Best Content Marketing Tools

All companies need to have a strong marketing plan. It’s essential that you know how to position your business on the market and answer your target audience's needs to boost sales. Fortunately, as expensive traditional media is becoming less relevant and online marketing is becoming increasingly popular, marketing has never been cheaper. No longer do you need to pay for expensive billboards or TV ads. Instead, you can funnel your marketing budget into modern technology and connect directly with your target audience. Better yet, online marketing allows you to reach more people for less. And it’s content marketing that has become the backbone of any business's marketing efforts. Content marketing is not only surprisingly inexpensive but also offers tremendous value to your product.

Why Your Business Needs a Content Marketing Plan

Content marketing covers a wide variety of mediums. From YouTube videos to social media posts and blog articles, everything your audience consumes is considered content. In short, content marketing is anything you produce that either informs or entertains your target audience while boosting your brand. Like everything in business, content marketing needs planning. This is the only way to get a higher return on all the benefits content marketing can offer you.

For instance, let’s imagine that you own an accounting firm. As tax season is approaching, you write several guides that answer the most common questions posed by small business owners and share them online for free. Soon enough, you start getting organic traffic to your website and some of the readers of your comprehensive advice are then converted into new customers. Better yet, other companies in the industry now link to your content on their own blogs, giving your content a wider reach and expanding your network.

In other words, those inexpensive guides prove your company’s expertise, building your brand authority at an affordable cost. Of course, this only happens when you truly stand out from the crowd. Fortunately, several content marketing apps and tools can help your business do just that.

Recommended Content Marketing Tools

Due to the number of solutions available, it can be challenging to find content marketing tools for your business’s needs. To help out, we narrowed it down to the following platforms:

Social Media Scheduler: SocialPilot

It isn’t easy to stand out on social media, but this is still a great place to interact with your customers. In fact, all the content you create for your website should be shared on your social media profiles. However, it’s inconvenient to manually post updates several times a day. Instead, it’s more worthwhile to schedule all your posts for a week or month in bulk so that you can focus on the other important aspects of your business. That’s where social media schedulers come in. This type of software saves a lot of time by allowing you to manage all your social media platforms in one place and schedule posts to go live when your audience is most engaged. Additionally, social media planners, like SocialPilot, let you copy posts from one social media account to another, helping you maintain the same tone of voice across the board effortlessly. Read our SocialPilot review.

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Printed Photo Book: Blurb

If your business has a physical office, photo books are the best reading material you can have in your waiting room. Ditch all those business magazines that might highlight your competitors and instead blow away your visitors with a cherry-picked portfolio that really shows off your product. Regardless of whether it’s seen by a potential client, business partner, or even a job candidate, this affordable book will increase their interest in what you offer – especially if you own a business that operates in a visual industry, such as architecture or catering. The best part is that photo book builders, like Blurb, are straightforward to work with. Even people who don’t know anything about design or photography can easily take advantage of the software’s templates and use the drag-and-drop builder to create a beautiful portfolio. Read our Blurb review.

Visit Blurb

Graphic Design Service: Penji

Eye-catching designs help people notice your content. Of course, not everyone has the artistic flair or sufficient technical knowledge to create great images. However, graphic design services employ a team of talented designers that are able to create a variety of different projects. Whether it’s YouTube thumbnails, Instagram posts, website graphics, merchandise, or physical marketing materials, you’ll get whatever you need. Of course, these services design everything to your specifications and will revise your projects until you’re totally happy. Penji is a great example of this, as you can request an unlimited number of designs and revisions to ensure that you end up with the perfect product. With Penji, you can also set up different brands – each with its own unique identity. And if you’re not happy at all with your design, you can choose a designer better suited to your style. Read our Penji review.

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Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

In the same way that companies need to have a business plan, all marketing efforts need to be backed up by a marketing strategy. You should only get started after carefully planning, as this will allow you to pinpoint how to get the best results. Marketing plans can be as comprehensive as you want, but a nice place to start is by first answering the six W’s (who, what, when, where, why, and how).

• Who is your target audience?
• What is your audience looking for?
• When should you publish?
• Where should you publish?
• Why should people get your service?
• How will you measure success?

By answering these questions, you’ll have a clear goal in mind. Let’s imagine you sell wedding cakes. After answering these questions, you conclude that one of the best places to advertise your cakes is on Pinterest – where most brides create boards for their wedding planning. Additionally, you notice that it’s worthwhile writing blog articles that answer the most searched wedding questions by engaged couples to increase web traffic. Of course, what channel to use and content to create depends on the product you offer and its competitive advantage.

Additional Advice for Small Businesses

Marketing is one of the most important parts of a business, but so are productivity, finance, and team management. Company owners need to be on top of their game in all areas and it can be a bit overwhelming. Thankfully, we live in an era where technology substantially cuts the time spent on each activity, letting you focus on the more strategic side of running a business.