16 Content Marketing Tools For Extraordinary Results

With countless competitors and a lot of noise online, success in digital is all about standing out from the crowd. For many businesses, extraordinary content is the key to extraordinary results.

B2B companies that post at least 11 blogs per month get three times more traffic than those that post 1. Imagine how many of those visitors could translate to paying customers?

Great content leads to higher engagement, which ultimately generates revenue. You can’t waste your time on creating content that doesn’t convert. It’s time to build out a thriving editorial calendar that’s bursting with the kind of irresistible content that builds trust with your ideal customers.

That’s where these tools come in.

With these 11 tools, you can simplify your content creation process and create a more effective content marketing strategy.

16 tools for your content marketing strategy

1. Almighty Press

Almighty Press is a great ideation tool because it gives you an idea of what’s about to trend.

You can use the tool to build up a list of content ideas that align with trending topics and keywords.

Almighty Press pulls lots of its content from major news outlets, so it can give you an idea of breaking trends and topics.

Even if the results don’t directly relate to your business, you can use them to come up with ideas that you can relate to the trending topics.

The tool also offers scheduling tools that help you to keep track of your content strategy.

2. Feedly

The news is always a great place to start if you’re looking for fresh content ideas based on information that’s already engaging people.

Like Almighty Press, Feedly curates news from tons of different sources.

It’s a little different though. Instead of filtering your results based on keywords, you’ll choose from several news category channels.

Image source: Feedly

Better yet, you can filter the content you see based on who produces it.

It’s essentially a massive RSS feed that keeps you up to date on trending topics. You may also be able to use it to keep track of what your competitors publish.

Here’s a pro tip.

Generally speaking, the content that finds its way onto these feeds is content that’s converting. It’s driving engagement and getting people talking.

If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t make it onto the tool.

Use it to figure out how others structure content to make it more appealing to readers — and thereby engineer your next marketing campaigns to hit the mark.

3. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is another great tool for figuring out what your audience wants:

A quick search for one of your keywords reveals a bunch of content from your competitors.

However, it’s the engagement stats that you should pay most attention

Buzzsumo tells you who’s writing about what in your niche. Then, it shows you how people are engaging with that content.

High engagement numbers mean a topic is trending. Use this info to time the release of your content for maximum engagement.

Buzzsumo also helps you figure out who the key influencers are in your industry.

Use what they’re doing to inform your own strategy. You may even try and collaborate on a content piece with them, to build the buzz faster.

4. CoSchedule’s Headline Analyser

80% of people never make it past the headline of a piece of content. They take one look and decide it’s not for them.

CoSchedule’s Headline Analyser helps you to shore up your headlines so that they grab people’s attention and keep them reading.

It analyses a number of metrics, including grammar, structure, and the use of powerful/emotional words in your headline.

You get a score out of 100 and a bunch of other results too. The tool tells you about the sentiment the headline conveys and how it will look in Google’s search results.

Use it to craft strong headlines that stand out from everything else in the SERPs.

5. Power Thesaurus

This is the tool for you if you feel like your content comes across a little generic. It’s also great if you’re prone to repetition in your content.

Let’s say you’re looking for synonyms for the word “easy”.

That’s over 2,000 synonyms and similar words to choose from.

This is also a great tool for coming up with new content ideas and even new types of content. It provides you with a list of words that people actually use in everyday conversation. You can then pull these into your keyword list and start generating new ideas based on those words.

6. Soovle

Soovle is a great tool for telling you what types of searches people make across a variety of search engines.

You get a list of keywords, which is a good thing for inspiring content ideas.

But look a little closer.

Soovle breaks its keyword list down so you can see what people search for in different search engines.

Take the Bing results as a great example.

We may never have thought to target a keyword like “content marketing association”. You’d think that “firm” or “company” would be a better term.

But people who use Bing search for that keyword. That gives you something new to target in your content.

Use Soovle to create a strategy that takes all search engines into account.

7. Portent

You may have a general idea for your content.

But it’s hard to come up with topics. And the list you create never lasts as long as you want it to.

That’s where Portent can help.

This handy little tool comes up with new article ideas based on the keywords that you enter:

It can even come up with some power words for article titles that grab people’s attention.

It’s not perfect though.

Sometimes it comes up with a content idea that doesn’t make sense:

We’d love for content marketing to give us great hair but it’s just not going to happen.

Just keep refreshing to get content ideas that make sense.

8. UniCheck and CopyScape

There are all sorts of reasons why you want to avoid plagiarism in your content.

On the business side of things, you could end up with a cease and desist letter. If the plagiarism is extensive enough, you could even face a lawsuit. Webmasters also have the ability to file DMCA takedown requests against sites that copy content.

That leads to Google taking your page out of the search results entirely.

Duplicate content also relates to search. Google may choose to rank your piece lower if it’s significantly similar to another piece of content.

That could be your own or another business’ content too.

In fact, some estimates claim that almost 30% of content on the web falls into the duplicate category.

Simply put, you want to avoid copying other people’s content. Both UniCheck and CopyScape check against huge banks of web content to make sure you’re not copying something else.

They also provide feedback so you know what you need to change.

This means you create unique content that has a better chance of ranking.

9. XMind

XMind is a mind-mapping tool that helps you apply some logic to your ideas.

It’s ideal for those moments when you’ve come up with several seed ideas but need to figure out where you’re going to take them in your content.

Use it during your team brainstorming sessions. It helps you to keep track of every idea that comes up and apply reason to it.

It’s also a great visualisation tool. The mind maps that you create help you to structure content in such a way that you can flow from one topic to the next.

For example, you could create a map that lists content ideas for each stage of your marketing funnel. You get an instant visual representation that helps you figure out which pieces belong where and who you should promote them too.

10. Piktochart

There are all sorts of reasons why you’d want to incorporate infographics into your content marketing strategy:

• 65% of all people are visual learners.
• Infographics improve web traffic by about 12%.
• People share infographics on social media 3 times more than any other form of content.

The problem has always been finding the time and developing the expertise needed to create them.

Piktochart makes everything easy as it offers a bunch of templates for you to work from:

There’s also an infographic building tool for those who want to get a bit more hands on:

This is a great tool for giving existing pieces of content a new lease of life. You can take what you’ve already written and turn it into an infographic that has more sharing potential.

11. Hemingway

The quality of your writing plays a role in engagement.

If your content looks like an unprofessional mess, people will click away from it.

Long sentences and overuse of passive voice makes your content complex and lacking authority.

That’s where the Hemingway App comes in.

Just copy and paste your content into the app and you get a bunch of useful stats.

The app ranks your content’s readability on a grade scale. The higher the number, the harder the content is to read.

This piece checks out. But you’ll notice the colour-coded stats on the right.

Those colours highlight the content to show you the exact things you need to clear up. We’ve used a couple of adverbs early on in this article. But the overall count falls far below the recommended, so they’re safe to use.

Hemingway helps you to clean up and simplify your content so that it’s suitable for an online audience.

12. Pocket

If you feel like you can never find fresh ideas when you need them for your content, you’re not alone. With so much content on the internet, it’s hard to find the ones that matter to you.

What if you could save content that matters to you all in one space and come back to it when you need inspiration? With Pocket, you can store articles, videos, and stories that matter to you all in one space.

Install Pocket on your phone, tablet or internet browser!  Finding new inspiration for your content has never been easier!

13. Grammarly

You can create great content even if you think you’re not a great writer.

Grammar can be tricky. If you make grammar mistakes/typos in your content, your credibility instantly drops.

Don’t worry! Grammarly will help you write great content! Add this intelligent grammar and spell checker as an extension to your browser, or use their online editor to check your writing!

It is incredibly easy to use and we highly recommend this to anyone who’s just not quite sure about their grammar and spelling sometimes.

14. Google Docs

Collaboration made easy? Yes, please.

Google Docs is the best for collaborating with people on your team! This is great if you feel like you have no time to create content all by yourself. Bring your team on board to help!

With all your documents saved in the cloud, you don’t have to worry about losing your work! Everyone in your team works on one document, rather than multiple versions. Plus you can see all the changes being made in real-time!

15. Airstory

Looking for a way to minimise the time spent on planning and writing content?

Use Airstory to quickly save great paragraphs and data from your research and use them later when you are writing your content! These are saved as cards and you can add tags to them for quick access later!

Airstory is the ultimate web clipper! You can easily install it as a browser extension on Chrome and Firefox.

16. Google Analytics

The proof is in the data. Writing content that your readers love will keep them returning to your website. Google Analytics lets you see how well your content is performing with your website visitors.

Google Analytics lets you see things like:

• Time spent on content
• Bounce rate
• How people use your website/content (do they read lots of content or do they leave straight after?)
• The characteristics of your readers (Geographic location, how they found your content and more)

Looking at what works, and what doesn’t is the best way to keep writing content your readers will love, and keep them coming back for more!

Taking the next steps.

Content marketing success is the dream that becomes reality with time and with the right tools. It involves a lot of research, scheduling, and talent in your team.

Combine all of these tools and you’ll keep your strategy organised and never run out of topics. Of course, these are just some of our picks. There are plenty more tools out there that will help you to create a content marketing strategy. Do you have any recommendations to add to this list?

Experiment a little until you find the right fit for you.

However, there are some questions that these tools can’t answer. How do I create and optimise content marketing campaigns that deliver a serious ROI? How do I make my website a lead-generating, revenue-driving machine for my company?

For those, you need to enlist the help of content marketing agencies.

OMG can help you to boost traffics, leads, and sales by 10 times or more — and we’ve got the results to prove it. If revenue-shifting results is the goal, let’s talk about your business goals.

Getting started is as easy as chatting with one of our Digital Growth Gurus. You can claim your $2,000 digital audit, all for free.