Welcome to the world of content marketing! Now, where do you start? You need a blog post, some images, maybe an infographic – and that’s just for starters. If you’re feeling slightly overwhelmed by the plethora of content marketing tools available, then fear not. Here are a few free content marketing tools tried and tested by us that we use on a daily basis and that will actually make your job so much easier.
Grammar
If you feel like your spelling and grammar isn’t quite up to scratch, then you need Grammarly. Of course, any Word-type software will check this for you as you go, but this free tool automatically proofreads your content anywhere you write on the web – social media posts, content management systems, emails, messages. Download this free extension and wonder how you ever lived without it.
Keywords
You’ve done your keyword research, now what to do with it? You need to produce engaging, compelling content answering questions your customer base has. Enter ‘Answer the Public’ – an easy visualisation tool showing the motivations behind a user’s search for your keyword. Sound a bit too techy? Enter your keyword and press search – you’ll get a gorgeous chart giving you oodles of ideas for content. Warning – this is one of the most addictive content marketing tools we’ve used.
Ideas
Along the same lines although not as pretty is Content Idea Generator. This tool will generate tons of blog titles for you, all you have to do it sign up for an account (free and takes 1 minute), then it will ask you 18 questions about your content – what business you’re in, who your competitors are, what benefits your product or services offers to your customers etc, and at the end it generates a huge list of potential blog topics that you can copy and paste into a spreadsheet with the click of a button. How easy is that?
Design
Making things look pretty used to be something reserved for the lucky gifted few, but with Canva you can bluff your way to being a pretty decent designer – for free. Simply set up your account, and as long as you use the free elements of the system it won’t cost you a thing. You can produce professional looking blog graphics, posters, infographics, social media ads – it covers them all. This content marketer couldn’t be without it.
Research
Maximise the chances of having your content found and shared by researching what type of content relating to your keyword performs best using Buzzsumo. This is one of the content marketing tools regularly praised by industry experts as being the most valuable to find current hot topics resonating with key influencers for your industry. There are different levels of this package available, and if you don’t want to pay you only get a limited number of daily searches but it’s a great guide to get you started. What content are people sharing for your keyword?
Hopefully, that’s enough to get you started, however as we use (and quickly become dependent!) on handy new tools we’ll, of course, let you know.
