Content marketing has become essential to any modern marketing campaign and there are many tools out there to help you get the job done faster and cheaper.
From brand building on a budget to lead nurturing and customer engagement, the benefits of using content marketing tools are enormous and can make a significant difference in your marketing efforts and return on investment.
These tools exist for different content marketing activities and often work with unique approaches or technologies to get the job done. This post lists the best of them and what they can do for your business.
Content Marketing Tools Tips
Choosing the right content marketing tools for your business requires some effort on your side. Following are some tips to help you get it right.
- Identify Your Content Marketing Needs: Content marketing is a diverse field that touches on everything from traffic generation to lead generation, customer engagement, and improving your brand awareness. So, you need to be clear from the beginning about what you need and how you are going to achieve it – such as SEO, content creation, social media, analytics, and so on.
- Consider Your Budget: You also need to determine how much you are willing to spend on content marketing tools, then find solutions that match that budget. Free tools might impose limits or make you work more, while premium versions make your life easier. It’s up to you.
- System Integrations: Using marketing tools that integrate with your other tools or website can greatly improve your efficiency. So, consider each tool’s available system integrations.
- Customer Support: Good customer support is equally necessary, in case you encounter problems using the tool.
Best Content Marketing Tools
| Rank | Name | Highlights | Pricing | Website |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | ChatGPT | Content Outline & Creation | Freemium | chat.openai.com |
| 2. | HubSpot | CRM and Marketing automation | Freemium | hubspot.com |
| 3. | Semrush | Keyword & Competitor analysis, SEO | $130 / mo | semrush.com |
| 4. | Trello | Project management & Collaboration | Freemium | trello.com |
| 5. | Canva | Image creator & editor | Freemium | canva.com |
| 6. | Constant Contact | Email Campaigns | $12 / mo | constantcontact.com |
| 7. | WordPress | CMS & Publishing | Freemium | wordpress.org |
| 8. | Grammarly | Grammar Checker | Freemium | grammarly.com |
| 9. | Google Analytics | User insights | Free | analytics.google.com |
| 10. | Buffer | Social media marketing | Freemium | buffer.com |
1. ChatGPT
Used For: Content outline & creation
Features:
- Large language model that understands and writes text
- Very efficient idea generator
- Capable of taking commands like a human
- Produces amazing outline of written text
Alternatives: Perplexity.ai, Jasper AI, Copy.ai, GrammarlyGO, You.com
Pricing: Freemium
Free Trial: Yes
ChatGPT is a chatbot that can understand human language as clearly as a human. In addition to that, it comes with lots of capabilities, such as surfing the web, creating lists, writing articles or book outlines, composing essays, helping with marketing planning, and so much more.
Developed and released by OpenAI in November 2022, ChatGPT hit its first million users in just 5 days, given its amazing capabilities. Still, it can hallucinate – that is, write stuff that is not true. So, it’s best to work with it or with any other AI-powered system as a co-creator and always check the work.
ChatGPT is available for free and there is a premium plan for $20 per month, which offers access to a larger language model, more chatbot capabilities, better availability, and extra features.
2. Hubspot
Used For: CRM & marketing automation
Features:
- Free CRM for your marketing activities
- Also includes sales, content, and publishing features
- Makes it easy to automate your work
- Analytics & reporting features
Alternatives: Zoho CRM, Salesforce, Brafton, Drip
Pricing: Freemium
Free Trial: Yes
Hubspot is a powerful marketing platform that aims to make a marketer’s life easier by combining CRM with marketing automation, content management, SEO, and analytics. This makes it easier for any business to quickly grow bigger.
The CRM is free for everyone, with some features available for all users, and other features only available to paid users. In addition, there is the Marketing Hub for $20 per month, the Sales Hub, Customer Service, CMS, and Operations Hubs.
Hubspot offers 3 plans – Free Tools with limited features, a Starter with more features for $18 per month, and the Professional plan for $800 per month with even more features.
3. Semrush
Used For: SEO, keyword & competitor analysis
Features:
- Keyword & competition analysis
- SEO and backlink analysis
- Site audits
- Real-time data & reporting
Alternatives: Ahrefs, Yoast, Surfer SEO, BuszzSumo, Google Trends
Pricing: From $129.95 per month
Free Trial: 14 days
Those seeking to market their website need a tool like Semrush. It lets you do content marketing, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), PPC (Pay-per-click) campaigns, competitor research, and social media marketing.
Semrush lets you access 25+ billion keywords for 130 countries. You can run an in-depth audit on any website based on 130 checks, get recommendations to increase your search rankings, and draft and schedule your social media content posts.
There are three plans – Pro for $129.95 per month, Guru for $249.95 per month, and Business for $499.95 per month. A free trial is only available for Guru and Business plans. Pro plans include 5 projects, 500 keywords, and 10,000 results per report. Guru includes 15 projects, 1,500 keywords, and 30,000 results.
4. Trello
Used For: Team Collaboration
Features:
- Uses boards and cards for simple representations of tasks and projects
- Allows comments, attachments, and due dates
- Fully customizable platform
- Lots of app integrations
Alternatives: Asana, AirTable, Zoho Projects, LibreOffice Calc
Pricing: Freemium
Free Trial: 14 days
If you work with a team, then you need a way to collaborate with ease. Trello offers you a simple and fun platform to keep all your tasks, tools, and team communications in one place – the result is improved productivity and higher ROI.
There are boards, lists, and cards that make it easy to organize meetings, manage tasks, manage projects, onboard new team members, and automate lots of stuff in a simple and easy-to-understand way.
Trello is a freemium service, with its FREE plan offering unlimited cards, unlimited storage, and access via mobile apps. The STANDARD plan costs $5 per month and includes unlimited boards and 1,000 automation commands. There are also the PREMIUM and the ENTERPRISE plans with even more features.
5. Canva
Used For: Image creator & editor
Features:
- Makes designing stuff very easy
- Extensive gallery of pre-designed templates
- Fully customizable
- Includes collaboration options
Alternatives: Visme, Movavi, Adobe Express
Pricing: Freemium
Free Trial: 30 days
Canva is an online graphic design tool for creating social media posts, posters, presentations, logos, videos, and more. It is simple and easy to use, allowing even beginners to achieve good results with ease.
Canva uses templates to make design easy. You can change photos, fonts, colors, and more, quickly with simple clicks and a drag-and-drop design. Canva also includes collaboration features, such as comments, assignments, and designing together.
The free plan includes everything you need to get started and creative. The Pro plan offers access to unlimited premium content, 100+ million premium stock photos, graphics, videos, and audio. It also allows brand kits and offers many more functions for $14.99 per month.
6. Constant Contact
Used For: Email Campaigns
Features:
- Create professional email campaigns
- Easy to use drag-and-drop editor
- Segment and manage lists
- Automate your mailings
Alternatives: Mailchimp, ConvertKit, Aweber
Pricing: From $12 per month
Free Trial: Yes
Constant Contact is a robust email marketing platform, designed for all levels of marketers – from beginners to experienced, and advanced professionals.
It offers drag-and-drop email templates, a marketing CRM, event management, and social marketing features in its Lite plan, which costs $12 per month. The Standard plan costs $35 per month and includes 3 users, more email sends a month, contact segmentation, and drill-down reporting.
The Premium plan further includes social media and Google ads managers, as well as SEO recommendations for $80 per month.
7. WordPress
Used For: Publishing & content management
Features:
- Most popular CMS on the Internet
- Extensive features, plugins, and themes
- Versatile open-source platform
- Also available as a managed service
Alternatives: Drupal, Joomla, Shopify
Pricing: Freemium
Free Trial: Yes
WordPress combines content management and publishing features into a single platform that has enabled it to dominate the Internet – from being used by over 45% of all websites to accounting for 65% of CMS systems and powering 36% of the top 1 million websites on the net.
WordPress is an open-source project. There is a managed WordPress service at https://wordpress.com with a freemium price structure and a free download at https://wordpress.org that you can host and manage by yourself.
Further features include 9,000+ free themes, 60,000+ free plugins, and tons of premium options. WordPress has a massive online community, so the possibilities are endless.
8. Grammarly
Used For: Grammar checker
Features:
- AI-powered grammar checker
- Cleans up hard-to-read sentences
- Polishes your writing
- Includes brand voice and tone suggestions
Alternatives: ProWritingAid, ChatGPT
Pricing: Freemium, $12 per month
Free Trial: Sometimes, 7-day to 30-day trials
Bad grammar can harm your content marketing efforts – from lower search rankings to lower conversion rates and even a ruined reputation.
Grammarly offers a comprehensive service that ensures your grammar is mistake-free and polished. From typos to missing punctuation and commonly confused words, every error is identified and proper suggestions, are offered.
The Free plan includes basic features, while Premium plans from $12 per month offer more. Grammarly helps you produce writing that’s easier to read, for a better impression. It also offers GrammarlyGO, a generative AI service.
9. Google Analytics
Used For: User insights
Features:
- Easy-to-use customer tracking system
- An enterprise-grade solution that can scale
- Free platform from Google
- Extensive and powerful features
Alternatives: HotJar, Squidvision
Pricing: Free
Free Trial: Free
Google Analytics is a free but enterprise-grade marketing software that gives you the essential insights you need about your customers.
You can use it for reporting, predicting user behavior, and exploring so many data collection and modeling analyses that only big firms could usually afford.
Google Analytics remains free because the information it provides for Google is very valuable. (See Datafication & AI).
10. Buffer
Used For: Social media marketing
Features:
- Create more social media content
- Includes AI assistant for idea brainstorming
- Helps to build your brand
- Plan & schedule with ease
Alternatives: HootSuite, CoSchedule, Sprout Social
Pricing: Freemium, from $6 per month per channel
Free Trial: 14 days
Buffer is a marketing platform to help any business grow an audience on social media and beyond. It works on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
The system works by helping you plan when and what to publish, suggesting the right hashtags, and the right platform, with automation to help reduce your workload.
Buffer is a freemium business, with its Free plan including an AI assistant, landing page builder, and Buffer’s planning and publishing tools for up to 3 channels. The Essentials plan costs $6 per month per channel and further includes engagement tools and analytic reports.
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are some of the frequently asked questions about content marketing tools.
Q: Why is content marketing important?
A: Content marketing is important for any online business because it helps to engage your potential customers, drive traffic to your offers, strengthen your brand, and save your business advertising costs.
Q: Why do I need content marketing tools?
A: You need content marketing tools because they help to streamline your operations and thereby make your marketing efforts more effective and your business more productive.
Q: What are the different types of content marketing tools?
A: Content marketing tools fall into many classifications, including email marketing, customer relationship management, article creation, competition research, image or video creation, and social media marketing.
Q: Is content marketing the same as SEO?
A: No, they are not. SEO is part of content marketing and many tools provide SEO analysis and optimization features to help your overall strategy.
Q: Are there free content marketing tools?
A: Yes, many content marketing tools offer free versions or plans. These include Google Trends, Zoho, Airtable, ChatGPT, Grammarly, and many more.
Conclusion
We have reached the end of this 10 best content marketing tools list, and you have seen the top offers out there, their highlights, what they cost, and possible alternatives.
Which of these services and which of their plans you end up choosing depends on your business’ needs and goals – as businesses are different, so there is no single best tool here.
