Marketers are continuously elevating their content marketing strategies, finding new ways to connect with audiences, and increasing the level of content produced. In fact, 69% of B2Cs and 70% of B2Bs are creating more content year over year, B2Cs employ an average of 11 content marketing tactics and B2Bs average 13. This level of content marketing takes a lot of expertise, some organization, and a little bit of assistance. We’ve curated a list of 22 tools to advance your content proficiency, streamline your strategy, and assist you in every step of the content marketing process.
Content Inspiration and Mapping
1. Content Snippets
To write quality content, you have to first know what quality content looks like. Content Snippets displays a curated batch of top-notch copy examples, so you can gain inspiration for your own content. With the ability to search keywords related to your own project or sort by type (e.g., advertising, instructions), you can easily find examples relevant to the kind of content you produce.
2. Checkiday
Holidays frequently rise to the top of social media trends, presenting an opportunity for brands to jump on the bandwagon of a highly viewed hashtag. The key is knowing when opportunities are approaching, so you can work out a creative strategy for your brand. Checkiday lists fun, quirky, federal, and just plain weird holidays to inspire your social media content. Plan ahead by using the forward arrows to check out upcoming dates or locate a specific day on the calendar.
3. Wordtracker
Wordtracker is a widely used tool for keyword research. Searching for long-tail keywords will help you optimize your content for SEO. This subscription-based service recommends high-performing keywords based on market, location, and time. A sound investment to ensure your target audience can find your content.
4. Content Mapping Template
HubSpot’s free content mapping template is the tool you’ll need to plan targeted content based on your buyer personas and their stage in the buyer journey. The template includes simple explanation of why and how to map your content based on those two important aspects of your marketing. Once you’ve mastered the mapping process, print the blank template to fill in your own info and begin creating your own content.
Content Creation and Collaboration
5. Simplenote
Keep your notes organized on a sleek interface with Simplenote for iOS, Android, Mac, and Kindle. With this app you can list content types you’d like to explore, topic ideas, or keywords. If your content inspiration goes beyond a list, you can even use the app to house full drafts of your content. The app allows you to connect your notes across all devices and share your thoughts with others, so you, and those you collaborate with, have access to your ideas at any time and any place.
6. iA Writer
iA Writer is the blank canvas you can use to draft all of your content, from company blog posts to brand emails to personal writing projects. This app, available on iOS, Mac, and Android, celebrates writing in its simplest form, allowing you to focus on your words and how they connect seamlessly to bring your message home. Markdown formatting keeps your hands on the keyboard, speeding up the writing process. Our favorite feature blurs everything in your piece with the exception of the select sentence you need to develop, allowing you to focus on improving your content one section at a time.
7. GatherContent
Join Olive & Company in organizing your content production through GatherContent. This valuable software gathers all components of your content marketing strategy—website, blog, email, and miscellaneous—on one platform, so your entire content team can collaboratively draft and edit. Custom field structures ensure authors know what components they need for each type of content. To streamline the editing process, comments and corrections are conveniently displayed, and there’s a simple content-approval process. The option to export and schedule content adds functionality beyond the draft phase, so you can ensure your content is uploaded and published when and where you need it to be.
8. Penflip
Penflip is a collaborative content editor, perfect for groups of people working together on content. Penflip is especially useful for ebooks, as its simple, logical interface organizes content by chapter. With the option to work on their Markdown editor or an offline text editor, you can write when it’s convenient for you. All it takes to share your content is sending a link, so there’s no need to spend time creating profiles or logging in. All edits are documented so you can understand where and why changes were made.
9. Adobe InCopy CC
This Adobe Creative Cloud feature works in-step with InDesign to allow designers, copywriters, and editors to work on a single document without disrupting another’s work. Copywriters can add copy without accidentally adjusting the design and designers are prevented from accidentally deleting copy.
10. Canva
It’s no secret that visual content is on the rise. Diminished audience attention spans demand the incorporation of photos and other creative imagery to our content. Canva helps you respond to this content marketing reality by simplifying graphic design. Marketers with any amount of design background can create infographics, presentations, social media graphics, posters, and more, and they can do so quickly with Canva. The best element besides its simplicity? It’s free.
Grammar and Word Choice
11. AP Stylebook Online
Odds are your marketing organization has chosen to follow either The Associated Press (AP) style or The Chicago Manual of Style to guide your copywriting. Here at Olive, we’re adopters of AP style and have used most of their guidelines to build a style guide of our own. Their AP Stylebook Online, combined with the official dictionary of the AP Stylebook, Webster’s New World College Dictionary, is a resource essential to ensuring the language and grammar of your content is consistent. AP Stylebook’s online version updates constantly, so you don’t have to wait for each year’s new addition to discover new rules. One of the most useful features is the option to build your own online style guide with rules that apply specifically to your organization.
12. Wordnik
Why pull your definitions from one dictionary when you have the opportunity to view results from multiple sources at once? That’s the magic of Wordnik, an online dictionary and community. Look up a word to view definitions from five different dictionaries in addition to etymologies, related words, and real examples of the word being used.
13. Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913 + 1828)
Having access to a contemporary dictionary such as Webster’s New World College Dictionary or Wordnik keeps you up to date on the current, most common definitions of words. Unfortunately, the word examples given are often dry and don’t lend much of a hand to inspiration. To counteract this, it helps to have another dictionary on hand: Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913 + 1828). The verbiage is eloquent and sophisticated, a delightful and historic language resource.
14. Thesaurus.com
This is your basic, no distractions Thesaurus. One goes to thesaurus.com for one task and one task only—to find synonyms or antonyms for a specific word. This site is easy to search, so you can quickly perform the task at hand.
15. Synonym Finder
As opposed to many thesauri, Synonym Finder supplies complete definitions, along with hypernyms and their definitions, for each word. While a site such as Thesaurus.com is perfect when you’re simply looking for a list of synonyms, Synonym Finder is useful when you’re hoping to gain a more holistic understanding of a word.
16. AMA Dictionary
AMA Dictionary is your A-Z guide to marketing terms and how they weave together. See how the American Marketing Association defines terms and concepts such as sales call allocation grid, innovation, marketing communications, and hundreds more.
17. The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL)
With all of the grammar and language information on OWL, you could, like the nocturnal bird that shares its name, stay up all night learning. Refer to this site when you have a topic-specific question about grammar or subject-specific question about various categories of writing. If you don’t own your own style guide, you’ll find access to three top style guides: AP style, Modern Language Association style, and Chicago Manual of Style 16th Edition. OWL’s search functionality is also reliable when you can’t find the answer to your question.
Copy Development
18. Online Editing and Proofreading Checklist
Another fantastic resource from HubSpot. Print out and run through this Online Editing and Proofreading Checklist every time you create a piece of content. It’ll organize your proofreading process and ensure you don’t miss even one opportunity to optimize your content. This checklist guides you through your entire piece beginning to end. You’ll run through topic selection, article structure and formatting, writing/copy editing, supporting elements, attribution to title selection, style guide alignment, search engine and conversion optimization, finishing touches, final sanity, and end on the ever-important topic of content promotion.
19. Advanced Marketing Institute Headline Analyzer
This tool analyzes the Emotional Marketing Value of your headline to help you reach your audience on an emotional level. You’ll receive a score between one and one hundred percent, so you can see just how much room there is for improvement. Headline Analyzer also distinguishes which emotion—intellectual, empathetic, or spiritual—your headline targets, while explaining why it’s important. That explanation will help you determine if your headline is drawing out the desired emotion or if you need to explore different words.
20. WriterKata
Writers never stop learning. So how do wordsmiths sharpen their skills? WriterKata is a series of exercises to help any marketer improve at constructing meaningful messages. This website is a fun way to embrace creativity while becoming a better communicator.
Content Scheduling
21. Content Marketing Templates
This link leads you to nearly every content marketing template you’ll need to organize and schedule your content before or after it’s written and optimized. In this Content Marketing Institute post, you’ll find templates for three important areas of a content marketing strategy: social media planning, editorial planning, and influencer marketing. Since the list of marketing templates can seem overwhelming at first, we’d recommend downloading one from each section to start: the various social posting schedules, editorial calendar, and template to assess possible influencer marketing vendors.
22. Coschedule
Coschedule is a popular content marketing scheduling platform. While this tool is not free, it provides benefits that a free template (such as the ones from CMI, above) does not. The first benefit: with this tool you can schedule both social media and blog posts on one platform. Putting everything in one place removes confusion and keeps you from having to open multiple spreadsheets when scheduling your content in bulk. The second benefit: collaboration. Your whole team can view your schedules and complete tasks that’ll keep your content strategy moving in the right direction. The third benefit: view your most popular posts so you can get started on optimizing your posts and calculating your ROI.
