9 Tools to Streamline Your Content Marketing Machine

As a content marketer, it’s important to make sure your content machine is efficient and you and your team have the tools you need to create and promote high-quality content. There are hundreds of content marketing tools available, all of them with their own pros and cons. Below you’ll find eight content marketing tools that will help you with research, writing, graphic design, video creation, publishing, marketing, and project management.

Keyword Research: Ahrefs

Ahrefs has become the tool of choice for content marketers to do keyword and backlink research to develop their content marketing strategy. Ahrefs’ keyword explorer tool helps you understand the search volume for a given keyword and how competitive it is to rank for that keyword. It also helps you discover related keywords to expand your content strategy. You can also do research into the keywords your competitors rank for and what websites link to them so you can develop your backlink strategy.

Writing: Google Docs

Google Docs is the ultimate writing and collaboration platform when drafting content. You can leave comments and tag teammates to get their feedback or thoughts on a particular part of the document and they can leave suggested changes while you work on a different part of the document.

The explore feature lets you do basic research right in Google Docs without leaving to a new tab. This makes it easy to find content to reference.

One of my favorite features is the document versioning history. As you write a blog post, you’ll go through many iterations of editing, rewriting, and cutting, but there may be a point where you wonder if what you first wrote is better than what you ended up with. Being able to look at previous versions of the document will help you go back in time and review the many versions you wrote and pick and choose what you want to keep in the final version.

Editing: Grammarly

Not everyone has the luxury of having an editor review all their blog posts. That’s why there’s Grammarly. Grammarly is compatible with Google Docs and Gmail and will catch grammar and spelling mistakes as you make them. The premium version of Grammarly will also review phrases to help you write with more clarity.

Graphic Design: Canva

A fast-growing company in Sydney, Australia, Canva has evolved over the years to allow marketers to quickly and easily put together graphics for blog posts, social media, email, and printed materials.

Canva provides thousands of elements from fonts, colors, shapes, images, frames, lines, and more so you can create the exact look you want. They also provide hundreds of premade templates that you can start with and build from or use as inspiration.

Video: Loom

With more and more content moving to video and more consumers saying they want to learn through video, it just makes sense that video becomes a part of your content machine. Loom makes it easier for you to create a video and embed the video directly into your blog posts. You can create video product tutorials, a simple intro video so readers know who you are, or a video of you walking through a strategy taught in your blog post.

Marketing: HubSpot

The HubSpot WordPress plugin ensures that you have the tools in place to capture interest if your readers are interested in reading more of your content or learning more about your products. You can embed a form in a blog post to collect contact information, use a pop-up form to collect email subscribers, or set up a live chat widget so your readers can chat with you in real-time.

Project Management: Airtable

Airtable has become known as the spreadsheet taken to the next level. Users have configured their Airtables to be pipelines for sales and recruiting, a wiki for their internal documents, and of course a project and content management tool among other things.

Animalz, a content agency, has shared their Airtable configuration for managing their content agency which can be adapted to a simple editorial process.

Promotion: Mailshake

Though it’s marketed as a sales tool, Mailshake is a super easy-to-use software for sending personalized content promotion emails in bulk. Unless you have a large network of content creators in your space, building links and promoting content usually requires reaching out to influencers and content folks via cold email. If you’ve done this before, you know it can take a while.

With Mailshake, you can upload a list of people, along with personalization fields like their name, company name, an article of theirs you want to reference, etc., and send dozens of personalized emails at once. It cuts down the time you have to spend building links and promoting content down significantly.