In the last few years, marketers have had to come to terms with a changing business landscape.
The business world has shifted into a global digital hub with fewer buying decisions being made face-to-face, in favour of online deals.
Just think about it; how many times in the last month have you had a problem that needed to be solved and headed online to seek a solution? You’re thinking of a high number.
This is why the vast majority of successful businesses invest a large amount of their time and resources into increasing web traffic. How do they acquire that traffic? Content marketing. Build trust and persuade those prospects to become customers.
So, sounds easy right? Well, it can be if you have the right tools at your fingertips and know your audience.
We’ve put together a list of the tools that make up a content marketing toolkit, that can help you increase visitors to your website.
Small disclaimer: We’re not saying you need to use all of these; there are similar tools that provide a similar function, or some may not help you at all! We’ve found these tools to be standouts, and can say that every tool listed is something we've used - and we can’t give a better recommendation than that.
Content Marketing Tools to Increase Website Visitors
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Low Cost, High Reward
In simple terms, content marketing is a process that involves several key stages.
Firstly, determine who your buyer persona is; who you're trying to sell your products or services to. This will help you to produce content that they're interested in consuming. This will involve research and analysis into types of content your buyer persona likes to consume, how to distribute it and how to put it in the path of the right person.
Secondly, create content that engages them; using the research you've done, create content that's educational, informative and targeted. This will depend on where your visitor is in the buyer's journey - have they come to your website to find a solution to a problem? Or do they know the solution, and they're investigating which one is best? This will influence what content they're likely to be interested in.
Thirdly, analyse performance and make changes accordingly; content marketing is a constant process of evaluating performance and changing your strategy to improve results. The marketplace is always evolving. What's trending in your area of business might be entirely different tomorrow. It’s up to you to keep abreast of what your buyers are interested in.
Luckily, several handy tools can help you figure this all out.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a great tool for researching what content is popular and trending, as it allows visitors to look up any topic and view the content that's already out there. It's also useful if you wish to view what content a competitor is producing and how successful it has been.
Buzzsumo is useful for analysing how to distribute a piece of content and what platform to use - as it gives up-to-date statistics on the social performance of content, meaning how much engagement it's getting on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Pinterest.
This tool can be used to determine which online influencers are having success with their content and provide data on the content they're producing. This helps with researching topics you might cover to avoid being similar to the most popular content on the web.
In Summary:
- Research your buyers
- Analyse competitors
- Increase social reach
Is There Anything Similar?
Buzzsumo's biggest competitor is EpicBeat. EpicBeat is a content curation tool, helping you scour the internet for the best articles out there.
There's also a social listening tool which is useful for measuring how people are engaging with your content. A 1-month free trial and cost-effective pricing could be a draw for those looking for a cheaper alternative.
HubSpot
HubSpot helps with a large variety of tasks; but it excels in marketing automation, reporting and the creation of complex inbound marketing strategies. This is achieved by giving users a one-stop shop for creating, monitoring your content and evaluating how it's influencing your website visitors.
HubSpot has become one of the leading platforms for marketers to produce content marketing strategies by offering an academy programme, designed to provide knowledge and educate users on everything from sales to Facebook ads.
Within HubSpot's dashboard, some tools allow you to monitor and segment website visitors; creating personas for different types of buyer. They're valuable sources of information; it helps you decide what piece of content to target them with, and where to distribute it to generate the most interest.
In Summary:
- Free education
- Create various types of content
- Reporting and monitoring tools
Is There Anything Similar?
HubSpot isn't the only CRM software out there! There are hundreds of platforms available that all offer different benefits.
If you want an alternative, consider Freshsales. It's free for small teams and pricing is cheaper than HubSpot, lead management is intricate and customer support is reliable. You can also pair it with Freshdesk for a comprehensive solution.
Freshsales isn't inbound or content focused though, and email marketing and tracking features aren't well-developed.
Answer the Public
Answer the Public is a useful tool for getting insights into what people are searching for; essentially what content they want to read and consume and what they're interested in. It gives the user the ability to search for any term that might enter into a search engine, such as Google, and find all the related keywords and search terms that have been entered.
For example, putting in the term, ‘PlayStation’ will create a detailed results page giving details as to what terms have been entered with the word ‘PlayStation’ in them. This could be ‘which PlayStation to buy’ or ‘can PlayStation play DVDs’. The software gives ideas as to what long tail keywords are commonly associated with the main keyword you want to base your content around.
With its easy to navigate tool system, Answer the Public allows users to gain knowledge and ideas of what search engines are looking for when ranking your content; gaining a better understanding of how to rank higher and increase the likelihood of buyers visiting their website.
In Summary:
- Insights into search engine keywords
- Insights into content titles and body
- A never-ending source of ideas
Is There Anything Similar?
There are plenty of keyword tools out there, but most offer data on how many searches there are per month, or how many backlinks you need to appear on the first page.
While this data is crucial, you need to remember that sometimes ideas are what you need! And sometimes the internet isn't the best way to do it.
Consider scheduling a content brainstorm session, get your team together and bounce ideas around the room until you get one worth pursuing.
Neil Patel
If you want to educate yourself on all things content marketing, Neil Patel is a fantastic resource. Neil is an author, entrepreneur and marketer who has dedicated himself to providing up to date and relevant knowledge on a variety of topics relating to digital marketing and content strategy.
His easy to use portal, neilpatel.com has all sorts of helpful tips and tricks to increase the effectiveness of your content; including a library of videos, guides and blogs to help you achieve success.
Neil has compiled guides on many complex content marketing topics, including SEO analysis, marketing checklists and competitor analysis; and breaks them down into bite-size chunks that are easy to digest.
In Summary:
- A library of tutorials and guides, both text and video based
- Insights into strategy and content optimisation
- Helpful tips and tricks for SEO & social media marketing
Is There Anything Similar?
There are many self-proclaimed marketing gurus in the industry; it's finding the right one that's the problem.
Each will have a different area of expertise and a different way of distributing their knowledge. Fortunately, we have an article showing the top 5 Digital Marketing Experts to Follow in 2018, which can help you decide.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs.com is a comprehensive tool for all things data, research and analysis. It houses an exstensive database of keyword information for search engines and rank monitoring, which allows users to keep track of keywords that either they or their competitors use.
Their dashboard includes traffic data, the volume of searches for a search term along with a host of information on the users searching for certain keywords. This might be their country of origin, the exact URL of the website being shown in the results, or when the content was last updated.
This vast mine of information is a critical tool when researching what keywords will build relevant and engaging content, as the data they provide is both accurate and up-to-date.
In Summary:
- An in-depth source of keyword data and analysis
- Website rank tracking resource
- Great competitor research tool
Is There Anything Similar?
Another popular SEO tool is SEMrush, which offers many of the features and benefits that Ahrefs offers. Here are some of the most popular features:
- Domain specific keyword ranking
- Position tracking
- Comparison of domains by keywords
- Crawl Audit Tool
- Organic Research
- Advertising Research
- AdSense
- Backlinks
- Keyword Research
- Ranking
Time To Get Started!
When planning a content strategy for your business, content marketing tools will play a part in your success. They're the best (and some say cheapest) way of increasing website visitors and keeping those buyers engaged with your brand over the long term; eventually converting them into customers.
Content marketing is always evolving, bringing new ways to engage your audience, persuading them to consume your content. With these tools at your disposal, we are confident you'll hit the ground running.
