Today’s senior content strategists need tools that work for them. While many Content Strategy platforms are easy to learn and use, the time you invest into integrating a tool into your workflow becomes wasted time if it doesn’t do the job you need it for.
Maintaining the flexibility to pivot to new tools is crucial in our fast-paced industry. However, if you minimize the time spent locating your toolbox and learning the right tools for your use case, you can maximize your time to turn out amazing work for your clients and stakeholders. Let’s look at just a few of our team’s current favorite content marketing tools.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a keyword-based tool that shows you the most shared pieces of content related to keywords across multiple social platforms, either over the history of the platform or over recent periods of time. It also provides a ‘trending score’ that shows how quickly something is gaining popularity, allowing the user to see and anticipate content trends. You can even use Buzzsumo to identify influencers or locate who is mentioning you specifically, generating valuable leads for potential links that will increase your SEO and allow you to pitch guest article slots or PR opportunities.
Groovejar
Groovejar is a nifty tool to increase your e-mail capture rate. Simply use their customizable pop-ups to encourage users to enter their email address. Their ‘Collect and Convert’ feature generates email campaigns to retarget those customers for future conversion. Groovejar also includes integrations with MailChimp and other email services, and other tools such as GrooveKudos, a widget to automatically display positive reviews of your business from Yelp, Angie’s List, Facebook, and other major websites.
CoSchedule
Generating headlines is often either the most fun or most frustrating part of content creation. The best content in the world is wasted if no one clicks through to it, so it’s critically important either way. Headline Analyzer by CoSchedule helps grab the reader immediately with headlines that are optimized for attention. This tool uses data from the web to analyze the optimal word balance and length for your headline to drive traffic, shares, and engagement. It can even give you a preview of how it will look in Google Search. Brainstorm potential titles, enter them into the tool, and it will help you sharpen your hook and pull traffic from the net.
Google Keyword Planner
Google’s Keyword Planner, part of the AdWords system, allows you to identify search rates for keywords, as well as how much competition there is for those keywords near the top of Google’s search history. Fortunately, you don’t need to be running AdWords to take advantage of this tool; it can help your SEO efforts without any ad spend at all. Find the right keywords and include them in your title, body, and URL and you’ll be on the first page in no time!
Asana
Asana is a simple and easy to implement project management solution for busy content marketers. A clean interface gives you at-a-glance assessments of the status and progress of your content marketing tasks, either in calendar and list format. Keep your workflow running smoothly by effortlessly juggling research, idea generation, content crafting, and even assigning and sharing content with freelancers and other stakeholders to move the process along. A good project management tool saves you time and is effortlessly mastered. Asana is a great project management tool.
CONCURED
Finally, we cannot forget our own tool, CONCURED.
CONCURED is a content strategy platform designed to help content marketers know exactly what to write about next for their content marketing campaigns. Using the power of AI and studying billions of data points, CONCURED gives marketers the full context of their niche’s content web so they can make smarter decisions on where to fill gaps and fill the need for information that their niche craves.
These are just a few of our favorite tools. For more tools, and more information on using content intelligence in your own business, download our new e-book: “Content Intelligence: Data-Driven Creativity for Today’s Senior Content Strategists,” at this link. Harness the power of content intelligence for your marketing efforts today!
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