We all know that content marketers generally handle multiple projects. Instead of doing everything manually, you can automate time-consuming tasks and drastically improve your productivity and performance.
But choosing the right content marketing tool can be difficult, especially when there are so many options to consider.
This article will list the top 14 must-have content marketing tools to include in your tech stack and boost cross-functional collaboration for better results
14 Must-Have Tools to Level Up Your Content Marketing Efforts
Let's face it, even the most comprehensive and well-rounded marketing strategy can fall flat without the right tech stack to optimize its execution. Instead of spending their time, efforts, and resources on manually implementing every single process, marketers can rely on power-packed tools to do some of the heavy lifting.
So, let’s look at the 14 best tools you must add to your content marketing tech stack today:
For Content Creation
An efficient content creation process lies at the center of every successful market strategy. You're leaving money on the table without a seamless workflow to collaborate, brainstorm, and create quality content.
But here's the good news: AI-powered tools can simplify the content creation process and simultaneously enhance the quality of output. Here are three tools to achieve this:
1. Jasper AI
Jasper AI is a writing assistant powered by advanced AI and natural language processing (NLP) technology. The tool enables marketing teams to create fresh and creative content in as many as 50 formats.
Marketers can curate ideas, create outlines, find taglines, and produce meaningful pieces of content at scale for different purposes like producing case studies, influencer marketing campaigns, and blog posts with Jasper’s powerful functionality.
Best Features
- Easily create content in more than 25 languages
- Create original, plagiarism-free long-form content 5X faster in the Boss Mode
- Short learning curve due to handy training courses to get the hang of the tool
Pricing: Starter at $49/mo for 35,000 words, Boss Mode at $99/mo for 100,000 words
2. Grammarly
Grammarly is an AI editing tool that finetunes all your content drafts by eliminating grammatical errors and inaccuracies. Besides editing for punctuation and grammar, marketing teams can best use this tool to analyze and optimize all their content for tonality, readability, and clarity of expression.
You can adjust your goals according to the target audience and get accurate suggestions for these goals.
Best Features
- Offers goal-specific suggestions to enhance the content
- Rates every piece for readability and vocabulary with relevant comments
- Compatible with various platforms—from Google docs and emails to social media and apps
Pricing: Free. Premium plan starting at $12/month, Business plan starting at $15/member/month.
3. Hemingway App
Hemingway App is a powerful content editor to boost your content creation efforts. Unlike Grammarly, Hemingway reviews your content primarily for clarity of thought and conciseness. The tool grades the content for the ease of readability and highlights words, phrases, or sentences affecting the readability score. So, marketers can run their content through this app to refine the overall language.
Best features
- Checks your content for sentence complexity, passive voice, and overuse of adverbs
- Easily imports content from Microsoft Word and other writing platforms
- One-click integrations with Medium and WordPress
Pricing: The online version is free. Hemingway App can be downloaded and used offline at a one-time cost of $19.99.
For SEO and Analytics
A robust SEO strategy can give your content marketing efforts some much-needed visibility. It can be the key to unlocking discoverability, greater traffic, and better conversions.
This is where SEO and tracking tools come to the rescue for many marketers. Here are the four best tools to supercharge your search engine optimization campaigns:
4. Semrush
Semrush is an SEO and market research tool with various advanced features that help content marketing teams grow organic traffic and win more search engine real estate. The tool provides data about keyword volume and difficulty, competitors, and link building.
You can also build a more exhaustive content strategy using Semrush's topic research, content audit, and post-tracking functionality.
Best features
- A suite of 55+ content marketing tools to perform end-to-end research and analysis
- Real-time reports to create SEO-friendly content
- Ability to track brand positioning and content performance regularly
Pricing: Free version, Pro plan at $119/month, Guru plan at $229/month
5. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a powerful SEO tool that provides in-depth performance reports, tracks your rankings, and analyzes competitors' keywords and traffic. Content marketing teams can use Ahrefs to discover conversion-focused keywords, optimize content, and audit the performance of all published pieces.
The tool also provides a detailed estimate of the number of backlinks your content has acquired over a period of time.
Best features
- Conduct a content gap analysis between your brand and competitors
- Monitor your content's performance to create SEO-rich content
- Perform keyword research for 10 different search engines
Pricing: Lite starts at $99/month, Standard starts at $199/month, Advanced starts at $399/month, and Enterprise starts at $999/month.
6. Yoast
Yoast is the #1 WordPress SEO plugin that enables you to optimize your content for SEO, improve readability, perform technical SEO tasks, and find relevant internal links for your blog post.
Content marketers can leverage this tool to identify all the places where your keywords needs to be included and improve your overall content with better structuring suggestions.
Best features
- Color indicators that highlight whether you've optimized your page correctly or if it needs improvements
- Preview and edit meta-descriptions, URL slugs, and social media snippets
- Get internal linking suggestions to enhance your content’s discoverability
Pricing: Free version, Yoast SEO Premium costs $99/year.
7. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web analytics service for tracking your content performance through various metrics, like session duration, bounce rate, and the total number of users. The tool shows which pages receive the most traffic and how many visitors return to your website.
GA essentially gives you an overview of what's working and what's not to help iterate your content strategy.
Best features
- Measure and analyze content performance
- Analyzes conversion rates and marketing campaign effectiveness
- Shares site sessions, page views, average session time, and bounce rate in real-time
For visuals
The fact that video was the most popular form of media in 2021 proves the importance of creating visual content for successful marketing. Visual content can maximize engagement and expand the reach of your campaigns, building brand recognition.
So, let's look at the two best tools to create static and motion visual content:
8. Canva
Canva is a graphic design tool for creating high-quality images and videos. The tool has a massive library of over 400,000 templates for every content format—from slide decks and logos to flyers and social media posts.
Content marketing teams can leverage this power-packed tool to produce exceptional designs and media for various channels, such as emails, blogs, social media, and ads.
Best features
- Extensive library of 400K+ templates that you can customize as per your preferences
- Cloud-based storage system allows you to access your designs from any device
- Minimal learning curve to make designing easy even for those without a knack for design
Pricing: Free version, Pro plan at $119/year
9. Vidyard
Vidyard is a video marketing platform for hosting, publishing and sharing video content through your website, email, or social media platforms. The tool gives content marketers the power to create interactive experiences, boost their SEO game, and accelerate the buyer journey through engaging video content.
You can also leverage its analytics and personalization features to get better visibility into your content performance.
Best features
- Multi-platform integration so people can watch your live webinars across various platforms
- Video hubs to collect all your content in a single place
- Chrome extension for screen and video recording
Pricing: Free version, Pro at $19/month, Teams at $300/month, Business at $1250/month
For project management
Planning and collaboration are two of the most demanding areas for content marketing teams. With so many moving parts in a content strategy, it's nearly impossible to see quality results without streamlined planning and production.
When teams generally waste 12% of their resources due to inefficient project management, choosing the right tool becomes very important. Here are the three best tools for this:
10. HubSpot
HubSpot is a multi-functional CRM with many features and free tools content teams can use to their advantage. You can use the tool for various use cases—including analytics, scheduling, brainstorming, and management.
With features like email tracking, social media management, and automation, marketers can put their content marketing efforts on auto-pilot with HubSpot.
Best features
- One of the most powerful CRMs with an easy-to-use interface to get things done
- All-in-one solution for different channels and content formats, like ads, social media, email, and more
- Can be integrated into your existing website or used as a content management system
Pricing: Free version, Premium plan starts from $45/month
11. Trello
Trello is a popular project management tool that helps you organize multiple tasks on a single (or multiple) board/s. You can use the tool in various styles, like the popular kanban board format, the tabular view, or the calendar view.
Trello simplifies collaboration within a team, irrespective of its size. Plus, it allows you to break down large projects into smaller goals and track your progress according to these milestones.
Best features
- Customizable boards to keep all critical information and files in a single place
- Easily integrate with other tools and automate workflows
- Simple and easy-to-use user interface with unique plugins to streamline planning
Pricing: Free version, Standard at $5/user/month, Premium at $10/user/month, Enterprise at $17.50/user/month
12. HootSuite
Hootsuite is a social media management platform for scheduling and publishing content on desired channels at any time—from a single tool. The tool is a shared planner for your entire team to create, plan, schedule, and track all your posts.
While it helps marketers stay on top of their content pipeline, it also allows them to assess their best-performing posts.
Best features
- Connect the tool with more than 35 social media platforms
- Easily monitor and compare all your competitors' content and social media profiles for better insights
- Track, analyze, and spot social media trends in real-time
Pricing: Professional plan (1 user) at $49/month and Team plan (3 users) at $129/month
For lead generation
Lead generation is your content strategy's final and most crucial stage. Think of it as the culmination of your efforts—the content you've meticulously planned, created, and published translates into leads and conversions.
Given the immense value of lead generation for content teams, you need the best lead gen tools to manage all your prospects. Let’s look at two great options:
13. ClickFunnels
ClickFunnels is a multi-purpose content marketing tool that functions as a web-building and sales funnel-building tool.
Content teams can use this tool to create sales funnels and nudge visitors towards the most relevant content about the brand's services/products at different stages of their journey—ultimately converting them into potential leads.
Best Features
- Quickly build sales funnels with its easy drag-and-drop web page editor
- Easy integration with Facebook marketing automation
- Combine different content formats to create highly-targeted messaging
Pricing: Basic plan at $80.84/month, Platinum plan at $247.50/month.
14. Uberflip
Uberflip is a content experience platform for designing custom landing pages to enhance content delivery and maximize audience engagement. Content marketers can use this tool to create personalized flows that systematically define a visitor’s interaction with all the content available on different channels.
Best Features
- Present content effectively without web development
- Facilitate content distribution and lead generation by creating content hubs
Pricing: $1,200/month billed annually
Give your content marketing tech stack a facelift
Creating a content strategy and hiring a capable team is just the first step toward success. To succeed in the long run, you must empower your team with the right tools and build a robust marketing tech stack.
With these 14 tools, you can cover every vital aspect of content marketing and implement your strategy more confidently.
Jasper is the perfect choice for you if you want to start slow and select only one tool to hit the ground running. It's a fast, easy-to-use solution to cover your entire marketing funnel. Try Jasper today.
