Content marketing is definitely the best way to engage customers and show a company’s credibility at the same time. This type of marketing increases website traffic and conversion rates, which leads to increased customer loyalty and higher revenue.
If we tried to explain the digital content marketing strategy in brick and mortar business terms, it would be a promotional strategy that attracts customers (with free books, magazines, concerts and cinema) to spend most of their free time inside the stores, and one day or another they will definitely buy the product that is on display.
Best Content Marketing Tools to Use
1. HubSpot
This highly popular marketing platform is made by the eponymous company, which is one of the most respected names in inbound marketing. Since its foundation, HubSpot has been dedicated to implementing successful content marketing strategies (often implemented on their own web presentations), running one of the most popular marketing blogs, and developing this highly praised marketing tool.
HubSpot Marketing Platform enables its users to create complete marketing funnels. It comes with very detailed navigation that leads users through inbound marketing strategy development and implementation processes. HubSpot comes with lots of features, options and metrics to play with. Since inbound marketing should consist of many different promotional segments, platform offers a long list of features that deal with each piece of the inbound mosaic. Platform offers apps that enable users to:
- Create Content – several HubSpot apps are used for scheduling, assigning, writing and optimizing blog and website posts, as well as creating the landing and call to action pages and newsletter emails.
- Optimize – HubSpot’s SEO app contains keyword research tool. It also includes rank tracking, competition research and measures organic traffic and page performance.
- Network – Social Network app enables users to create and run many different social network accounts
- Analyze – Analytics app is used for measuring the whole marketing funnel. It is also good for measuring total company revenue, and finding out its prime sources.
Like all other marketing platforms HubSpot also comes with a few disadvantages. It doesn’t offer approval processing (based on workflow), appropriate PPC integration and has a lot of problems with calculating campaign’s ROMI.
2. Copify
Content marketing requires top-notch content. Although the popularity of video and audio content will grow rapidly in the future, well-written articles still rule the web, and we can expect this written word popularity bonanza to continue in 2016.
But not all web administrators are good with writing, and hiring a professional writer on a regular basis can seriously hurt a company’s budget. Most content marketing experts advise companies to ask for freelancer help on websites like Upwork, Freelancer or Fiverr. But we should ask ourselves, how reliable are writers who bid on our job-posts? That’s where Copify jumps in, with its team made out of several hundred experienced copywriters. They offer many different types of written content, from articles and blog posts to press releases and e-commerce content. Monthly blog packages are also on the offer, where the whole of a company’s blog can be assigned to one or several writers from Copify’s team.
Although it’s always advisable for company experts to become involved in a content marketing strategy, companies and outsourcing marketing experts who feel they don’t have enough capacity to produce top-notch content, will definitely benefit from hiring Copify writers.
3. Dibz.me
Four Dots is one of the fastest growing inbound marketing agencies and their success is partly credited to the fantastic link prospecting tool made by their developers. Since their SEO work often involves building relevant links, developers from this agency decided to create Dibz.me and help their colleagues facilitate the most laborious part of their job, searching for adequate websites and blogs for creating quality backlinks.
The app comes with a user friendly search form that requires link builders to enter relevant criteria for making their search more advanced and accurate. It also uses large set of metrics in calculating website’s potential, including:
- Spam factors– Dibz.me excludes websites with spam keywords, content and links;
- Domain authority– Very important parameter that in case of Dibz.me is taken directly from Aherfs Site Explorer.
- Referring domains and pages– This app inspects referring domains, since they tell us a lot about website’s reputation.
- Social Shares– Dibz.me counts website’s social shares on networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+.
Search results on this app are presented in a very transparent and systematic way. Domains are listed in tables with above mentioned metrics written in each row. Users can also check website’s preview and instantly access websites they prefer. Tables are easy to use and they can also be downloaded and added to different outreach tools.
Although Google algorithm is constantly changing, backlinks still represent one of the most important criterions for website ranking. With this in mind, we can say that Dibz.me is a very useful tool for everyone who wants to improve their website’s search engine visibility. It will enable link builders to skip manual searches, and invest more time into creating good-quality content, which will be gladly shared by respected website and blog administrators.
4. BuzzSumo
When browsing the BuzzSumo website you will be amazed by the number of famous corporate clients who are using this app. The list starts with huge corporate entities like Yahoo and IBM and it also includes highly popular content publishers like: National Geographic, TED and Rolling Stone. All these big names use BuzzSumo for a reason.
BuzzSumo enables its users to find fresh content trends and discover how topics they would like to write about resonate on many different social media websites. For these searches, the app offers a long list of different metrics, so users can find topics by domain, time period, specific social network, type, or other criteria listed under the Advance Operators option.
Subscribed users also get:
- Alerts for content, which is published, linked and shared by client’s competitors;
- Ability to discover and analyze content posted by respected niche influencers;
- Many different functions that enable them to do advanced content research, scheduling and analysis.
5. Outbrain
This app is fully dedicated to content promotion. Although it is a pay-to-play option, it definitely deserves a place on this list because it can share content on some of the most popular and respected websites, including ESPN, CNN, and the Daily Telegraph.
People who browsed the web lately couldn’t miss the sponsored “recommended content” pop-ups that can be seen in the bottom of various web pages. Many of these pop-ups were paid by Outbrain and they share relevant and niche-specific content from their client’s websites. This company, in broad terms, establishes the connection between content publishers, which results in more satisfied viewers and an increased number of visits and conversion rates.
Outbrain enables users to select their daily budget (which can’t be less than $10). It uses the cost-per-click charging concept, which means that users pay only after somebody opens their link. All this makes Outbrain a great choice for companies and marketers who want to amplify their posts’ outreach and gain a greater audience.
Content marketing is slowly becoming the most popular digital marketing trend. One of the reasons for this is that big companies are entering the content game, which leads to a situation where millions of publishers are creating tons of free content for business purposes. With all this in mind, we hope that you realize how each piece of useful tech, such as the apps we listed in this article, is becoming an essential tool for ensuring your content receives the attention it deserves.
Content marketing is definitely a way to engage customers and increase website traffic. There’s many ways to share its media through content marketing.