To remain competitive, brands have become increasingly focused on creating a higher quantity of content, while still striving to maintain quality. Unfortunately, the quantity and quality struggle is real for so many B2B and B2C marketers alike.
Along with finding the right people and creating a sound content strategy, there is the matter of finding the right tools to integrate with your process and help you reach your goals. With the help of Alan Belniak (Content Marketing Manager and Social Media Lead at Alignable), we reviewed 12 of today’s top content marketing tools to save you the legwork.
Below you’ll find key benefits for each tool as well as the “wow factor” that is unique to their solution. As an added bonus, we also asked experts from each of these companies to share their best content marketing tip to provide you with some additional information to add to your content arsenal.
#1 – Contently
Key Benefits: This complete content marketing platform track leads, uses a visual editorial calendar to align teams around content goals and integrates into other business systems.
Wow Factor: Contently offers both a tool, and a writer marketplace to help companies find quality writers to augment their existing staff.
#2 – Curata
Key Benefits: Combines insight (analyze pipeline impact), alignment (streamline content supply chain) and simplicity (ease of adoption).
Wow Factor: Get up and running in less than an hour with limited/no IT support; addition of CMP to existing curation tool/product makes Curata a viable all-around player.
#3 – DivvyHQ
Key Benefits: Easy to use dashboard, workflow alerts and the ability to manage multiple calendars (by content type, persona, buyer profile, etc.).
Wow Factor: Unlike many tools, DivvyHQ offers a monthly option for users that aren’t ready to make a large investment at once.
#4 – Expion
Key Benefits: Content discovery engine, employee advocator, paid optimization module, asset library/storage and performance scoring.
Wow Factor: The employee advocator module creates an entirely new distribution model for branded content in a way that can be easily tracked and managed.
#5 – GatherContent
Key Benefits: Collect, organize and prepare for approval all in one place.
Wow Factor: The automated reviews, progress indicators and built-in templates help provide a good starting point for small businesses.
#6 – Kapost
Key Benefits: A built-in workflow to manage content production, content review and publishing.
Wow Factor: Eliminate the need for time consuming planning outside of the platform with an intuitive planning calendar and distribution mechanism.
#7 – NewsCred
Key Benefits: The ability to plan, create, publish and measure from the same tool; strategy, content creation, global asset management; social listening; audience insights.
Wow Factor: A social monitoring built in to track chatter about the very content you just created.
Key Benefits: Supports custom workflows and uses custom rights/roles for publishing. Plus multiple tag support, real-time content scoring, multiple content formats supported, multiple ‘publish to’ locations, integration with email to dynamically produce emails, full support of metadata tags, easy connections to popular social networks, easy dashboarding of metrics and SEO advice
Wow Factor: Because it is an Oracle product, it integrates with their other products fairly seamlessly.
#9 – Scoop.it Content Director
Key Benefits: Easy content curation, autoscheduling for maximum reach and metrics on a per-post level.
Wow Factor: In addition to new creation/authoring platform, there is the ability to leverage powerful curation opportunities.
#10 – Scribe Content
Key Benefits: Yields preferred audience language when searching and discussing on social networks and aids in ID-ing guest posting opportunities.
Wow Factor: There is an SEO-optimization algorithm built in and includes suggested content cross-linking for increased usability and time spent on site.
#11 – Uberflip
Key Benefits: Integrates with top-end marketing automation software like MailChimp, HubSpot, Eloqua, Marketo and Pardot.
Wow Factor: Users can turn standard PDFs into active flipbooks that include embedded videos and other interactive content.
#12 – Zerys
Key Benefits: Different levels of service depending on company needs, built in SEO tools and task management for writers.
Wow Factor: There is a user forum and community support that actually connects you to other, real users.
Are You Prepared to Implement Content Tools?
If you aren’t producing quality content, investing in a content marketing tool can be a waste of precious resources. Part of our role as a digital marketing agency is to help our clients determine which solutions will help them reach their marketing goals and business objectives. If you need help creating a customer focused content marketing strategy or want our help creating awesome content to make your content tools worth the investment, contact us today to see how we can support your efforts.
Header image via Shutterstock
