Advertising and marketing in the 21st Century needs to go a lot further than television and radio. Most marketing happens online through social media, your company’s website and anywhere else content can be posted. Content marketing lets you tell your business’s story, promote your brand and connect with your customers in ways that have never been possible before.
At first glance, content marketing doesn’t seem that difficult. After all, it seems like everyone has at least one social media account. Sadly, successful content marketing is very challenging if you don’t have the right tools at your disposal. There are countless such tools available to marketers, and it’s up to you to choose the ones that are the best for your business. Here are some to keep in mind as you begin your content marketing efforts.
Feedly
Feedly has become a great replacement for Google Reader and the perfect choice for RSS with over 7 million users. Just add your favorite blogs and fill your feed with all of the content you will need.
Quora
Quora is a great social network if you need quick answers to any questions you want to ask anyone on the Internet or you want some insight into the latest trends. It’s incredibly easy to use whether you’re simply gathering information or you’re reaching out to potential clients.
Paper.li
People like to think that newspapers are dying, but while physical papers that are delivered door-to-door aren’t so common stories are still regularly printed in millions of papers around the world. Many of these can be curated with Paper.li, a free service that will let you find newspaper articles on virtually any topic from anywhere on the Web.
Buffer
Buffer is all but essential content marketing and social networking tool that lets you schedule posts across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. These are all still the biggest social networking sites on the Web, so anything that streamlines how posts are shared across all of these networks will prove to be useful for your content marketing efforts.
Pinterest is sometimes seen as something as something people use to post about their favorite hobbies, but it also makes for a great organization and marketing tool. If nothing else, it can curate content from other sites for you to use as content marketing inspiration.
Google Keyword Tool
Finally, you will still need to find the right keywords to market your content. This is where the Google Keyword Tool comes in handy. The Google Keyword Tool will help you decide what keywords are best to use in headlines and body paragraphs if you want to generate traffic organically from search engine hits. While you should never rely on the data you get from this tool, it will still be a great place to start as you create your content.