Top 7 Content Marketing Tools
Content marketing plays a key role in brand promotion and customer acquisition, so the use of effective tools in this area is becoming increasingly relevant. There are plenty of solutions today that improve and speed up the creation, optimization, and distribution of content. Thanks to them, internet marketers manage to perform their work duties much faster and better. In this review, we will tell you what content marketing tools are, and consider the seven best services that help increase productivity and achieve better results. These platforms are suitable for both beginners and experienced specialists.
Tools for Effective Content Marketing
Content marketing services are specialized platforms that help companies plan, create, analyze, and distribute content to attract audiences and increase brand awareness. These tools are used by marketing departments, agencies, bloggers, business owners, and individual professionals. The main goal of these platforms is to simplify content management and ensure its maximum effectiveness. Among their many features, the most popular ones are publication automation, tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), and competitor analysis tools.
The benefits of using such services are obvious. They help save time, as many processes can be automated (for example, publishing posts or collecting analytics). Thanks to the analytical capabilities of the programs, marketers can better understand their audience and adjust the content strategy to achieve better results. As a consequence, the business receives increased customer engagement, increased traffic to the site, improved positions in search engines, and, as a result, increased sales.
Illustrative case: An e-commerce company used BuzzSumo to analyze successful topics and create content that would maximally engage their audience. Using the tool, they identified key trends in their niche and created a series of articles that generated high engagement on social media. As a result, the company’s blog conversions increased by 25%, significantly increasing organic revenue.
Now that you have a general idea of content marketing tools and their benefits for business, let's take a look at the 7 best services in this area.
Hootsuite
Our review of top content marketing tools opens with the Hootsuite platform. It offers a number of useful SMM tools for marketers and entrepreneurs. With its help, users quickly expand the audience of their pages and communities, and also more successfully promote products and services on social networks.
Key features:
- The built-in text editor OwlyWriter AI helps to simplify and speed up the preparation of various text formats for social networks: posts, articles, descriptions, titles, hashtags, and more.
- Hootsuite's built-in idea generator lets you create original content on a variety of topics faster.
- The service is a centralized content hub, allowing you to plan, develop, and place it on different platforms through a convenient web interface.
- Useful platform features: a module for mass publishing posts, automatic selection of the best time for posting, a content calendar planner, and a catalog of ready-made templates for Canva.
- The system has powerful tools for engaging and strengthening audience loyalty. The most popular among them are group and private chats, message templates, incoming message analytics, autoresponders, and automatic tagging.
Hootsuite offers three pricing plans with a 30-day free trial:
- Professional (1 user, up to 10 accounts) – $99 per month.
- Team (3 users, up to 20 accounts) – $249 per month.
- Enterprise (from 5 users and from 50 accounts) – the cost is discussed individually and is provided upon request.
Payment must be made for the entire year at once. Monthly payments are not provided.
BuzzSumo
Launched in 2014, the BuzzSumo platform today confidently holds its place among the best content marketing tools. Its high demand is ensured by a set of powerful tools for content analysis. With its help, content authors and marketers can quickly find the most trending topics, develop and improve content strategies, and interact with the most popular influencers.
Key features:
- One of the most useful features of the service is Discover Topics. It instantly creates a list of trending topics based on user queries. In addition, here you can see relevant article titles and content ideas for each individual topic.
- Each idea category includes a set of data on the selected topic: a report on publications with the number, titles, and level of engagement, as well as relevant keywords, audience questions, and more.
- The Trends feature is ideal for finding the most relevant topics for content. It analyzes recent news headlines across categories: technology, politics, sports, fashion, and more. It also allows you to personalize trends based on keywords.
- The Content Ideas Generator tool provides detailed analytics on trending content topics, as well as content formats, lengths, platforms, and publishing times.
- Content Research is one of the best tools for content marketing of this service. By entering any keyword, you will get a list of the most read articles on this topic, as well as social networks and influencers who posted them.
BuzzSumo offers 4 pricing plans:
- Content Creation (for 1 user) – $199 per month.
- PR & Comms (for 5 users) – $299 per month.
- Suite (for 10 users) – $499 per month.
- Enterprise (for 30 users) – $999 per month.
The prices listed are valid for monthly payments. If you pay for the entire year at once, you can save 20%. Each plan comes with a 7-day free trial.
Similarweb
The Similarweb platform is deservedly considered one of the best content marketing automation tools. Its web analytics features provide businesses with detailed data on web traffic, keywords, competitors, and other aspects of SEO promotion.
Key features:
- The Competitive Tracker module allows you to track your competitors' websites across all digital channels. The Ranking Distribution Tool provides a detailed analysis of your website's ranking in Google search results.
- The SERP Feature Analysis Tool helps you optimize your website to improve its ranking in search results.
- Powerful keyword research functionality helps you collect up-to-date keyword data, as well as traffic, audience engagement metrics, and top search trends in real time.
- SAM (Sales AI Module) is one of the innovative AI content marketing tools of the service. It uses artificial intelligence to integrate digital analytical data into the daily work processes of sellers. It helps to identify key opportunities and form targeted messages, which significantly increases the efficiency of sales teams and improves interaction with customers.
- Traffic overview tools show the total number of visits, frequently referring pages, and competitor traffic sources.
- Similarweb users can specify a business niche they are interested in and select up to 200 competitors to analyze keywords in a specific segment.
- The platform identifies new competitors that are rapidly gaining traffic, allowing users to quickly track their strategies and keyword matches.
Similarweb offers 4 pricing plans (for individual users, startups, marketing teams and large businesses):
- Starter (1 user, up to 100 sites and 1,000 keywords in the table) – $125 per month.
- Professional (1 user, up to 500 sites and 5,000 keywords in the table) – $333 per month.
- Team (5 users, up to 10,000 sites and 50,000 keywords in the table) – the cost is discussed individually and is provided upon request.
- Enterprise (10 users, unlimited number of sites, up to 150,000 keywords in the table) – the price is discussed individually and is provided upon request.
The prices listed are valid for a full year of payment at once. If you pay monthly, the cost will be higher. Each plan includes a 7-day free trial.
Buffer
Buffer is popular among marketers and entrepreneurs interested in free content marketing software tools. It is especially useful for small businesses that are focused on growing their audience on social networks while trying to minimize costs.
Key features:
- The platform provides a solid set of built-in tools for developing and publishing content, as well as managing it and analyzing its performance.
- The service allows you to easily plan content and add ideas for new posts to your own library. Posts added by users are automatically published on selected platforms according to a specified content plan with hashtags.
- Automatically generated reports help you track key metrics for your published content.
- Built-in analytics tools take a large-scale slice of data related to audience interactions with content and generate personalized insights based on them.
- The platform has a number of collaboration features that enable permissions and approvals management to efficiently distribute tasks and processes.
- The service provides a built-in AI text editor and landing page builder. Moreover, it helps to quickly track new comments in different social networks and promptly respond to them.
Buffer is one of the free content marketing tools, as it offers users a corresponding plan. It is worth considering that its capabilities are limited to 3 channels for publishing posts. In addition to this, the platform has several paid tariff plans:
- Essentials – $5 per month for 1 channel.
- Team – $10 per month for 1 channel.
- Agency – $100 per month for 10 channels.
The prices listed are valid for a full year of payment at once. If you pay monthly, the cost will be higher. Each plan comes with a 14-day free trial.
Semrush
The all-in-one Semrush platform has over 50 SEO tools for content marketing that are useful for content writers, online marketers, and SEO specialists. It helps businesses intelligently optimize websites, identify relevant keywords, and analyze competitors' positions.
Key features:
- Keyword Research identifies popular queries and provides data for analyzing ranking opportunities. It also allows you to manage target keywords, evaluate their ranking, and get data on organic traffic.
- The Competitive Research tool provides detailed data on competitors' websites: their keywords, number of backlinks, traffic by country, and share of organic and paid traffic. You can use it to compare your website's performance with your competitors' resources.
- The Link Building function allows you to partially automate the process of link analysis and generation.
- Using internal and technical SEO tools, you can optimize individual website pages for search rankings.
- SEO audit functions are focused on tracking the main SEO metrics of the site. By using them, you will receive information about its condition, performance, errors, and more.
- The platform allows you to create optimized content based on ready-made templates, analyze log files, and manage lists.
Semrush offers 3 pricing plans:
- Pro (5 projects, 500 keywords to track) – $117.33 per month.
- Guru (15 projects, 1500 keywords to track) – $208.33 per month.
- Business (40 projects, 5000 keywords to track) – $416.66 per month.
The prices listed are valid for a full year of payment at once. If you prefer to pay monthly, please note that the price will be approximately 17% higher. The Pro and Guru plans come with a 7-day free trial.
Hemingway App
Hemingway App is one of the consistently popular content marketing tools. It is a powerful multifunctional AI service for checking and editing texts of various volumes, formats, and topics.
Key features:
- AI checks the quality of texts and makes recommendations. It highlights overly complex sentences (pink), difficult to read (yellow), very difficult to read (brown), passive sentences (green), and adverbs (blue).
- The text checked and edited by the user is automatically saved in the web editor. However, this convenience is only available in the Plus version.
- Built-in formatting tools allow you to italicize and bold text, insert links, and add quotes, lists, H1, H2, and H3 headings.
- Hemingway App supports free text checking via a web interface. Editing features are available in the advanced version Hemingway Editor Plus with AI support. It automatically edits content in a given style and tone, offering 8 different options.
- The service can be used not only through the web interface but also through the desktop program. Its cost is $19.99.
Hemingway Editor offers 3 pricing plans for the Plus version:
- INDIVIDUAL 5K PLAN (rewriting 5000 sentences per month) – $8.33 per month.
- INDIVIDUAL 10K PLAN (rewriting 10,000 sentences per month) – $12.50 per month.
- TEAM 10K PLAN (rewriting 10,000 sentences per month) – $12.50 per month per user.
The prices shown are valid for a full year at once. If you choose monthly payments, the cost will be 17% higher. All plans include a 14-day free trial.
Google Analytics
Our review ends with one of the most famous tools for content marketing and SEO sites — Google Analytics (GA). Its tools provide webmasters and optimizers with detailed information about the parameters and traffic of the site, as well as the actions of its visitors.
Key features:
- GA allows you to automate website performance audits, audience segmentation and engagement, conversion rate monitoring, marketing strategy optimization, and more.
- The platform generates detailed analytical reports on the site metrics of interest to the user in real time. Among them are reports on interaction with the audience and its retention, which make it possible to identify current trends, analyze the user path, their entry and exit points, and more.
- By setting up individual conversions in GA, you can track any visitor actions: form submissions, video views, etc. This increases the accuracy of monitoring campaign results and their compliance with marketing goals.
- Google Analytics allows you to visualize the user journey through advanced funnel analysis. The map shows peaks of engagement and points of attention decline. This helps you find points or areas that require improvement, optimize conversion flows, and interactions with the audience.
- The service supports segmentation of website or application visitors by dividing them into categories. Thanks to this, it becomes possible to use separate strategies for each of them.
Google Analytics offers two pricing plans:
- Google Analytics 4 (GA4) Free with basic functionality.
- Google Analytics 360 (GA360) with increased data limits and an expanded set of tools – from $50,000 to $200,000 per year and more.
By the way, with the help of our service, you can easily set up integrations for Google Analytics 4 to automate work processes and get rid of routine tasks.
Final Thoughts
The content marketing tools reviewed in this article help marketers, optimizers, and webmasters promote websites and applications faster and more effectively through relevant content and SEO. In the review, we presented tools of different types: for content analytics, writing and editing texts, automatic content publishing, keyword tracking, target audience analysis, and more. Some of them are equipped with AI support, which significantly increases their performance. Some systems provide the opportunity to use them for free (Google Analytics, Buffer) or give a free trial period (BuzzSumo, Similarweb, Semrush, Hemingway App). Choosing the right tool can be a decisive step in improving a company's content strategy and achieving long-term business goals. This is especially important in the context of constant competition for audience attention in the digital space.