Content marketing is a single term that actually encompasses numerous strategies and channels. Between managing and tracking information from your company blog, social media sites, email campaigns and more, marketers have their hands full trying to stay organized and focused with content production and distribution.
Fortunately, there are quite a few comprehensive tools available to help marketers tackle these challenges and execute their content marketing strategies effectively. Let’s take a look at five of the most helpful ones:
LinkedIn’s Dynamic Duo
One the biggest challenges businesses have with content marketing is their inability to gauge its effectiveness. For that reason, LinkedIn created Dynamic Duo, which takes its name from the famous comic book pairing of Batman and Robin. This new content marketing dashboard combines a content marketing score with trending topics to help marketers glean new insights and gain greater visibility into the effectiveness of their marketing strategies.
The content marketing score measures your audience’s engagement with your content and lets you benchmark performance against your top competitors. Trending content helps you target specific demographics by drilling down on what subjects resonate the strongest with different LinkedIn audiences; that information, in turn, allows you to tailor future content specifically to those groups. In short, Dynamic Duo eliminates the age-old content question: is it working?
SlideShare
In the past, when marketers created comprehensive, high-value presentations or infographics for conferences or internal meetings, their shelf life ended when the event finished. But with SlideShare, a free online media service, these assets can be re-purposed and uploaded to the Web to reach broader audiences and drive more value.
SlideShare is a platform that allows users to easily upload and share presentations, infographics, documents, videos, PDFs, and webinars. Of course, the service can also be used for more than re-purposing content. Marketers can create original slide decks specifically for the Web to promote products, services or promotional offers and draw in new customers. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, SlideShare is certainly worth a pretty penny to marketers.
Google Calendar
Editorial calendars are a content marketer’s best friend. Google Calendar, a free online tool, helps you keep everything from webinars dates to whitepaper development to social media campaigns organized. For example, if you have a product launching six weeks from now, with Google Calendar you can schedule your content at exactly the intervals you want to get maximum exposure. Sure, you can stay with the oft-used method of sticking dozens of Post-It notes around your office to remind you of when you’re supposed to do what, but doesn’t that seem like a colossal waste of time and effort?
Google Calendar is especially useful in that you can access it from a mobile device, like a tablet or smartphone, by performing a two-way sync. Your marketing responsibilities don’t disappear when you get up from your desk, so Google Calendar is designed to make your life easier on-the-go as well.
Hootsuite
Have you ever been so concentrated on another marketing project that when you finally looked up at a clock, you realized it was two hours past the time you meant to tweet about a special new promotional offer? Many marketers have been in that same position, but with Hootsuite you can schedule social posts ahead of time to make sure content goes up at the right moment.
The social media management system provides marketers with a single interface from which they can oversee accounts on numerous social platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare and others. Rather than logging into all these sites individually to post content and monitor feedback, Hootsuite gives social media managers the flexibility to do everything from one central dashboard and to create a posting schedule days or even weeks in advance.
Hubspot
If your inbound efforts across various channels feel a little fragmented, Hubspot is a great tool to integrate your marketing under a single umbrella. Leveraging Hubspot’s comprehensive suite of applications and native integrations with commonly used tools like Salesforce.com and SurveyMonkey allows businesses to better attract customers—as well as measure marketing effectiveness and engagement with analytics. Hubspot can be particularly valuable for companies that have already embraced the concept of using a wide array of inbound marketing tactics, but are having trouble generating quality leads or measuring their marketing progress.
Do you have any helpful tools you use to help create, organize and distribute content? We’d love to hear your thoughts!
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
