The Top 10 Tools for Content Marketing Strategy in 2020
Content Marketing

The Top 10 Tools for Content Marketing Strategy in 2020

4th June 2020

The percentage of marketers with a documented marketing strategy continues to rise year on year, reaching nearly 70% this year compared to just 62% two years ago.

And, while 84% of companies outsource their marketing efforts, there are a lot of great tools for content marketing that companies of varying sizes can use to not only create quality content but share it, analyze it, and ultimately optimize it.

If you’re looking to cut costs while still optimizing your marketing output, these tools can help. Not sure where to start in optimizing your content marketing strategy in 2020? Take a look at these top content marketing tools.

1. SEMrush Content Marketing Platform

SEMrush content marketing platform

The SEMrush Content Marketing Platform provides marketers with a comprehensive set of data-driven tools to create and execute a successful content strategy.

While a trained team might be able to work independently, the platform allows them to be on the same page quickly and cover the full content marketing workflow in one place. This includes content ideation, planning, writing, optimization, measurement and analyzing impact.

SEMrush allows you to compile a content plan focused on your audience’s specific needs and manage an editorial calendar with your colleagues. It lets you generate briefs featuring actionable optimization tips based on your competition in search results and fine-tune its SEO friendliness on the go in your Google docs.

By combining data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and SEMrush, you’re able to automate your content audits based on your own criteria. It gives you the ability to easily analyze your guest posts or any content published on third-party websites, while also identifying backlink opportunities based on mention analysis.

Pricing: Starting at $199.95/month for the Guru subscription. Along with the Platform, you’ll get access to SEO, competitive analysis, PPC, and social media tools within SEMrush.

2. HubSpot

hubspot content

HubSpot features a set of solutions that helps marketers make sense of data to inform future marketing and content decisions. It does so by giving marketing teams the ability to track content marketing ROI, optimize content strategy and manage the content creation process.

In short, HubSpot allows you to view all the life cycle stages in your sales pipeline to showcase the ROI of your efforts and further optimize every step of your content strategy. It lets you track your audience’s interactions with your website, emails and social accounts, and understand which traffic sources drive more leads to scale your success or optimize those that don’t work.

You can use the HubSpot tools to identify which content performs well and generates leads to decide if you should proceed with developing a topic or search for another one. It also allows you to distribute your content via social media effectively and serves as a bridge between SEO research and actual content creation.

Pricing: Starting at $50/month for the Starter plan.

3. SurveyMonkey

surveymonkey content

SurveyMonkey allows you to understand your audience and their specific needs right from the horse’s mouth. Create in-depth surveys and questionnaires to foster conversation and engagement and formulate a solid content marketing strategy.

Using audience surveys, you can easily identify potential customer pain points, understand your audience’s perception of your brand, or simply learn more about your buyer’s journey. Send out the survey to measure the analytics you need — do A/B tests, measure brand performance or perform a market segmentation.

With SurveyMonkey, you’ll be sure that you’re not only asking the right questions, but the right people, too.

It makes it easy to build custom reports based on the data from the surveys, providing you with the ability to gain insights that drive better decisions.

Pricing: Starting at $30/month per user for the Business Plan.

4. Hotjar

Hotjar content

Hotjar is a user experience analytics tool for marketers interested in understanding how customers interact with content. It allows you to uncover the “what”, “when”, and “why” in a way that is visual and easy to understand, even for the most novice marketing teams.

One of the handiest features you can use to guide your content strategies is the Hotjar heat maps, which allow you to figure out where people are clicking and when. You can also record user actions, track their satisfaction and analyze conversion funnels.

You’ll receive clear and visual data points about what’s happening when visitors reach your site. And, you’ll be able to get some sort of context as to why people behave the way they do on your site. As a marketing or growth manager, this makes relaying data to higher-ups easier and more straightforward.

Pricing: Starting at $89/month for the basic business plan.

5. Contentsquare

contentsquare

Contentsquare lets you see how visitors progress through your site in order to help you build a bigger and better picture of the customer journey. In short, it’s a platform offering insight and digital analytics, especially useful for content marketing teams.

Using the tool, you can improve acquisition by visualizing customer journeys — see how visitors progress through your website, from entry to exit, and analyze the behaviour of new users versus regular users.

By analyzing how visitors interact with a specific piece of content, you’ll be able to understand how it influences your goal completion and optimize your content strategy to improve ROI.

With Contentsquare, you can track the metrics that matter most to your team and set smart alerts to get notified when selected metrics change dramatically.

Pricing: Contact Contentsquare directly for pricing.

6. Alter

Alter content

Alter helps you to provide your website visitors with personalized content recommendations to increase engagement and conversion. The AI-powered software essentially crawls your website in order to understand your content across the board. Then, it makes smart recommendations to visitors.

It will recommend personalized content to each visitor based on their interests and behaviors. This keeps them more engaged, which means they’re more likely to come back and interact further.

This is important as a content marketing tool because it takes the guesswork out of the equation when trying to target individual customers. Use Alter to ensure that users receive the right kind of suggestions at the right time in their consumer journey.

Pricing: Starting at $20/month for the Premium plan.

7. StoryChief

storyschief content

StoryChief is an all-in-one platform that helps you to create a comprehensive content distribution strategy. It allows you to handle your multi-channel distribution approach more efficiently, even if you’ve got multiple teams working at creating content for various different platforms and audiences.

At its core, StoryChief provides you with a central place where the entire content team can collaborate better and publish campaigns faster while also ensuring everybody is on the same page.

Instead of adapting content to fit various platform layouts or messaging back and forth between content editors and other stakeholders, the platform allows marketers to centralize their content distribution efforts, making publishing faster, easier, and more optimized.

After distributing content, teams have the ability to measure traffic and optimize campaigns with reports that compile data across different channels. Track each story, each post, or each campaign easily with smart insights taken from various channels. This will ensure you get a bigger picture idea of what to optimize and what to invest more time and energy on.

Pricing: Starting at $12/month for the Essential plan.

8. Social Blade

social blade content

Social Blade gives you helpful insights into content performance on YouTube, Twitch, and Instagram, which allows you to improve your video content strategy. Plus, you can analyze the performance of competitors’ content.

While this is helpful for those looking to grow their video channels, it’s also helpful in identifying your core competition, analyzing the content they are releasing, and also detecting key social media influencers you could potentially partner with.

Marketers who need to build out influencer campaigns or optimize a company’s video marketing strategy can use Social Blade’s analytics to monitor trends or take advantage of consulting in order to receive tailored advice specific to the company’s genre and demographic.

Pricing: Starting at $3.99/month for the Bronze subscription.

9. Writer

Qordoba content

Writer (formerly Qordoba) is an AI-powered writing assistant that helps your entire organization to maintain the same style and brand voice across all the content you produce.

So, if someone in marketing is drafting up a web copy, Writer will help them write with the same style, terminology, and brand voice as the social media manager who’s also drafting up the text for a new Facebook post.

Using Writer, your writers will get in-line suggestions right in their content copy, so that they can easily comply with your overall guidelines.

To get the most out of this tool, ensure you’re able to clearly define a brand voice from the get-go. Create your content guidelines and then let the AI-powered program do the rest.

Pricing: Starting at $49/month for the Starter plan.

10. Acrolinx

Acrolinx content

Acrolinx is a content governance solution for enterprises. It analyzes how your business communicates by using automation to align your content with your guidelines, thereby shortening your editing process.

By aligning your content with your content strategy and audience’s needs you’ll win new customers, notice an increase in engagement and reduce communication risks, which increases marketing ROI across the board.

The tool also analyzes how your entire content operation performs, featuring content comparisons, trend analyses, quality and improvement metrics, and more. Using Acrolinx, you can optimize your way into a finely tuned content machine.

Pricing: Contact Acrolinx for current pricing.


So, how can you choose the tools that are right for your team?

It’s best to analyze what you currently need from your content marketing efforts and identify ways in which you can improve your efforts and overall strategy. Depending on those goals, you’ll be able to equip an arsenal of the best, most useful content marketing tools.

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Written By
Maria Raybould is a Online Marketing Specialist at SEMrush.
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