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Content marketing is an effort-intensive area of business. Creating quality content, distributing and promoting it to reach the right audience, and ensuring it delivers on your business goals is no mean feat.
From digging up ideas to measuring the performance of your content, there is a lot that content teams and marketers have to strive for. Managing all of it without the right content marketing tools is like sending an army to war without ammunition.
The Content Marketing Software market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 18.7% globally, reaching a market size of nearly USD 22.6 billion by 2028. So if you aren’t making use of the right productivity tools for your content process, you might be falling behind in the race. Productivity-boosting content marketing software can help you automate and speed up a lot of tasks for your content team, freeing up time for more strategic work.
From generating ideas to actually creating and scheduling content, there is a tool for almost every marketing activity that you can think of today. But picking the right tools from a sea of options is a challenge in itself. There’s a lot to consider. On one hand, you may be taking productivity up by a few notches but on the other, you’re probably paying a lot more than what you’re gaining – bringing your ROI down.
Here are a few time-saving tools for content teams and marketers that can do you justice, both in terms of capabilities and pricing.
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The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing for Business
1. Narrato – Content creation, planning, and collaboration
Content creation is by far one of the most challenging areas of content marketing. In a 2022 survey by SEMRush, some of the top content marketing challenges pointed out by respondents included creating content that resonates with their audience, improving content SEO performance, and producing authentic, high-quality content.
The scattered toolset that your content team has to use to plan, create and optimize content to deliver results does not make things easy for anyone. Often both productivity and collaboration take a hit, reflecting poorly on the final outcome.
This is where the content creation, optimization, and management platform, Narrato shines through. Narrato brings together all the key tools required for content planning, workflow, and team management, plus content creation and optimization – all in one place.
Narrato’s key features include:
- Content creation and optimization – You can create content on Narrato itself and optimize your content too. They have a powerful AI content assistant that lets you optimize content for SEO, grammar, and readability. You can also use the AI writer on the platform to generate content for common use cases like creating blog post intros, conclusions, outlines, improving your content or turning paragraphs into bullets, and so on. The platform also has a free image search tool and a Canva integration for creating graphics to go with your content.
- Content planning – The content planning tools on Narrato include an AI idea generator for generating new topics for your articles and blog posts. You can generate automatic SEO content briefs to get suggestions on keywords, topics/questions to include, references, and other SEO parameters. To help you organize and plan your content efforts better, there is a content calendar and kanban boards as well.
- Content and workflow management – On Narrato, you can assign tasks and take every task through a set of workflow statuses, ensuring you are in control of the process. Workflow automation and bulk actions boost productivity and help save time throughout the content process. All your content can be neatly organized in folders under projects to manage a repository.
- Content collaboration and communication – Users get access to on-platform messaging and in-line text commenting for easier collaboration on a content task.
- Team management – There are different user roles with custom access to give you better control over which users can access which projects. There is a Client (Guest) role for agencies and a freelance content creator team can also be easily managed including their payment accounting and management.
- Content marketplace – Narrato has a content marketplace too, with hundreds of expert freelance writers. Your order is automatically matched to the best-suited writer on the platform and the finished content is delivered within 24 to 48 hours.
Pricing:
Narrato has a free plan for individual content creators and teams just getting started. The Narrato Workspace paid plans start at $8 per user per month which include advanced features like Revision History, Automatic SEO content briefs, Freelancer payment management, white labeling, and more. The pricing for the content marketplace is bucketed under 4 service levels.
2. Easel.ly – Infographic creation
Every content marketing team needs to create visuals and infographics to go with their content. And hiring a graphic designer is not always an option, be it for budget constraints or other limitations. Neither is it easy for content creators without design experience or knowledge to learn graphic design, because the learning curve can be quite steep.
Intuitive software that allows you to easily create infographics, without any expertise in design, is a must-have productivity tool for content teams.
Easel.ly is a graphic design tool that will save you a lot of time on your infographics and visual elements. Apart from infographics, you can build reports, presentations, ads, charts, and more. There are thousands of templates for various use cases, such as health, food, travel, product comparisons, social media, financial, and many others.
The ease of use of the platform makes it convenient to operate for anyone on your content team. You can add team members to collaborate on a design. You can also share your designs directly from the platform via email, a public link, or even on Facebook and Twitter.
Easel.ly also has an unlimited graphic design service if you’re planning to outsource it, particularly handy for small businesses with a small content team. You can choose to hire a designer part-time or full-time and all you will have to do is share a brief.
Pricing:
Easel.ly pricing plans include student, individual, and business plans. The Individual plan is priced at $4 per month and the Business plan with additional features costs $5 per month. Paid plans for graphic design services on Easel.ly start at $120 per month
3. Portent’s Content Idea Generator – Ideation and topic inspiration
The first step in content creation for marketing is generating ideas. Finding new and engaging topics for your blog posts, articles, eBooks, podcasts, videos, etc. can be tough, especially if you are creating content frequently. If you have to compete in the market, your content has to be both fresh and yet something that the audience wants to read about. And the topic is the first thing anyone would look at to decide if it’s worth their time.
A good ideation and inspiration tool can be a lot more productive than having to brainstorm new topics with the entire team every time.
Portent’s Content Idea Generator is one such ideation and topic inspiration tool that many marketers vouch for. It is a simple tool with very little to talk about. But it does what it says. All you need to do is enter your subject or keyword and the tool churns out an attention-grabbing title in seconds. If you want alternatives you go on clicking on ‘See Another Title’ to generate new suggestions.
You can also click on the title generated to get some quick tips on why the title could work and how to craft better titles.
Pricing:
Portent’s Content Idea Generator is free to use.
4. Norbert – Email finder
In content marketing, you often have to reach out to people, be it influencers in your industry or another brand you would like to partner with. Reaching out is not the hard part, but finding their contact information is. It is hard to find the right email addresses for your cold outreach, and if your messages don’t land in the right inbox, it is just wasted time and effort.
An email finder tool like Norbert can be very handy for your content team in this regard.
The tool helps you find email addresses based on the contact name and company URL you provide. The platform also has a contact database that is regularly updated. Email addresses retrieved by Norbert are also verified to check for accuracy and assigned with a ‘certainty score’.
This makes the process of contact extraction a lot faster than the manual process of digging through databases and social media accounts. Norbert also helps you build contact lists for building resourceful relationships in business. In content marketing, Norbert can help you find relevant emails for reaching out to other blogs for link-building efforts, and also for content distribution.
Norbert integrates with most other platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, Zapier, Google Chrome, and others.
Pricing:
The first 50 emails you extract are free on Norbert. The Norbert paid plans start at $49 per month for up to 1,000 leads and go all the way up to 50,000 leads at $499 per month.
5. Alitu – Audio and podcast editing
Podcasts are a raging trend in the content marketing world right now. Brands that are not investing in podcasts may soon be losing out on a major chunk of their audience if this trend sustains. But creating podcasts and especially editing them to arrive at something share-worthy is a painstaking task.
So if you are considering including podcasts in your content strategy, you will need an audio editing tool to ensure quality.
Unless you have a professional on your team, you should be looking for more intuitive and easy-to-use tools where you don’t have to put in much time or effort.
Alitu provides just that. It is a simple recording and editing tool that has some very useful features. The automated audio clean-up automatically reduces all background noise and levels the audio when you upload a file, for a crisp and clear final product.
You can record podcasts remotely with up to 5 guests using the call recording feature. The recorded call is added to the Alitu library, so no upload is required. You can also highlight any mistakes and silences that you don’t want in the final output and the tool will remove them for you. Intros and outros to your podcasts can be set once and will be added to every new podcast created.
You can also directly publish your podcast to your favorite hosting services directly from Alitu.
Pricing:
Alitu offers a free trial. There is a monthly and yearly plan priced at $32 per month and $320 per year respectively.
6. Hashtagify – Hashtag analytics
As a content marketer, your primary goal is for your content to be found by the right audience, irrespective of which channels you publish on. Your team may be creating excellent content but if it doesn’t reach the right audience, the effort is all in vain. For your social media content, using the right hashtags is one surefire way to increase your reach.
But finding the right hashtags again demands research. From finding what is trending to what your target audience may be searching for, it’s a lot for a small content marketing team to handle.
Using a hashtag analytics tools like Hashtagify can help. Hashtagify boosts your hashtag marketing by suggesting the best hashtags for Twitter and Instagram based on your target keyword. Along with relevant hashtags to use, it also shows you a popularity score for your target hashtag, a recent popularity score, and monthly and weekly trends.
It also offers hashtag suggestions based on your content and also helps identify Twitter influencers in your niche, who you could connect with.
Pricing:
The platform offers a free trial. Hashtagify paid plans start at $29 per month.
7. Tomato Timer – Time tracking
Nothing helps save time more than keeping track of time. This is why your content marketing team needs a time tracking tool that can help them be productive, take much-needed breaks between work and maintain a good balance.
The Tomato Time, recently acquired by Toptal, is a simple and easy-to-use time-tracking tool that works on the Pomodoro technique in which you break your work into 25-minute sessions followed by 5-minute breaks. With the Tomato Timer, however, you can choose between a short and a long break of 10 minutes as well.
You can change the settings to customize the work and break session times. You also get desktop alerts on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
Pricing:
Tomato Timer is a free tool.
8. Murf – AI voice generator
Adding narration to your videos is a great way to add a human touch and help the audience connect better with the content. But adding voiceovers to videos is not everyone’s cup of tea. Neither is hiring voiceover artists very pocket-friendly for every business.
This is where you can save both time and money by trying a voice generator tool instead. An AI voice generator tool like Murf can help you create quality, human-like voiceovers for all your videos, animations, podcasts and similar content.
Murf helps you create studio-quality voiceovers for different use cases within minutes. There are different options available for product developers, marketers, authors, animators, podcasters, and more. The Murf library has over 130 text-to-speech voices in 20 different languages. You can easily upload your creatives, be it a video, image, or music, and sync it with the voiceover you choose. You can also change the pitch, punctuation, and emphasis where you need to so that your message is rightly conveyed in the voiceover.
Not just text-to-speech, but you can also convert your voice recordings to AI voiceovers. With the Enterprise plan, you can add your team members to collaborate on projects too.
Pricing:
The free plan gives you access to up to 10 minutes of voice generation and transcription. Murf paid plans start with the Basic plan for individuals priced at $13 per month and can go up to $166 for the Enterprise plan for teams.
Wrapping up
In the competitive world of content marketing, time is money. The more productive your content marketing team is, the more likely it is that their brilliant ideas will be put to action.
But they cannot deliver their best unless they have all the resources they need for success. If your team is overworked and stressed, they cannot be productive. These few time-saving tools should be a good place to start when it comes to empowering and enabling your team.
With a little help from these tools, you are sure to witness a noticeable difference in both productivity and your team’s morale.
Guest author: Neelam Goswami is a content writer and marketer working with a leading content writing service – Godot Media. She has written for several reputed brands in the digital and content marketing space including Neal Schaffer, Mio, and Content Studio, among others.