps you pick the best profile.
Pricing
Mention offers three pricing plans:
- Solo: $25 per month with 5,000 mentions and 5 social accounts
- Pro: $83 per month with 10,000 mentions and 10 social accounts
- Enterprise: $450+ per month with 100,000 mentions and unlimited social accounts
Email Marketing Tools
1) Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a top-notch, all-in-one email marketing platform with lots of unique and advanced features.
Top Features:
- With Mailchimp, you can create beautiful emails to get better engagement rates.
- Mailchimp offers a drag-and-drop email builder with lots of pre-designed templates.
- You can check real-time analytics for your email campaigns and see how they are performing.
- The “transactional emails” feature lets you send transactional emails (such as order confirmations) directly from your Mailchimp dashboard.
- It comes with a content studio where you can store and manage all your files, including images, videos, content, etc.
- The marketing automation feature lets you automate email marketing by sending emails based on pre-defined rules.
Pricing
Mailchimp offers four pricing plans:
- Free plan: up to 2,000 contacts
- Essentials: $10.25 per month (up to 50,000 contacts)
- Standard: $15.31 per month (up to 100,000 contacts)
- Premium: $3.6.13 per month (up to 200,000+ contacts)
Dive Deeper: How to Use Personalization to Increase the Impact of Email Marketing
2) Sendinblue
Sendinblue is a SaaS software that was founded in 2007 with the goal to provide the best marketing tools to help brands improve their marketing efforts. From email marketing to CRM, Sendinblue offers all digital marketing tools in one place.
Top Features:
- Sendinblue comes with a drag-and-drop editor to help you create beautiful and engaging emails.
- You can fully personalize your email with customized texts based on your campaign goals.
- This tool provides an A/B testing feature to test the effectiveness of your emails.
- You can also create automated emails with Sendinblue’s marketing automation tool, which helps you to proactively convert your prospects into leads.
- With unlimited lists and contacts, you can create customized emails as you need.
Pricing
Sendinblue offers three pricing plans:
- Free plan: You can send up to 300 emails per day
- Lite: $25 per month (up to 100,000 emails)
- Premium: $65 per month (up to 1M emails)
Dive Deeper: SaaS Email Marketing: 12 Best Strategies to Follow
3) Aweber
Aweber is a powerful email marketing software that automates most of your email marketing needs. It is especially designed for small businesses to create amazing-looking emails within minutes.
Top Features:
- Aweber comes with a “Smart Designer” where you get various AI-powered email templates to create stunning emails automatically.
- You can also create high-converting landing pages to assist your email campaign needs.
- You can automatically send emails as newsletters to your customers or website visitors to let them know about your new blog post or content.
- Aweber offers powerful analytics and reporting features to measure the effectiveness of your email campaigns.
Pricing
Aweber offers several pricing plans:
- Free plan: with a limitation of up to 500 subscribers
- Pro plans: start from $26.15 per month for up to 2,500 subscribers and goes up to $146.15 for 25,000 subscribers. If your requirements are more than 25,000 subscribers, you must contact Aweber’s sales team.
Dive Deeper: 10 Easy Ways to Get Started with Marketing AI (Artificial Intelligence)
Content Marketing Tools for Social Media
1) Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media marketing and management platform which helps you market your content via social media. Hootsuite is trusted by over 800 companies from the “Fortune 1000” list like Marketo and Melia.
Top Features:
- You can create and schedule posts for multiple platforms using a single dashboard.
- It lets you connect with over 20 social networks, including Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.
- Hootsuite provides a single inbox for all messages so that you can engage with your customers in one place.
- You can easily fill in your content gaps and collaborate in real time.
- It lets you measure the performance of your campaigns with powerful analytics. You can also create custom reports for your clients.
- You can manage your social and search ads using one platform to simplify your campaign process.
Pricing
Hootsuite five pricing plans:
- Free plan: where you can connect up to 3 social profiles and schedule 30 messages
- Professional: $49 per month for up to 10 social profiles
- Team: $129 per month for up to 20 social profiles
- Business: $599 per month for up to 35 social profiles
- Enterprise: For up to 35 social profiles. Contact them for pricing.
2) Buffer
Buffer is another popular social media tool that helps you improve user engagements on your content. Trusted by over 75,000 companies, including Shopify, Spotify and other big brands, Buffer is undoubtedly one of the best social engagement platforms to amplify your content marketing efforts.
Top Features:
- You can easily plan and publish your posts for all leading social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
- Buffer’s special Instagram feature lets you schedule targeted posts directly to Instagram.
- A single dashboard lets you manage your content team. You can draft, approve, sync and share content between your team members.
- By using Buffer, you get in-depth insights into how your followers are growing, what the engagement rate is, and what the overall post reach is.
- Buffer lets you create custom reports with your brand logo to make them look more professional for when you share them with your clients.
Pricing
Buffer offers four pricing plans:
- Free plan: you can schedule 10 posts with three social profiles
- Pro: $15 per month (up to 8 social channels and 100 scheduled posts)
- Premium: $65 (up to 8 social channels and 2,000 scheduled posts)
- Business: $99 (up to 25 social channels and 2,000 scheduled posts)
3) SocialPilot
SocialPilot is another widely used social media scheduling tool with advanced and unique features which let you increase the reach of your social posts without any hassle. From small businesses to large enterprises, anyone can use SocialPilot to improve their content marketing efforts.
Top Features:
- You can connect 50+ social accounts to start drafting and schedule posts with ease.
- With the “Social Inbox” feature, you can message, comment, and do other tasks in real-time.
- You can manage your social media team and their work, like giving them tasks, collaborating on their issues, and providing approvals using a single dashboard.
- To save you time, SocialPilot enables you to bulk schedule up to 500 posts for upcoming weeks and months.
- You can also share PDF reports with your clients, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google My Business analytics.
- With SocialPilot’s browser extension, you can share your posts from WordPress or other platforms directly from your browser without even logging in to the SocialPilot dashboard.
Pricing
SocialPilot offers a free 14-day trial and three pricing plans:
- Professional: $30 per month (up to 25 social media accounts)
- Small Team: $50 (up to 50 social media accounts)
- Agency: $100 (up to 100 social media accounts)
Dive Deeper: How to Boost Your Social Media Marketing Efforts with Content Marketing Tools
4) Curata
Curata is a content curation tool to increase your content velocity. With the help of this tool, you can discover, curate and share relevant content from the web.
Top Features:
- Curata offers two software solutions, the content curation software and the content marketing platform. The content curation software fuels the content marketing engine by curating the best content from the web and social media.
- The software is powered by artificial intelligence. It learns your content preferences as you use it so that you don’t waste time scanning irrelevant content.
- You can publish and share content with one click which saves a lot of time.
- The editorial calendar lets you plan your content easily. You can set deadlines, add channels and tag your team to keep everything on the same page.
- Curata offers easy integrations with your existing CMS platforms in less than 40 minutes so that you don’t have to start from the beginning.
- Its powerful analytics lets you see the top-performing content and channels so that you can make data-driven decisions to generate more business leads.
Pricing
Curata does not offer fixed pricing plans. You can book a demo for custom pricing by contacting the sales team.
Video Creation Tools
1) Animoto
Animoto is a drag-and-drop video maker to create stunning videos for your business for free.
Top Features:
- Animoto comes with a library of over one million images and video clips.
- You can also upload your own images and videos to use on your project.
- It provides hundreds of copyright-free songs that you can use in your videos.
- You can easily add text on your videos by selecting from over 40 professional fonts.
- To make your video more professional, Animoto allows you to add your brand name as a watermark on your videos.
- You can share your created video on your social platforms or download it to your computer to share it with anyone you want.
Pricing
Animoto comes with a free plan with its own branding. If you want to create your own branded videos, you can switch to any one of the paid plans:
- Professional: $15 per month
- Team: $39 per month
Dive Deeper: 17 Engaging Video Content Types that People Love to Watch
2) Biteable
Biteable lets you create instant videos with its huge collection of ready-to-use templates. You can create videos for Facebook, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Instagram and other social media sites.
Top Features:
- Biteable offers hundreds of pre-designed video scenes and templates to create stunning videos in minutes.
- You can upload your own photos, clips, tracks and text, and use them on your videos.
- Biteable provides hundreds of royalty-free music tracks to add to your videos to make them more professional.
- You can share your videos with your target audience with a single click.
- The photo video maker lets you convert any photo into videos. You can even create animated videos in just a few clicks.
Pricing
Similar to Animoto, the free plan of Biteable includes watermark exports. If you wish to create branded videos then you need to upgrade to one of these paid plans:
- Plus Plan: $29 per month
- Ultimate Plan: $99 per month
Dive Deeper: The Ultimate Guide to Video Marketing
3) Flexclip
With millions of stock media, including images, music and videos, Flexclip is one of the best video editing tools to create videos, movies, and even slideshows for your business.
Top Features:
- Flexclip lets you convert your photos into videos by combining pictures and music. It accepts pictures in various formats like JPG, PNG, BMP and GIF.
- You can record your voice and add it to your own videos.
- It also lets you rotate your videos 90 degrees without any hassle, and you can upload videos in various formats like MP4 and MOV.
- You can also add your brand logo on videos to help increase your brand awareness.
Pricing
Flexclip offers four pricing plans:
- Free plan: create a maximum of 12 videos
- Basic: $4.99 per month (up to 50 videos)
- Plus: $7.99 per month (up to 1,000 videos)
- Business: $19.99 per month (unlimited videos)
Design Tools
1) Canva
Canva is the most popular free designing tool to create images, logos, infographics, banners and other visual projects. It comes with pre-designed, ready-to-use templates which makes it easier for you to create without any designing skills.
Top Features:
- Canva allows users to create a team and let them add or edit visuals from anywhere. The team can also communicate with each other.
- It comes with several photo effects and filters to make your photos attractive and unique.
- You can simply drag and drop and use shapes, icons and thousands of free images to create stunning designs.
- You can add different styles of photo frames to your pictures to make them more professional.
- Canva also provides ads templates for various social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others.
- You can also add text to your images with beautiful fonts or use formatting options like italics and bold.
Pricing
Canva is a free tool to use but with limited free elements like templates, images, logo, etc. To use their full features, choose one of their premium plans:
- Pro: $12.95 per month with millions of images, logo, videos, etc.
- Enterprise: $30 per month with unlimited storage and 24/7 customer support.
2) Piktochart
With over 8 million active users worldwide, Piktochart is one of the best designing tools. It comes with an easy-to-use interface, which helps even beginners create great visuals such as infographics, presentations, reports and flyers. With a drag-and-drop interface, you can add various elements to your design like graphs and charts.
Top Features:
- You have access to 800 ready-to-use templates for infographic, presentation, social media and reports.
- Piktochart comes with a unique feature in which it extracts colors from your brand logo and adds it to the background automatically.
- It allows you to upload your own images and videos into Piktochart’s library to use on your designs.
- You can download your created designs in various formats like PDF, JPG and PNG.
Pricing
Piktochart offers three pricing plans:
- Free plan: with 40 MB storage
- Pro: $29 per month with unlimited HD images, and 1GB storage space
- Team: $99 per month with up to 5 team members capability with 1GB space for each team member
Dive Deeper: Why Infographics Are STILL the Best Content Investment You’ll Ever Make
3) Adobe Spark
Adobe Spark is a newly launched design tool provided by Adobe. With Adobe Spark, you can create stunning graphics, social media images, short videos, and even web pages. You can transform your ideas into appealing visual stories with this tool.
Top Features:
- Adobe Spark comes with the largest library of images, icons, fonts and other visuals.
- You can upload your pictures from local devices or cloud storage in just a single click.
- Spark Video lets you create compelling video stories to boost your content marketing efforts.
- This tool also offers an Android app so that you can create designs from anywhere.
- You can easily share your graphics directly to social channels or email it to your colleagues.
Pricing
Adobe Spark offers three pricing plans:
- Starter: Free (thousands of free images and icons)
- Individual: $9.99 per month (full features)
- Team: $19.99 per month (full features + admin features)
4) QuotesCover
QuotesCover is the best online quote maker with tons of features to help you create engaging quotes. It is a simple, fast and secure tool that translates your text into beautiful visual graphics.
Top Features:
- With QuotesCover, you can create quote images in any dimension and resolution you wish.
- It comes with all the essential tools like Instagram carousel maker and profile pic border.
- Image processing is done 100% on your computer so your privacy is protected and you also get faster speed.
- All the fonts and backgrounds are free for commercial use.
- You can create quotes for almost every platform, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.
- QuotesCover offers a collection of thousands of pre-build quotes in several different categories.
Pricing
QuotesCover offers two pricing options:
- Free: with all the essential features but it comes with advertisements
- Pro Version: $2.90 per month without advertisements along with instant image downloads, the ability to save templates, etc.
5) PicMonkey
PicMonkey is an online photo editor that helps you create stunning images for Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and other platforms. You can edit pre-designed images with multiple editing options like filters, backgrounds and other advanced editing tools.
Top Features:
- This photo editor lets you create high-end images with features such as the background eraser which allows you to remove the background of your images with ease.
- You can choose from thousands of templates and also resize your images instantly.
- PicMonkey provides different graphics, including icons, shapes, emojis, clip arts, logos, patterns, vectors, symbols and illustrations.
- A collection of touch-up tools lets you retouch photos. You can remove red eyes, whiten teeth, fix blemishes and wrinkles, and apply digital makeup.
Pricing
PicMonkey offers three pricing plans:
- Basic: $7.99 per month with 1GB of cloud storage
- Pro: $12.99 per month with unlimited storage
- Team: $33.99 per month with unlimited storage and team management
Project Management/Collaboration Tools
1) Trello
Trello is a project management and team collaboration tool to organize your content marketing projects easily. With the help of this tool, you can assign different tasks to your team members and track every aspect of its progress.
Top Features:
- You can create different boards for different content activities and tag your team members.
- Trello is an easy-to-use drag-and-drop platform.
- You can also add your attachments in any block to let your team members quickly see the important documents.
- You can set specific timing for each task you create, which enables the employee to complete the given task by the due date.
Pricing
Trello offers three pricing plans:
- Free: Unlimited cards, up to 10 boards and unlimited storage (10MB/file)
- Business Class: $12.50 per month and includes everything in the Free plan plus additional features like different board views, admin and security features and unlimited storage (250MB/file)
- Enterprise: Includes everything in the Business Class plan plus additional features like organization wide permissions and multi-board guests. Contact them for pricing.
2) ClickUp
ClickUp is a cloud-based project management tool to collaborate with team members virtually. It is trusted by more than 100,000 businesses of all sizes. From project management to spreadsheets and goal tracking, ClickUp helps you run your business smoothly.
Top Features:
- With ClickUp, you can see the real-time editing of other team members without collisions.
- You can mention use, task, and doc using the ‘@’ symbol to refer to the right person, task or document easily.
- ClickUp comes with hundreds of emojis to help you in conversation with team members.
- You can also add various permissions such as view, comment, create, edit, and admin.
- Easily switch between list view, board view, box view, calendar view, Gantt view, doc view, chat view, etc.
- Use this tool for project management, to-do lists, spreadsheets, goal tracking, time tracking, etc.
Pricing
ClickUp offers two pricing plans:
- Free plan: with unlimited tasks, users, and up to 100 MB storage
- Unlimited plan: $5 per month for more storage, advanced integration, and other features
Dive Deeper: How to Use an Organized Workflow to Stay on Top of Your Content Marketing
3) Asana
Asana is a SaaS platform that provides excellent solutions for team collaboration and project management.
Top Features:
- With Asana, you can create lists, boards, calendars and forms for better team management.
- You can use “Timeline” to create a project plan to see how all the elements of your project fit together.
- Asana lets you create a custom list with rules to automate your work and save lots of time.
- You can create forms to make it easy to request work and receive the details your team needs.
- Asana also allows you to monitor the status of your project with a progress percentage and time period.
- It displays the work load of every team member which helps you track which team members have a higher workload.
- Asana comes with over 100 useful integrations like Google Drive, Tableau and Microsoft Teams.
Pricing
Asana offers three pricing plans:
- Basic: Free (unlimited tasks, projects and up to 100 MB upload per file)
- Premium: $10.99 per month (more features like timelines, forms and reporting)
- Business: $24.99 per month (everything in Premium, plus advanced integrations with Salesforce, Adobe Creative Cloud, Tableau, Power BI)
- Enterprise: Call them for a quote.
Dive Deeper: 5 Common Marketing Workflows That Will Save You Time
Communication Tools (Internal and External)
1) Flock
Flock is a communication and team messaging platform. With Flock, you can collaborate with all the team members in your organization in one place to easily chat and share information with each other.
Top Features:
- You can start a direct chat or group conversation with anyone on your team.
- Apart from text conversation, Flock also allows you to do video conferencing in just a single click.
- You can share multiple files with your team members from your local device using a drag-and-drop interface.
- Flock comes with a powerful search option so you can find anything from messages to documents to links.
- By using the guest feature, you can give access to your work to your clients.
- Flock also offers an “announcement channel” which is used to share important news or updates with the team.
- You can set reminders of work so that you don’t miss any deadlines.
- Flock provides various integrations such as Google Drive, Calendar, and Github to help you keep your projects in sync.
Pricing
Flock comes with a free plan with . If you need more storage then you can opt for any of the below plans:
- Starter: Free (unlimited group chats, 5GB storage space per team and other basic features)
- Pro: $4.50 per month per user (with 10GB storage and group video calls)
- Enterprise: Call for a quote (with 20GB and multiple team admins)
2) Slack
Slack is an online messaging platform that can be used on multiple devices and helps you communicate with your team members in a better way. Trusted by over 750,000 companies, Slack is one of the most popular online communication platforms offering advanced data protection.
Top Features:
- With Slack, you don’t need to communicate with each team member separately. You can create multi-person direct messages or topic-specific group channels.
- Turn off all notifications except any that mention your name so that you aren’t distracted while you work.
- The past chat history feature keeps all your conversations secure so that you can refer to them if and when you need to.
- Easily upload docs, images and links. Use the emoji library to quickly respond to any comment.
- Slack comes with a mobile app to communicate with your team on the go.
- You can also make video calls using the group meeting feature.
- Slack offers easy integration with third-party video conferencing apps like Zoom and Microsoft Teams.
Pricing
Slack offers three pricing plans:
- Free plan: with up to 10 integrations, video calling, and up to 10,000 messages
- Standard: $8 per month
- Plus: $15 per month
- Enterprise: Call for a quote
Dive Deeper: 8 Slack Communities Every Marketer & SEO Should Join
Content Management System (CMS) Tools
1) WordPress
WordPress is the most popular content management system and comes with various features and plugins to help people manage their website online. It is an open-source software which powers more than 38% of websites on the internet.
Top Features:
- WordPress offers ready-to-use templates for all categories of websites.
- You can easily create posts and pages, and insert media like images, videos and documents.
- You can add team members to give access to your website with different roles like admin, moderator, etc.
- To help you customize your website, WordPress offers thousands of free plugins.
- WordPress supports a total of 70 languages, including English and Spanish.
- It has a community forum where you can ask different questions to fix any error on your site.
Pricing
WordPress is free to use, but you need to pay for the premium themes and plugins.
Dive Deeper: 10 SEO Approaches to Bring Traffic to a WordPress Site
2) HubSpot
HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing tool. Apart from marketing software, HubSpot also offers an advanced CMS to help marketers manage their website without any hassle.
Top Features:
- You can create multi-language content with easy migration.
- It offers 24/7 excellent phone support to solve all your queries.
- The CMS lets you create and manage personalized web pages for different visitors.
- The software automatically offers SEO recommendations to improve your website.
- It also offers support for hundreds of plugins, including analytics and marketing.
Pricing
HubSpot offers two premium pricing options:
- Professional: $300 per month (with the capability to add up to 30 currencies)
- Enterprise: $900 per month (with the capability to add up to 200 currencies)
Dive Deeper: 10 CMS Features that Make Your Content Marketing Strategy Easier
3) Joomla
Joomla is the best alternative to WordPress CMS with over 110M downloads.
Top Features:
- Joomla comes with over 8,000 extensions to help you customize your website depending on your needs.
- It comes with a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor which allows you to create content without any knowledge of coding.
- It offers an extensive library of documents, including tutorials, users questions and other useful resources.
Pricing
Joomla is free to use.
4) Shopify
Shopify is one of the best e-commerce platforms in the world. It makes it easy to sell your products online and take your business to the next level.
Top Features:
- Shopify comes with 70+ professional and pre-designed themes to display your products.
- It lets you customize the content of your store by providing access to the HTML and CSS.
- With a free SSL certificate, Shopify makes your online store secure resulting in improved online visibility.
- It provides more than 100 payment gateways, including PayPal, iDEAL and others.
- Shopify offers an easy translation of your content in 50 languages.
- It offers unlimited bandwidth with email forwarding in their web hosting.
- It comes with a free mobile app for effectively managing your orders and product inventory.
- Shopify also offers 24×7 support with forums, support teams, usage guides and Shopify experts.
Pricing
Shopify offers three pricing plans:
- Basic Shopify: $29 per month with 2.0% transaction fees.
- Shopify: $79 per month with 1% transaction fees.
- Advanced Shopify: $299 per month with 0.5% transaction fees.
Dive Deeper: Top 19 Shopify SEO Plugins for Your E-commerce Site
5) Blogger
Blogger is a blog management platform provided by Google. It is the best CMS for beginners because it is pretty easy to use.
Top Features:
- Blogger allows users to connect their custom domain from various domain name providers, including GoDaddy and Namecheap.
- It is very easy to use with a simple and beautiful user interface. Even if someone doesn’t know about CMS platforms, they can still work on Blogger easily.
- It offers various SEO settings and options to optimize your website for search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
- It is very fast and anyone can create a site in minutes without any knowledge of coding.
- Blogger comes with zero downtime issues, which means your website will always be active.
- With Blogger, you also don’t have to worry about hacking attempts to your site, because Google itself protects it.
- Most of the Blogger widgets and templates are free to use.
- It also comes with built-in analytics, where you can track your website traffic data to maximize the performance of your blog.
Pricing
Blogger is a free CMS platform.
SEO Tools
1) Yoast
Yoast is an SEO plugin available for popular CMS platforms like WordPress and Drupal. Yoast offers various advanced features that make it very easy to optimize your website content to rank higher in search engines.
Top Features:
- You can add your primary keyword for every post or page and Yoast will automatically scan it and grade how good your content is optimized for that keyword.
- Yoast offers internal link suggestions according to your content which helps to optimize the internal linking structure of your entire website..
- You can create an optimized URL slug, meta title and description for every blog post you publish.
- Yoast provides recommendations on content to increase user engagement.
- This plugin makes it easy to remove duplicate content issues by applying canonical links in your content.
- You can also link your Google Search Console account with your Yoast account.
- Yoast comes with great support and various resources to help new users manage their site with ease.
Pricing
Yoast is free to use, but it also offers a premium version with advanced features such as redirection manager, interlinking suggestion, a preview of the page on social media, etc., which costs $89 per year for one site. It also has other SEO plugins specifically for video SEO, local SEO, WooCommerce SEO.
Dive Deeper: 10 Effective SEO Techniques to Drive Organic Traffic in 2023
2) PageOptimize Pro
PageOptimize Pro is an on-page SEO tool that helps you optimize your content for better organic rankings. It analyzes your competitors and provides actionable data to make changes on your content for a boost in the SERPs.
Top Features:
- The POP Chrome extension lets you easily make changes on every page for increased rankings.
- PageOptimize Pro also helps you add target keywords in your content and tells you how many times to include them.
- You also get recommendations on your website structure to boost rankings.
- It lets you add LSI terms, suggests a word count range to outrank your competitors, and apply schema for increasing the CTR or page relevance.
Pricing
PageOptimize Pro offers a 7-day free trial and three pricing plans:
- Basic: $20 per month (12 reports)
- Premium: $30 per month (25 reports)
- Unlimited: $39 per month (unlimited reports)
3) Copywritely
Copywritely is an SEO content analysis tool for content optimization. Copywritely helps you make improvements so that your page or post is SEO friendly in order to boost rankings, and displays SEO-related issues and in-depth, actionable tips on how to fix them and update your content.
Top Features:
- Copywritely offers a plagiarism checker which lets you check your content for any duplicate content on the web.
- It provides one of the best grammar checker tools which detects and suggests grammar fixes.
- With Copywritely, you can also improve the readability score of your content and make it easy to read.
- It offers a “Keyword Density Checker” to help you add exact keywords in the right places.
- Copywritely also comes with a Keyword SERP checker with which you can identify your competitors’ most relevant content.
- With “Article Rewriter,” it makes it easy to rewrite and paraphrase any content from the web without plagiarizing it and publish on other platforms.
- Copywritely also displays the word count of your content with the time it takes to read the content displayed.
Pricing
Copywritely offers four pricing plans:
- Startup: $18 per month (check up to 50 articles)
- Personal: $45 per month (check up to 200 articles)
- Company: $35 per month (check up to 150 articles)
- Enterprise: $67 per month (check up to 300 articles)
Dive Deeper: B2B SEO: How to Rank Your Business Website Higher in Search
4) Clearscope
Clearscope is content optimization software for SEO professionals. With the help of Clearscope, you can drive massive traffic to your site by optimizing pages for SEO.
Top Features:
- Clearscope offers a real-time content editor where you can paste in your content and see your content grade along with suggestions to improve it.
- This AI-powered tool automatically generates a list of relevant terms to add to your content in order to increase the relevancy of your content.
- Clearscope also checks the top 30 organic results based on your keywords to check the readability scores of your competitors.
Pricing
Clearscope offers two pricing plans:
- Essentials: $170 per month (with 20 report credits)
- Professional: $350 per month (with 50+ report credits)
Dive Deeper: SEO Keyword Research Made Easy in 2023
5) SimilarContent
SimilarContent helps you increase your content performance with unique features like “keyword coverage score.” It is trusted by over thousands of writers who use it regularly to optimize their content.
Top Features:
- With a built-in editor, you can improve your “content relevance score” with ease.
- SimilarContent provides you with a prediction percentage on how your content will rank on Google.
- This tool also tells you how many backlinks you need to rank your content on Google’s top 10 results.
- You get a real-time analysis which measures your content relevancy against your competitors.
- SimilarContent also provides related LSI keywords for a search query and tells how many times you need to use them in your content.
Pricing
SimilarContent offers three pricing plans:
- Starter: $9.99 per month
- Business: $19.99 per month
- Agency: $49.99 per month
Dive Deeper: What Is Content Optimization? (And How to Ace It!)
Analytics Tools
1) Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a website and app analysis tool provided by Google. It is a must-have for every marketer because it displays crucial information like traffic channels, audience cohort, top-performing pages and countries, ranked keywords, and other useful analytics data.
Top Features:
- Google Analytics let you check the top-performing pages on your website so that you can continue to optimize them to maintain traffic consistency.
- You can create different goals such as destination, events, duration and pages per session that lets you track your content performance.
- You can easily check which page or post is helping to maximize the revenue on your site.
- The demographics section displays users by city, gender, age, interests, and language.
- You can easily check target users by country, their engagement rate, and the number of engaged sessions per user.
- The Acquisition report lets you see the top channels that are driving visits to your content.
Pricing
Google Analytics is free to use.
Dive Deeper: Google Analytics for Content Marketing: How to Track and Improve Your ROI
2) Hotjar
Hotjar is a heatmap and behavior analytics tool that helps you understand user activity on your website. Hotjar is trusted by over 680,000 organizations in 184 countries.
Top Features:
- Hotjar displays various heatmaps such as click, move, and scroll.
- It records user behavior and actions on your website, which you can see at a later time to optimize the different areas on your site.
- You can also add surveys on your website to better understand the content needs of your visitors.
- Hotjar tracks on every device including desktop, mobile and tablet.
- It also enables visitors to leave instant feedback by using smileys.
- You can easily export survey responses and recorded heatmaps to share with your clients.
Pricing
Hotjar offers a free plan which collects data from 2,000 page views each day and allows up to 300 recordings. However, if your website is getting more than 2,000 page views per day, then you have to choose a paid plan starting at $39 per month. There are several plans for Personal, Business and Agency categories.
Dive Deeper: 9 Alternatives That Are Just as Good as Google Analytics
3) Matomo
Matomo is the best alternative to Google Analytics that aims to secure customers’ data. Matomo is trusted by over 1 million websites across 190 countries. It is an open-source tool with 100% accurate analytics data.
Top Features:
- You can directly import your Google Analytics data to your Matomo account without any hassle.
- Matomo offers heatmap analysis and session recordings to understand your audience better.
- The combined keywords report lets you see all SEO keywords across all search engines that are sending traffic to your website.
- You can even filter the keywords on the basis of image and video. Moreover, you can easily see which keywords are driving traffic from Google, Bing and Yahoo.
- The powerful A/B testing feature lets you test your headline, forms, links, fonts, color schemes, layouts, and literally everything to measure your content performance.
Pricing
Matomo is free to use if hosted on your own servers. But if hosted on Matomo’s servers then you need to select one of these plans:
- Cloud Essential: INR 1,690 per month
- Cloud Business: INR 2,590 per month
Conclusion
Content marketing is not an easy task. Use the power of effective content marketing tools to measure your content performance, apply positive changes, and level up your content strategy to generate the highest ROI.
