SUMMARY
More than 47% of surveyed small-medium scale business owners plan to spend $ 10k for their annual content marketing efforts
Since everyday social posting is a mandate, it is difficult for marketers to ensure consistency, it is imperative to use tools to streamline content
Automated tools for language and user experience monitoring will ensure that even the smallet content offers a well rounded user experience
Content is not the king; it is the kingdom. Since everyone is trying to cement a lasting impact in the digital spectrum, content marketers have a greater role to adorn. So if you stumble across CCO (Chief Content Officer) profiles, do not be surprised. That’s actually the trend to arrive simply because the content is rapidly emerging as a standalone vertical across organizations. More than 47% of surveyed small-medium scale business owners plan to spend USD 10k for their annual content marketing efforts. As a result, achieving volume and value of content is of paramount importance for everyone and tools are the key differentiator in ensuring the same.
For everyone aiming a wider digital footprint, here’s the list of tools that you must have.
Hootsuite – Social Scheduling & Optimization
Despite a growing number of alternatives in this segment, Hootsuite continues to be my favorite platform. Over the years, the scope of content marketing has expanded beyond production only. Today, it is a strategic vertical and completely covers distribution. Hootsuite helps in the smart tracking of content uploaded and distributed across a wide range of social media channels. With a focus on the end-to-end management of a company’s social media activity, Hootsuite allows drafting, scheduling and monitoring of posts in a single dashboard.
Since everyday social posting is a mandate, it is difficult for marketers to ensure consistency. With Hootsuite, millions of marketers gain a competitive edge of the peak engagement hours. The platform has a calendar-cell-like display wherein you can mark your content at the appropriate date and time. Upon clicking, the cell expands into a specific form pertaining to details such as content, enabled social media accounts, time, date, images or videos if any. Even more interesting is the choice to publish every content post at an exclusive time every day. While the platform can connect with up to 35 social media platforms, the free version allows 4 accounts.
Wondershare Filmora – Video Production Studio
There should not be any hesitation while making video marketing an important layer in your enterprise strategy. Ever since the pandemic has locked millions of people indoors, 70% of businesses want to utilize the opportunity and produce more videos. But video production is still an expensive affair and beyond the scope of almost all small-medium scale companies. To their aid, Wondershare’s Filmora offers an immensely user-friendly dashboard to produce videos instantly. Used by more than 70 Million users all over the world, Filmora is more than just a video editing tool. It provides easy-to-use templates that suit a variety of business storylines. It is packed with advanced features like motion tracking, green screen editing, split screens and a wide range of effects to choose.
Filmora has been designed keeping in mind the agile requirements of companies whether start-ups or corporates. So be it social media short videos, tutorials or pitch decks for customers, Filmora’s easy-to-use studio provides tools to achieve rapid content productions.
Grammarly – Vocabulary Checker
Even if search engines & platform algorithms ignore grammar mistakes, the reader won’t trust you. No matter how aggressively you market your content, repetitive vocabulary inconsistencies will put your brand’s credibility in question. Grammarly provides a comprehensive dashboard for identifying and analyzing vocabulary mistakes in your content. While regular text checkers (including MSWord) do provide a fair overview of the mistakes, Grammarly does a low-level checking of the content followed by suggestions to use a more appropriate word. It scans the content and captures mistakes such as squinting modifiers, repetitive words in a sentence, use of passive voice, irrelevant words and more.
Grammarly can be integrated with browsers such as Chrome to enable immediate proofreading without having to manually paste the content in the tool.
ClickFunnels – Content Marketing Funnel Development & Analysis
Funnels shouldn’t be on this list since they are a Sales practice; right? Wrong! Funnels are equally important for content marketers and deserve to be a part of the mainstream plan. ClickFunnels had foreseen the growing trend and rolled exclusive templates for content marketing teams. After all, 87% of businesses use funnels to predict potential loopholes in their content marketing strategy.
At the content level, a funnel represents the journey of a visitor from a lead to a customer at different levels of content. No matter creating funnels is an exhaustive exercise; ClickFunnels provides ready-to-use templates for standard marketing plans. That means, unless you have a fully customized marketing campaign, it is better to save the buck and use ClickFunnels. The platform provides a drag & drop facility to create plans on-demand for various types of content marketing: Inbound, Outbound and Hybrid.
Among many others, the main features include templates for Sales, Membership, Auto-Webinar, Hangout, and Email Integrations & Testing. Businesses especially those in the digital space can benefit from instant analysis of their incoming leads.
Honorary Mentions
Apart from the tools mentioned above, others should find a place in your stack. Copyscape (a plagiarism checker), Canva (simple graphics designing), Google Docs (multi-user live editing) etc. are equally effective in achieving a lasting impact. Which one do you use the most? We are eager to know.
