Best Content Marketing Resources To Improve Your Skills
Contrary to popular perceptions, content marketing is an extremely intricate process involving several working parts. You can take a look at the hundreds of tools and content marketing resources used by both veterans and novice marketers to put into perspective the enormous effort that goes into content marketing.
Must-Have Content Marketing Resources and Tools
The primary motivation for using these content marketing resources and content marketing tools is to create effective content that will result in the generation of leads while also contributing to building a brand. In fact, according to a research paper by the Content Marketing Institute, around 86% of all businesses use digital marketing to further their exposure as a brand.
Most of these companies utilize the following marketing resources for several marketing-related requirements:
1. Content Ideation:
Great content begins with good ideas. It is the foundation upon which the entire process of content marketing rests. Therefore, what better way to begin this process than to use the best content marketing resources that exclusively deal with brainstorming potential ideas that are relevant to today’s trends.
These include resources like:
Alltop:
This is an aggregation of current events that are trending at the moment. This collection is updated in real-time, making it possible to stay updated about the most recent happenings, which are important to create relevant content marketing strategies.
Hubspot Idea Generator:
This free tool requires a marketer to add five different nouns which will be used to create blog ideas. The tool can provide a year’s or week’s worth of content ideas.
Google Trends:
Google trends is essentially a marketing resource that gives insight into the search activities of its users. It displays the number of times a word has been looked up and other keyword research insights.
2. Content Strategy:
The most successful brands choose to create content marketing strategies keeping in mind a variety of factors like the target demographic, age, location and the channels they will be using for marketing.
In other words, formulating an effective content strategy will mean knowing the target customer. There is no better way of doing so than using resources that create buyer personas like:
Customer Avatar Worksheet:
This platform allows businesses to create templates for their target customers in a few minutes. The specialty of this software is that it creates a case study of the customer.
Buyer Personas For B2B Marketing:
This eBook from Adhere Creative contains all the information a B2B company requires regarding the buyer journeys of client companies.
EdX Buyer Research Courses:
For content marketing resources that offer a more detailed explanation, one can view the Quantitative Research For Marketers and Market Research And Brand Building courses available at Edx. Both the aforementioned courses are free and provide a data-driven approach to market research.
3. Management and planning:
Once the ideas and strategies have been finalized, it is time to create a more cohesive picture of the logistics of content marketing. This is possible by carefully planning out the writing, editing, and publishing timelines and documenting it in a content plan for a specific period.
The best content marketing resources that will aid in one’s content planning include:
Neil Patel’s Blogs:
Neil Patel is an expert content marketer that provides a large volume of tips that will help to enhance anyone’s content; it is especially evident in his article regarding the importance of a content strategy.
CoSchedule Editorial Calendar:
This platform formulates editorial calendars that play an essential role in mapping out the tasks of a content marketing team. Deadlines for tasks like writing, editing, and publishing are mentioned in the calendar.
Digital Media and Marketing Plan:
Coursera released this course to help one understand what makes a marketing plan successful. One of the aspects that makes this resource the best content marketing resource is that it contains information about creating social media strategies and optimizing digital assets.
4. Content Creation:
Content creation, like writing blog posts or recording videos, is usually what the common man will first think of when one talks about content marketing. This process can be made easier by using the following content marketing resources:
Copywriting guide:
Copy blogger is a popular platform known for posting several tips and tricks that help marketing teams engage their audiences better with their copy. In this way, a team can improve their copywriting skills in general.
Search engine algorithms also favor visual content like videos or infographics. This will involve the use of content marketing resources like:
Data Visualisation Catalogue:
If the content that a team is putting out involves a significant amount of comparative statistics, it can be useful to convey this information graphically to a reader. This is possible using this Data Visualisation Catalogue.
Canva:
This highly intuitive design platform can be used for a variety of branding reasons. This includes presentations, infographics and more.
5. SEO Requirements:
Along with writing, no piece of content on the internet is capable of getting the exposure it has to without having SEO requirements. Although marketers are well aware of the various aspects that need to be present to be optimized for the search engine, they can also use the following best content marketing resources:
Yoast:
This platform allows one to optimize their website in a manner that will favor the search engine algorithms. This content marketing resource also offers complete SEO training on the Yoast website.
Guide To SEO – MOZ
For absolute beginners, this blog series created by Moz will contain all the information one may need when it comes to SEO requirements. It has organized content that also has in-depth articles.
6. Editing and Refining:
A marketing team that creates content will also have to ensure that everything they publish is grammatically correct and gets the point across to the reader. To accomplish this, most teams use the following software to weed out mistakes and enhance the content.
Grammarly:
This application uses artificial intelligence to carry out spell checks and ensure that other grammatical requirements are present in a document. The software can also alter the content to ensure that it is presented in the right tone.
Headline Analyzer:
This tool uses an Emotional Marketing Value or EMV calculator to determine how effective the headline is and its ability to generate views. In this way, teams can create
7. Insights and analysis:
Once the content has been published on a platform, it is important to measure the performance of that type of content. This includes resources the use of resources like:
Measure Matters:
This youtube playlist created by Google Analytics contains all the information one might require to understand the working of Google Analytics. From data studio reports to machine learning, the 13-part video series has it all.
Crazy Egg:
This online application can track certain user behavior when they visit a website. The data collected from this is compiled and displayed in the form of heat maps, scroll maps and more.
From the above list of content marketing resources, it becomes clear that content marketing is more than just publishing the occasional written piece or posting brand-related media on social media platforms. Marketers have the arduous task of catering to their target customers while competing with several hundreds of similar businesses.
You should always invest in your content team to keep them up-to-date about the latest trends. At DAN Institute, we’ve gathered the best online content marketing courses together. Explore the best online content marketing courses and learn how to produce content that promotes a business and boosts brand awareness and profits.
The use of the best content marketing resources can offer several benefits like improved writing and knowledge about search engine algorithms and more. In this way, these resources will give one’s marketing efforts more of an edge in comparison to their competitors and enhance the company’s online presence.
