Con­tent mar­ket­ing isn’t easy. It’s hard work under­stand­ing where to get ideas, what types of con­tent to cre­ate, how to cre­ate it, and the best ways to pro­mote it. Any help is wel­come for a con­tent mar­keter. That’s why tools are great. They help ensure you’re cre­at­ing the best pos­si­ble con­tent. Here are 18 tools you can use to opti­mize your con­tent mar­ket­ing process.

---

Getting Ideas

If you’re involved in con­tent mar­ket­ing, you should be one of the biggest con­sumers of con­tent. If you pro­duce con­tent, you need to under­stand it. You need to know what works, what doesn’t, and in what cir­cum­stance you can use cer­tain types of con­tent. Plus, you’ll get a lot of ideas from look­ing at oth­er con­tent.

From read­ing the lat­est news, to find­ing the most impor­tant arti­cles, to under­stand­ing what peo­ple share a lot, many tools can help you start get­ting a bet­ter grip on con­tent. Here are a few tools to help you get ideas.

Feedly

Ever since Google closed Google Read­er, Feed­ly is the best RSS Read­er out there, in my opin­ion. This read­er lets you group web­sites you feel are most impor­tant in your top­ics. You can eas­i­ly go through head­lines and keep up to date with your favorite web­sites.

Hot tip: The paid ver­sion of Feed­ly allows you to eas­i­ly share and con­nect Feed­ly to oth­er tools such as Ever­note or Pock­et.

Getpocket

Get­Pock­et (“Pock­et as an app”) is per­fect for trav­el­ers. It down­loads con­tent to your tablet or smart­phone for you to read lat­er.

The brows­er plu­g­in eas­i­ly allows you to add con­tent you see, but don’t have time for now, to your pock­et. It then strips the site’s designs to have a clear read­ing expe­ri­ence. Get­pock­et also lets you sub­scribe to cer­tain web­sites (e.g., The New York Times).

Hot tip: Use Pock­et in com­bi­na­tion with oth­er tools like IFTTT to quick­ly share, save to for exam­ple Ever­note or sub­scribe to web­sites.

Prismatic

If you’d rather get “fed” by top­ic or via your social chan­nels, rather than just read­ing the same old sites over and over again, Pris­mat­ic is a good choice. This tool lets you sub­scribe to top­ics and add in your social so the most impor­tant arti­cles shared by your friends or col­leagues will also show up.

Hot tip: You can also fol­low oth­ers to see what top­ics they share. Fol­low influ­en­tial peo­ple in your niche!

Buzzsumo

Buz­zsumo is a social analy­sis tool that will show you exact­ly what is hot and what is not for the top­ics you are inter­est­ed in. Sim­ply do a search and it will return the most shared arti­cles around the web.

This tool is extreme­ly use­ful to get a bet­ter under­stand­ing of what type of posts peo­ple share and the titles they use. It also allows you to “fol­low” spe­cif­ic web­sites, your own or your com­peti­tors, and see their “hottest” con­tent.

Hot tip: Go one step fur­ther than look­ing at the shared links to see who shared cer­tain links. This will help you find inter­est­ing new influ­en­tials or find peo­ple with sim­i­lar inter­ests.

Evernote

Ever­note can actu­al­ly go into every sin­gle cat­e­go­ry of this arti­cle. I use it in every one of them, from think­ing of ideas to shar­ing and mon­i­tor­ing. When I read some­thing I can quick­ly share it to Ever­note. I also make notes when I hear of see things that give me ideas.

Hot tip: Real­ly think about your tag­ging and note­books. Tag­ging will make your life eas­i­er. For exam­ple, the tags “tools,” “post,” and “con­tent mar­ket­ing,” pro­vid­ed a lot of input for this spe­cif­ic arti­cle.

From Ideas To Concept

The next step is to get from ideas to con­cepts. What is real­ly impor­tant, what terms are peo­ple using, and how should you con­nect the dif­fer­ent types of con­tent.

Brainstorming: XMind

Brain­storm­ing can be real­ly use­ful as you’re decid­ing on your con­tent cal­en­dar and writ­ing arti­cles. Brain­storms will help you:

• Get a quick overview of all the ideas you have.
• Deter­mine the impor­tance of a top­ic.
• Dis­cov­er oth­er con­nect­ed ideas.
• Reveal where you lack con­tent (types).

I’m a big fan of XMind as a brain­storm­ing tool. XMind has sev­er­al tem­plates ready for you, is easy to set up, and eas­i­ly lets you share in dif­fer­ent for­mats (e.g., export­ing to Word or as images).

Hot tip: If you brain­storm a top­ic in the right way it will auto­mat­i­cal­ly turn into your out­line of an arti­cle. Dif­fer­ent branch­es will become top­ics and subtopics. XMind allows you to export (paid) this to Word or Excel, giv­ing you your out­line. All you have to do now is fill in the para­graphs!

Mock Up: Balsamiq

Some­times cre­at­ing con­tent means you have to tell your devel­op­ers to build cer­tain pages. Not every­body is equal­ly skilled at this. A tool like Bal­samiq can help you out here. With pre-set exam­ples and draw­ings, you can eas­i­ly cre­ate an exam­ple of the page(s) you want devel­oped.

Hot tip: You can also use Bal­samiq as a tool to cre­ate imagery for your con­tent. Do you do a lot of explain­ing about your tool for exam­ple? Sim­ply cre­ate draw­ings!

Creating Content

Now you have your ideas and your out­line set up, it’s time to start cre­at­ing the con­tent. Con­tent mar­ket­ing comes in many dif­fer­ent forms, not just text, so we’ll look at tools that will help you opti­mize con­tent in its many dif­fer­ent forms.

Your headlines: Portent

Let’s start with the head­lines of your arti­cles. We all know, a good head­line makes a big dif­fer­ence. After all, it deter­mines whether some­one will click on the link, and some­times whether some­one will share the con­tent.

But how to cre­ate that killer head­line? We’ve learned above that Buz­zSumo can give you some great insights into what head­lines work, but actu­al­ly cre­at­ing one isn’t that easy.

Say hel­lo to Por­tent. Por­ten­t’s title mak­er is sim­ple: type in your impor­tant terms and Por­tent will return you with sug­ges­tions of titles.

Here are some of the titles it sug­gest­ed for this post, based on the term “Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Tools’:

• How Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Tools is Like a School Bul­ly
• Doing Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Tools the right way
• Why Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Tools are Hot­ter than Jen­nifer Lawrence
• 17 ways Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Tools Could leave You Need­ing a lawyer
• The Dum­mies Guide to Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Tools
• Why every­body talks about Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Tools
• How Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Tools can keep you from…

Hot Tip: As you can see, not every title is per­fect. Make sure you don’t just pick the first one, but cre­ate a group of poten­tial titles and choose and adapt from there.

Keywordtools: Keywordtool.io

Smart dig­i­tal mar­keters know that when writ­ing con­tent you should think about the terms peo­ple use in search engines and on social media. This improves your chances of being found.

You’re like­ly already famil­iar with Google AdWords Key­word Plan­ner, so I’ll high­light a dif­fer­ent one: http://keywordtool.io/. This sim­ple tool shows you a list of 750 key­words for free. Again it will help you cre­ate head­lines, but it will also show you what words to use in your text.

Hot tip: Don’t just look at Google here. The “YouTube” tab has inter­est­ing data on what peo­ple are search­ing for on YouTube.

Video: Screeny or Camtasia

Want to show off an appli­ca­tion or maybe a web­site? If so, you may want to show what is good and make a lit­tle video (e.g., a how-to or an overview).

Tools like Cam­ta­sia and Scree­ny (Mac only) are extreme­ly use­ful for this. It only takes a few min­utes to cap­ture a cer­tain area of your screen and start show­ing off. Quick tips on how to do some­thing can real­ly make your con­tent look a lot bet­ter, so get on it!

Hot Tip: Try using the in screen video. It will show both the screen as well as your face (using the web­cam), mak­ing the video much more per­son­al.

Design: Canva

I recent­ly wrote a big post on a vari­ety of visu­al mar­ket­ing tools, so I won’t go too much in depth with that one, but I’d like to high­light one:

Can­va. Canva.com is an easy visu­al mar­ket­ing tool that lets you quick­ly cre­ate visu­als for any social plat­form. It has the sizes pre-set for you and you can use images from Can­va or upload your own.

Hot tip: Check out the Can­va Design School for help cre­at­ing bet­ter visu­als.

Podcasts: Audacity

Peo­ple do not just con­sume con­tent from text. Audio is a big one as well. It is easy because peo­ple can lis­ten to it while com­mut­ing for exam­ple. This is one of the rea­sons pod­cast­ing is still a good and pop­u­lar ele­ment of con­tent mar­ket­ing.

It’s quite easy to cre­ate pod­casts with apps on your phone or tablet. If you work on a PC, Audac­i­ty is a nice tool to have. It allows you to record voice, mix in music, and will eas­i­ly export the audio in any for­mat you want.

Hot tip: Import a record­ed video (like an inter­view) in Audac­i­ty and you will instant­ly have an audio file of that video. Repur­posed con­tent!

Infographics: Easelly

The best and most beau­ti­ful info­graph­ics are cre­at­ed by peo­ple who can actu­al­ly design. But some­times you want or need to get some­thing done “quick and dirty.” Easel­ly can be use­ful in such cas­es.

Easel­ly has tem­plates for dif­fer­ent types of info­graph­ics ready for you. You can eas­i­ly add visu­als – Easel­ly offers some, or you can upload your own.

Hot tip: It’s easy to add charts – you can even enter your own data in data­base for­mat and it will show a nice graph.

Promoting Content

Pro­mot­ing the con­tent is an extreme­ly impor­tant part of con­tent mar­ket­ing. Sev­er­al dif­fer­ent tools can help, but we’ll high­light three dif­fer­ent types.

Email: Mailchimp

Email still is one of the most used ways peo­ple con­sume con­tent and is con­sid­ered to still be more suc­cess­ful than social media. Send­ing out newslet­ters should be done with con­sid­er­a­tion, but you can still get a lot done, even if you aren’t an email expert.

A tool like Mailchimp can be use­ful here. Mailchimp lets you cre­ate many dif­fer­ent lists and newslet­ters. It also easy inte­grates with oth­er tools and CMS plat­forms like Word­Press.

Hot tip: Use Groups and Seg­ments to per­son­al­ize your e‑mails. Keep that in mind when cre­at­ing lists and sign up forms.

Social Media: Buffer

Social media shar­ing can be done in many dif­fer­ent ways. You can go direct­ly to the social net­work or use tools like CoSched­ule or Buffer.

I per­son­al­ly real­ly like Buffer because it allows you not just to share dif­fer­ent types of con­tent to dif­fer­ent plat­forms, it also makes it very easy to share oth­er people’s con­tent and it has insights on your stats.

Hot tip: Make sure to add a sched­ule and share updates on the time that your audi­ence is online. Use Buffer­’s “Opti­mal Sched­ul­ing” func­tion­al­i­ty to find out what times are best for your audi­ence.

Automation: IFTTT

Yes, Buffer is also part­ly automa­tion. And, yes, automa­tion is a bad thing when not done prop­er­ly. But when well thought out, automa­tion can be use­ful. IFTTT prob­a­bly is the most use­ful automa­tion tool.

It allows you to cre­ate “recipes” that vary from shar­ing a feed to your social accounts to cre­at­ing an overview of rel­e­vant con­tent based on a set of rules.

Hot tip: Browse through oth­er shared recipes to find out what oth­ers do to see if there is a recipe that could just fit your needs.

Working Together On Content Creation

Con­tent mar­ket­ing usu­al­ly isn’t a one per­son effort. It takes a group of peo­ple to think of, cre­ate, and share great con­tent. To have these peo­ple do the best job you need the right tools. Here are two help­ful col­lab­o­ra­tive tools.

Google Drive

Work­ing on the same doc­u­ment, look­ing at sched­ules togeth­er, mak­ing notes – it’s all pos­si­ble in Google Dri­ve. At this point of time it is the most com­plete and use­ful col­lab­o­ra­tion tool for con­tent mar­keters.

Trello

Last, but not least, there is Trel­lo. If you’re look­ing for a use­ful way to com­mu­ni­cate, keep track of what is hap­pen­ing, and see where you need to speed up, Trel­lo is per­fect.

---

These are just a few tools I use, but they def­i­nite­ly help in con­tent mar­ket­ing. So what tools do you use? Any of these? Or do you have the gold­en tip for us? Let us and the oth­er read­ers know!