Top Tools for Executing a Content Marketing Strategy
If you've got content creation as a marketing priority, but you're struggling to make regular progress, here are three tools that will help you to create better content faster and with more confidence.
These are the tools that I use personally. I make no revenue from recommending these products.
1. Ahrefs for keyword discovery
Ahrefs is a tool to audit websites, explore competitors, and research keywords and backlinks. I use it primarily to research keywords to decide what a company should write about. This is based on what people are searching for and how competitive the keywords are.
Without a clear, thought-out strategy, your approach to creating content can feel aimless. It's easy to become distracted with new ideas for content and accumulate "half-blogs" without finishing and publishing them. This lack of conviction often happens when there hasn't been enough work put into developing a strategy.
Ahrefs provides access data to see what words people are searching for, which terms are competitive and what other content is performing well.
The data will help to make the right decisions about the content you should focus efforts on.
Ahrefs is $99 per month, which is a lot for a SaaS product if you're an early-stage business I know. However, they offer a seven day trial for $7. If you're on a tight budget, you can use this to spend a couple of days doing research and getting an extensive list of keywords to last you months of content creation.
2. Contento Optimize for writing articles
Conento Optimize is a new content creation tool that has just been released by Contento. Once you've decided on the main keyword for your article, use this tool to help optimise the content that you include in the blog.
Contento Optimize has useful features that recommend other relevant keywords, popular links from top-ranking articles to help with your research, and a comparison of how your blog stacks up against other top-ranking pages.
If you're someone who starts a lot of blogs but doesn't finish them, this tool will help to push you past the finish line by providing prompts to help get over writing blocks. In my experience, it makes the process of creating content quite fun.
Contento Optimize starts at $49/month. You can get a 7 day trial for $5 to try it out.
3. Grammarly for making sure your words make sense
If English wasn't your favourite subject in school, and you struggle to get into writing flow because you can't quite make things make grammatical sense (like me), Grammarly Premium is a worthwhile investment.
Grammarly offers much more than just a spell checker. It helps with sentence structure, tone of voice, choice of words and overall consistency of the content. It means you can write without dwelling on the sentences that are not quite right. You'll also feel more comfortable posting your blogs out to the world, knowing that it reads correctly.
I've also found Grammarly to be useful for checking emails and social media content.
Grammarly Premium costs US$139.95 per year.
Conclusion
I use these tools recommended in this blog on almost a daily basis, and they save me a lot of time.
These tools are not free, but if content marketing is a priority for you, these tools will likely be a worthwhile investment.
All the best!