Content marketing has gotten really competitive. Almost every industry is creating infographics, blogs posts, videos, and ebooks. Speed and quality are a necessity. With so many content creators on the internet, it can be impossible to keep up, so we’ve chosen to highlight ten of our favourite content marketing tools that make the process a bit easier–especially if your creative juices have dried up!
10 Amazing Content Marketing Tools
1. Canva
If you don’t have access to a graphic designer, your branding, logos, and content will suffer. Even getting to grips with Photoshop or Gimp can be time-consuming, and that’s before we consider creating custom graphics with the likes of Adobe Illustrator. Which is where Canva comes into play. Canva makes graphic design simple.
If you need branding for your social media, a flyer, or any kind of promotional material, Canva will be a life-saver for you. Canva is simple to use and really accessible. Integrating templates and a searchable bank of stock photography, Canva is intuitive without ever being complicated. Adding design elements is as a matter of dragging and dropping. Once you’ve let your inner designer loose and designed a template you like, all you need to do is export your final image as a JPG or PDF.
2. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is something of a secret weapon in the digital marketing world. It doesn’t do anything terribly revolution and it won’t write your content for you. It is still useful, though as it collates all content in terms of social shares. BuzzSumo is at its most useful when you’re creating content and you’re stuck for ideas. Navigate to the app, type your field into the search tool and you’ll get a list of popular content.
The one negative is you can’t search by location, but BuzzSumo more than makes up for that with its ability to let you search and discover your competitor’s most-shared content. Copying isn’t a good idea, but there’s no harm in using BuzzSumo for inspiration.
3. Dafont.com
This one is for the graphic fans out there. Dafont.com is a database of thousands of fonts. We use it all the time.
4. Hubspot Title Generator
Hubspot is a massive resource for marketers, especially digital and content marketers. They’ve got posts and ebooks about absolutely everything digital marketing related. They also offer a bunch of free tools–one of which is the Hubspot Title Generator. Type a noun, verb, or phrase into the search bar and Hubspot’s algorithm will generate a title for you. While many of the titles are nonsensical or not terribly useful, it’s a handy tool to drum up ideas.
5. Infogr.am
Infogram is our second tool for the graphically-design-impaired. Infographics and visually-presented stats are some of the most powerful and widely shared content. Infogram gives you six basic templates to choose from alongside a range of drag-and-drop objects like charts and text boxes to create a stats-based infographic.
The one negative is that the templates are basic and aren’t terribly customisable. That said, if you want to make a couple of quick inforaphics, it doesn’t get any easier than Infogr.am.
6. Whatfontis?
Ever been making a graphic or sorting the CSS of a website and been stumped by the font? Keeping the font the same throughout a website or any kind of promotional material is very important for branding but the naked eye is not so good at distinguishing fonts from one another, especially fonts in the same family. The easiest way to figure out what font you’re looking for/at, is to go to whatfontis.com, upload the image or specifiy a URL. You’ll then be asked to designate the correct letter to its matching glyph and whatfontis will search its database and give you an answer.
Whatfontis isn’t always accurate, but it’s better than relying on guesswork.
7. GoAnimate
GoAnimate is a drag-and-drop 2D app that makes ‘animations’ based on templates. Like all of YouTube’s animation apps, it’s intuitive and easy to pick up, though it is a bit more advanced than your standard drag-and-drop content creation app. Action sequencing is awkward and voice-audio is really clunky and robotic unless you upload your own.
If you’re creatively-inclined and have ten minutes to spare, you can use GoAnimate to create an interesting piece of content. It won’t win any awards but it’ll keep your content campaign fresh.
8. Write or Die
Write or Die is for masochists. It’s also the perfect cure for writer’s block or any other creative ailments that have caused you to slack on the content front. Creative inertia will either be cured or punished with Write or Die. There isn’t much to the app: set your word count, your punishment level, and a time limit. Start writing.
As soon as your typing starts to lag, Write or Die will punish you. ‘Gentle’ mode gives you a visual warning. ‘Normal’ mode plays a painful high-pitched sound. ‘Kamikaze’ mode starts deleting the words you’ve already written, one by one, until you either panic, quit in defeat, or are spurred on to start typing again.
Tread carefully with Write or Die. It’ll either cure your writer’s block or kill it off forever!
9. Monosnap
Monosnap is a simple screenshot tool that lets you edit, draw on, and make videos from your screenshots. It’s that simple.
10. Essay Mama
essay mama check content for plagairism
Essay Mama is for content creators whose tactics might be verging into grey-hat territory. If you’ve rewritten or ‘repurposed’ someone else’s article and you’re worried it might be a bit too similar to its source material, you can run it through a plagiarism checker. Essay Mama is the most comprehensive and reliable plagiarism checker on the internet.
But seriously: plagiarism or stealing other peoples’ work isn’t cool!
We’ve found many of these tools useful, so we hope you do too! If you think we’ve missed anything,
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