These are a few of my favourite Content Marketing Tools
Content marketing can take up a lot of your spare time; it needs to be planned carefully and rolled out consistently. It needs to align with your brand, be formatted to suit the requirements of each marketing channel, be unique and engaging… the check list goes on. And on. And on and on.
While planning your message and ensuring that all of your content is succinct is undeniably important, there are a few ‘tricks of the trade’ (or tools if you will) that can help you create professional quality content quickly, easily and economically. These tools are used by professionals and novices alike and there is absolutely nothing wrong with using them to cut a few corners.
Here is a list of some of my favourite time, money and inspiration content marketing life-savers:
#1. Canva: Create Polished, Branded Content – All by yourself!
Canva is a pretty obvious choice for a list of tools for content marketing. If you haven’t heard of this tool before then you’ve probably been living under a rock!
Canva has come a long way since its original inception – it can now be used to design everything from a logo to a social media post to even videos!
You can create a Canva account for free, but if you’re using this tool on a regular basis then I highly recommend upgrading to a pro account to access the additional features. Some of my favourite features of our pro account include:
- Brand Kits – you can create a brand kit that includes your logos in various sizes, your fonts, and your colours. This makes creating new branded graphics an absolute breeze as all of your branding elements are already synched with Canva.
- Resize – this feature allows you to design a template and then quickly resize in multiple variations. This makes repurposing content quick and simple – design once, and then export in the different sizes you need for your website, social media channels, email marketing and more.
- Templates & Assets – on a pro account, you’ll get access to a lot more templates as well as assets like graphics, stock imagery, fonts and more. A lot of the templates on the free Canva account have been overused, so having access to a wider library of options will help you create something that is unique and stands out.
My final tip for Canva is to create a series of social media templates – 6 to 10 – and to use those consistently for all of your social media posts. That will ensure consistency in your feed and give you a much more professional look and feel.
#2. Thesaurus: Because nobody holds humdrum copy in high esteem.
Boring copy results in a lack of interest from your audience; I’m not saying that you should throw in a jumbled garble of unnecessary confabulation to everything that you say. But something as simple as a thesaurus could help you create a more eye-catching heading or title which can in turn lead to more email openings, more time spent on page or a higher click-through rate.
I use the thesaurus website a lot when I’m writing copy that needs to align with a brand’s tone of voice. It helps me find words that are ‘on tone’ and I often use it to build out a ‘bank’ of words to sprinkle through copywriting projects to make sure the overall tone aligns with the brand identity.
#3. Unsplash: Stock Imagery for an Economical Budget
If you find yourself regularly needing professional quality images that you can use safely (aka legally), but you don’t have the budget for expensive stock imagery for every single social media post that you make then I definitely recommend checking out Unsplash. Unsplash have heaps of images available to download for free, as well as some paid subscription options.
I don’t recommend relying entirely on Unsplash alone for your content marketing imagery. So many brands and businesses use Unsplash, it is likely that you’ll find some of their imagery familiar as it’s been used time and time again by other brands. But free stock imagery is a great option for background or filler imagery.
#4.Bit.Ly: Track your social traffic with customised URLs
Bit.Ly is great for when you are linking to your website from an external source – so for example, if you are posting a link to your site on Facebook or LinkedIn then use a Bit.Ly link. It allows us to track how much traffic each individual link on each different platform is directing to your site so that you can allocate marketing resources accordingly. If you are linking internally (from one page on the website to another) then we don’t need to use bitly links because Google Analytics will provide us with that detailed information.
While Google Analytics does tell us how many people have clicked through to the website from a platform like LinkedIn, it groups all of the traffic together, so if you have 5 posts linking back to the website, you won’t be able to see how many people clicked on each individual post, just how many people clicked in total. Bitly links provide that extra little bit of data to be able to tell which of the five LinkedIn posts was the most successful.
#5. Color Hunt: Glorious Colour Pallets to Help Your Content Projects
Aesthetically pleasing colour pallets that will put a smile on your face and help you out when inspiration levels are running on low.
Color Hunt uploads a new colour pallet each day with all of the hex codes that you need to pilfer the pallet and apply it to your own content.
#6. ChatGTP
https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt
We have fully embraced the power of AI technology at BeKonstructive Marketing. We use ChatGTP to help us come up with content ideas when we’re a bit stuck, or to help overcome writers block. A lot of what ChatGTP offers up isn’ usable – especially with our approach to content marketing – but it can be a great starting point, to help kick start our brains into thinking of our own ideas.
#7. Answer the Public
Answer the Public is another great content marketing idea generation tool.
The premise is simple – you type in a topic or theme, and the tool spits out all of the questions that people type in to Google relating to that topic. It’s a great way to come up with ideas for content – from a blog article that answers a handful of the questions, or a quick educational video answering one of the questions. The best thing is that you know that people are actively seeking out answers to these questions, so you just need to create a piece of content that answers their question and you’re guaranteed to get some traction!
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