10 of the Best Content Marketing Tools To Smash Your Goals in 2017

Last year Scott Brinker published this article along with a lumascape of over 3,874 marketing technology solutions.

3,874! Many of which were content marketing solutions. Admittedly some of those logos appeared on the page multiple times. Even so there were still 3,500 unique companies.

As content marketers we’re certainly not short of tools to help us. Trouble is the sheer volume of choice, can be overwhelming.

To help we’ve put together a list of just 10 of our favourite content marketing tools to help smash your goals in 2017.

#1. Leadpages

What does it do?

Generating leads is a crucial part of content marketing, and Leadpages is one of two lead-generating tools listed here.

It is an online tool that is popular for its ease of use, with a drag and drop interface that dramatically simplifies the process of building a landing page.

What is the benefit?

LeadPages ranks landing page templates in order of conversion rate, so you can be sure of finding template that has been proven to convert well for your industry.

Leadpages also comes with a suite of innovative lead generation tools including Leadlinks and Leaddigits. Leadpages were also the first company to introduce a lead magnet delivery feature, that bypasses your email service provider to send your lead magnet.

#2. Buzzsumo

What does it do?

This is a powerful content marketing tool that enables the user to quickly identify what content is popular by topic or domain.

Buzzsumo enables you to enter search criteria, and then analyses multiple sites, identifying what topics are being discussed, which are the most powerful influencers in your field, and what your competitors are doing.

What is the benefit?

By doing the hard work of collating and analysing information, it can save you hours of trawling social media and help you to focus more clearly on producing content relevant to the targeted audience.

#3. Ahrefs

What does it do?

Ahrefs searches over six billion web pages every day and has an index of twelve trillion links. It offers the ability to find search keywords that your competitors are ranking for, and to analyse the most successful content in your niche in terms of backlinks and social shares.

What is the benefit?

It is probably the most effective tool out there for analysing backlinks, although many marketers also value it for its Site Explorer facility, which can give you both a comprehensive overview and an in-depth analysis of any site you wish to examine.

#4. SimilarWeb

What does it do?

The third strategy tool to make our list, SimilarWeb, provides intelligence and insights for content marketers. It gathers data from multiple sources, then turns this data into meaningful information, giving the user access to a range of website metrics, including information about traffic source, social traffic, and related sites for the past six months.

What is the benefit?

You can analyse individual sites for reach, ranking and customer engagement, or search by industry, sector or country. SimilarWeb is extremely useful to content marketers in a number of areas, particularly in benchmarking and uncovering potential traffic sources.

#5. Interact

What does it do?

This is an innovative tool that helps you to drive leads and engagement through offering interactive content that online users love to share. Interact produces quizzes and questionnaires that both engage potential customers and help to identify leads.

What is the benefit?

The tool enables you to analyse the results of users’ interaction and to rank potential leads, and can be integrated with a marketing automation program to follow up leads.

#6. Ninja Outreach

What does it do?

Ninja Outreach simplifies the process of identifying, building relationships and keeping track of the key influencers, making it easy to search for the right people, but where it really comes into its own is through the facility to use pre written email templates to customise and send to website owners.

The tool offers a simple to use drag and drop interface, and populates the email with key information such as names, emails, and page URLs (using merge tags) while also enabling you to tailor the email before you send.

What is the benefit?

Ninja Outreach enables you to efficiently build relationships with influencers to build greater awareness and drive more traffic to your brand.

#7. Mailshake

What does it do?

Mailshake manages all of your cold email activity, through which you can not only promote content and build relationships with important influencers, but, most importantly, drive traffic.

What is the benefit?

It features an impressive range of templates for guest posts, PR pitches, initial contact emails and follow-up emails. It also gives you the ability to monitor how well your messages are performing, and to identify potential leads, helping you to easily and effectively manage any marketing campaign from one place.

#8. Meet Edgar

What does it do?

Meet Edgar is the perfect tool for managing your social media efforts. It schedules and publishes social media posts based on tried and trusted templates, which you can tweak to your particular needs.

What is the benefit?

The result is not only time saved on manually scheduling and posting, but a much more focused social media presence that drives traffic and engagement. It also keeps a buffer of old posts and automatically republishes them, keeping your social media content fresh.

#9. Quuu

What does it do?

Quuu is an engagement and traffic-driving tool that can effectively manage your social media marketing, freeing up a lot of your time. It shares content on social media on your behalf, enabling you to increase engagement and to grow your brand’s awareness.

What is the benefit?

Where it differs from other social media tools is that the content on Quuu is hand-curated. Every piece of content is reviewed by the team of Quuu curators before it is used, which means you can be sure your social media posts are of a high value, which is likely to lead to stronger engagement.

#10. Wordable

What does it do?

Wordable enables you to publish documents from Google Docs to WordPress at the touch of a button.

If you’ve ever written a blog post in Microsoft Word or Google Docs and tried to publish it in WordPress, you’ll know it’s not quite as simple as copy and paste. As the formatting you may have applied to your content doesn’t always pass through to WordPress so well.

My solution prior to Wordable, copy and paste the content into a text editor (which strips out the formatting) and copy and paste it back into a WordPress blog post. Then reapply the formatting! Yawn.

What is the benefit?

By speeding up the process of document publishing, Wordable saves the content marketer valuable time and effort.