Undoubtedly, content marketing is gaining a spotlight since brands are acknowledging how important content is to increase their sales and brand awareness. However, having a good content marketing plan isn’t enough to lead your way.
Content marketers need the right content marketing tools that will uplift their plan and lead to a successful path. As someone in the same field, we understand the confusion in picking the best content marketing tools that align with your goals.
With our years of experience, we have hand-picked some of the best content marketing tools that we use regularly and they all serve different purposes in contributing to your content marketing.
With these exceptional tools, you can implement your content marketing strategies, and wave goodbye to the manual hassle. With that, let’s take a look at our list of 18+ content marketing tools!
Must-Have Content Marketing Tools (Our Pick In 2023)
Besides Hubspot CMS, there are other tools that you shouldn’t miss out on!
While our list has 19+ content marketing tools, we have picked out six must-have tools every content marketer should have! Excited to know about those six tools? Check out the below list!
- Semrush – For finding backlink opportunities, content planning, auditing your website, etc.
- Ahrefs –For finding relevant keywords to stay updated with the recent hot topics.
- Grammarly –For ensuring your content is free of errors.
- Canva –For creating stunning infographics that make your content eye-catching.
- HotJar –For understanding your audience’s behavior better.
- Pexels –For high-quality copyright-free images to make your content appealing.
- ClickFunnels –For creating better-converting sales funnels to convert your audience into buyers.
Now that you know the top six essential content marketing tools let us take a look at the additional tools to help you thrive in content marketing!
1. Semrush
| Overall Rating | 4.9/5 |
| Price | $119.95/month |
| Best For | All-in-one marketing tool |
As a content marketer, you will need an all-in-one marketing tool that can help you plan your content, audit your website, do keyword research, create briefs for your content, etc., then Semrush is the perfect tool to have. You can also audit your existing content and find the content gaps in there and revamp it completely to rank higher on search engines.
Semrush is ideal for content marketers, SEO specialists, and SEO agencies. You can use its features for auditing your backlinks and finding backlink opportunities for your website. Its rank tracking feature gives you reports on your ranking keywords. If you are using Semrush for your projects, then you won’t need any other SEO tool.
2. Ahrefs
| Overall Rating | 4.8/5 |
| Price (basic plan) | $99/month |
| Best For | Keyword research and SEO tools |
SEO is crucial when marketing your content. When it comes to SEO, Ahrefs stands out as one of our favorite and go-to solutions. You can easily track your keyword rankings and check your competitor’s activities from a basic keyword research tool to a site analyzer.
Another incredible feature of Ahrefs is that you can use its content explorer feature to analyze how your industry’s top leaders are doing. Furthermore, it offers everything you need whether you are a novice or an expert content marketer. However, the only drawback of Ahrefs is that it may be expensive for beginners.
3. Canva
| Overall ratings | 4.7/5 |
| Price | $119.99 |
| Best For | Designing |
Your content will likely receive higher engagement if it has eye-catching visuals. While you can utilize the free images available on other sites, you can take infographics to your hand with the help of Canva! Canva has been a go-to solution for graphic designers, students, and professionals. With the intuitive and beginner-friendly user interface, you can create templates, social media designs, background images, banners, and more.
It has a free version that works quite well for beginners. The free version also provides sufficient templates to help with day-to-day content marketing visuals. However, you can upgrade to Canva premium to unlock additional Canva features.
4. Hubspot -Content Management System
| Overall ratings | 4.4/5 |
| Price | $23/month |
| Best For | Various content marketing tools under one roof |
For content marketers who need an all-in-one solution, Hubspot is a must-try tool. It provides plenty of tools, from content automation to analytics, content creation, and more. There are various stunning templates to build your landing pages, emails, sales page, and more. Moreover, it eliminates the hassle of manually handling all the website work by automating your marketing so you can focus on your content.
You can work with your team with its collaboration features, high-performing hosting, top-notch security, analytics, and more, making the digital experience easier for your customers.
5. Grammarly
| Overall ratings | 4.8/5 |
| Price | $30/month |
| Best For | Correcting your content and ensuring error-free content! |
Your content is the primary pillar in content marketing. Needless to say, it is impossible to start with content marketing without having good content. Sometimes no matter how excellent your content is, a small grammatical mistake can affect your brand value. Thanks to Grammarly, you can ensure your content is 100% error-free. From checking your blog, articles, and social media posts, to your email, you can enable Grammarly everywhere!
Besides checking grammatical errors, Grammarly also provides checking clarity, vocabulary, and delivery and has an in-built plagiarism checker that scans your content from billions of web pages online. To see the quality of your content, Grammarly gives you a score that will help you understand how you can improve.
Grammarly comes with a free plan, but there is a catch, you get a lot of restrictions while checking your content, and one of the major drawbacks is that you cannot check your content for plagiarism. With the premium version, you have many options unlocked to proofread your article and tune it in the best possible way.
6. Google Analytics
| Overall ratings | 4.7/5 |
| Price | Free |
| Best For | Checking your website’s insights |
Google Analytics is an exceptional web analytics tool in the market. Using Google Analytics, you can check your website’s bounce rate, lead generation, web pages, and overall website performance. Moreover, you can incorporate Google Analytics directly into WordPress to make tracking performance and analytics more accessible.
What makes it unique from other analytic tools on the internet is its robust functionalities and ease of use! Lastly, it will help you get crucial insights to understand how and where you can improve.
7. Buzzsumo
| Overall ratings | 4.5/5 |
| Price | Free up to 10 searches/$99 per month. |
| Best For | Finding top trends in your field. |
As a content marketer, you would want to stay on top of the recent trends and topics in your industry. Finding what’s new and trending can be tricky, especially when millions of people are in your field.
Fortunately, Buzzsumo would ease the burden by helping you find relevant and trending posts related to the keyword you enter. Whether you are just getting started or have been in the field already, Buzzsumo is one of the leading content marketing tools! You get a detailed insight into how well the engagement report performs with the top trending content. You can generate ideas revolving around the same topic and outrank your competitors!
8. Pexels
| Overall ratings | 4.9/5 |
| Price | Free |
| Best For | Get thousands of free stock images for your content. |
As mentioned, your content needs to be visually appealing to your audience. If your content doesn’t contain images, your readers will likely switch and take it as ‘boring.’ Therefore, you can add excellent images that relate to your content and make your content more fun to read with the help of Pexels.com. The tool offers thousands of copyright-free images you can download in different forms. All you need to do is type the keyword for the image you are looking for, and the tool will provide thousands of photos.
In case you want to level up your visual game in content, you can also purchase images right from the tool.
9. Wordable – Publish WordPress Posts Directly From Google Docs
| Overall ratings | 4.7/5 |
| Price | $99/month |
| Best For | Saving time by incorporating Google Docs directly into WordPress |
Many of us prefer Google Docs for writing content. It can be time-consuming to copy-paste your content from Google Docs to your WordPress site. With Wordable, you can easily export your Google Docs to WordPress in one click. When you export your docs, the formatting will remain the same without any changes.
Moreover, you can also enable all the Google Docs feature in Wordable, so you don’t lose any prominent comment! The clean and beginner-friendly interface gives you access to your imported and exported documents that will help you keep track of all the docs.
10. Loomly
| Overall ratings | 4.7/5 |
| Price | $26/month |
| Best For | Content calendar |
Organize your workflow and schedule your posts easily with Loomly. The tool acts as a content calendar to prepare your content in advance. You can add your team members and collaborate to work effectively on the content plan.
While it lets you create any type of content plan, Loomly’s primary focus is social media posts. Once you are ready with your content plan, you can also schedule your upcoming posts for your social media profiles!
11. Copyscape
| Overall ratings | 4.9/5 |
| Price | Works on a recharge basis and deducts money on every check, depending on the number of words. |
| Best For | Delivering unique content. |
Despite writing top-notch content and making it eye-pleasing for your readers, your content must be 100% unique. Plagiarised content can land you in severe trouble. As a content marketer, Copyscape should be your everyday tool.
Copyscape lets you check your content from billions of pages online and ensure it is totally unique. In case the content is copied, you will be given a detailed plagiarism report. Besides a plagiarism checker tool, Copyscape also offers other in-built tools such as a comparison tool, Copysentry, API, and more.
The best part is Copyscape is 100% reliable and highly affordable for every user!
12. UberSuggest
| Overall ratings | 4.7/5 |
| Price | $12/month |
| Best For | Keyword research |
Using relevant keywords that your audience is searching for will help in better ranking. By the leading marketer globally -Neil Patel, UberSuggest helps you find relevant keywords in your targeted location. You can search keywords by adding your audience’s location and your industry. Once you enter, the tool will give a list of keywords with competition level and search volumes.
The latest feature added to the tool is analyzing competitors’ keywords. For instance, you can enter your competitor’s domain to find the keywords they have covered and how well they are performing. One of the reasons why we recommend Ubersuggest is because of the free version! It provides five free searches every day, making it an excellent pick for beginners who do not want to invest in expensive keyword research tools.
13. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer
| Overall ratings | 4.6/5 |
| Price | Free |
| Best For | Optimizing your headlines. |
Your headlines are crucial for your posts. The more attractive your headline is, the more engagement you are likely to receive. However, judging your headline individually won’t help as CoSchedule Headline Analyzer can do. The excellent headline analyzer analysis your headlines to help you create better performing and eye-catching headlines.
One of the best parts about CoSchedule is that it doesn’t leave you empty with just a blunt report of ‘your headline isn’t good.’ Instead, it offers the best recommendations to create better and optimized headlines for your posts!
14. Trello
| Overall ratings | 4.5/5 |
| Price | Free |
| Best For | Managing workflow |
When you are a content marketer, it is obvious that you are going to work with your team daily. Your workflow must be carried out easily without creating a mess among your team members. With Trello, you can manage your teamwork easily.
You can create personalized boards for your team members and assign them tasks. Each time you assign a task to your team, they will be notified with an email, so they do not miss out on any important task. In addition, you can also add docs, PDFs, and other files when assigning them a task through Trello.
15. Slack
| Overall ratings | 4.1/5 |
| Price | Free |
| Best For | Communicating with your team and clients |
Similar to Trello, Slack makes it easier to manage your work under one roof. It facilitates easy communication with your team by bringing everyone under one channel. You can create an account using your email and let people contact you through your email. Furthermore, if you want to create a group of all your team members, you can create separate channels and invite them through email.
Lastly, it allows you to move your emails to Slack to make communication faster without moving to your emailing app.
16. Exploding Topics
| Overall ratings | 4.2/5 |
| Price | Free/$47 per month. |
| Best For | Finding trending topics for YouTube, blogs, and more. |
Coming up with topics that your audience is looking for can be tricky. As the name suggests, Exploding Topics enables you to find the top-performing and trending topics that haven’t been covered yet. You can set a filter with the duration.
For example, if you want to find the top trending topics in the past five years, you can select your niche and timeline and the tool will scan through millions of pages. What’s amazing about the tool is you can find topics that are better-performing yet less competitive, making it easier for you to rank at the top! You can also use it for YouTube videos, Blogs, and more.
17. HotJar
| Overall ratings | 4.4/5 |
| Price | Free/$32 per month. |
| Best For | Understanding your audience’s behavior |
Understanding your audience and how well they react to your content is essential. This is where HotJar comes into role. The tool offers plenty of powerful features that let you understand what your audience wants. Some of its prominent features include Heatmaps, surveys, recordings, feedback, and more.
HotJar is designed for each user from content marketers to designers so that you can build a closer relationship with your audience by understanding their needs and behavior!
18. TubeBuddy
| Overall ratings | 4.6/5 |
| Price | $2.80/month. |
| Best For | Growing your YouTube channels with the right practices. |
With millions of daily active users, YouTube is a potent platform to get started with content marketing. TubeBuddy will serve as your all-in-one solution for optimizing your YouTube channel and increasing your views and subscribers. The tool allows you to find trending topics for your videos and later optimize the videos.
TubeBuddy helps with optimization by finding the relevant and trending tags and titles that you can use for your videos. Furthermore, you can find excellent resources by TubeBuddy on best practices for boosting your YouTube channel.
19. ClickFunnels
| Overall ratings | 4.7/5 |
| Price | $80/month |
| Best For | Creating high-converting sales funnels. |
Lastly, the primary goal of a content marketer is to ensure that their readers convert into potential buyers. For doing so, you need to build a strong sales funnel that will help in driving higher conversations from your content. With ClickFunnels, you can minimize the burden of creating sales funnels from scratch.
The tool creates high-converting funnels for your website, depending on your needs. It has numerous in-built templates which you can easily drag and drop. Furthermore, you can also customize the templates as per your requirements.
Best Content Marketing Tools: Honourable Mentions
There are many good tools that didn’t make it to the above list. We have listed them below, if you want to explore these options, you can do that as well.
20. Airtable
Airtable is a cloud-based collaboration and project management tool that combines the features of a spreadsheet with the flexibility of a database.
21. Surfer SEO
Surfer SEO is a content optimization tool that helps users create high-quality, SEO-friendly content. It uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze the content on a given topic and provide recommendations on how to improve the quality and relevance of the content
22. Pingdom
Pingdom is a website monitoring and performance tool that helps users ensure that their website is running smoothly and efficiently. It allows users to monitor the availability, response time, and performance of their website, and receive alerts if there are any issues. This can be especially useful for content marketers, as a slow or unavailable website can negatively impact the user experience and damage the reputation of a brand
23. Buffer
Buffer is a social media management tool that allows users to schedule and publish posts across multiple social media platforms. It can be especially useful for content marketers, as it allows them to plan and share their content in advance, ensuring that their audience sees their content at the best times
24. Notion
Notion is a productivity and collaboration tool that allows users to create and manage a variety of content, including notes, tasks, wikis, and databases. It can be useful for content marketers because it allows them to organize their ideas and plan their content marketing strategy in one place
Final Thoughts: Best Content Marketing Tools (2023)
Content marketing, when done right can provide plenty of perks to your brand and revenue. With tools like Ahrefs, UberSuggest, and Buzzsumo, you can find relevant keywords for your content. Similarly, with Trello and Slack, you can ease your workflow.
On the other hand, you can optimize your headlines with CoSchedule and use Canva/Pexels for the best visuals. Lastly, create sales funnels through ClickFunnel to drive more sales!
Whether you are just getting started with content marketing or are an experienced marketer, the tools mentioned on our list will help you take your content marketing to next level!
FAQs
One tool won’t be able to serve the purpose of content marketing. Since content marketing revolves around various things, you will need the support of tools like keyword research, designing tools, management, and sales funnels.
Beginners in content marketing can start with UberSuggest, CoSchedule Headline Analyzer, Canva, Exploding Topics, and Google Analytics. All these tools will help you find relevant topics, and keywords, give insights into your website and create visually appealing posts for your audience.
Every brand or content marketer has different requirements. Hence, the tools used by each content marketer also differ based on their requirements. However, we recommend understanding your strategy and picking the right tool from the list above!
One of the primary factors you need to consider is whether the tool provides all the features you need and if it fits within your budget. Once you find the tool that will serve the needed purpose, check for its ease of use, customer support, and features offered.
