A content marketing stack is a collection of software tools and technologies gathered for the express purpose of helping a business use articles, graphics, podcasts, videos, or similar to attract and keep customers. Even the smallest of businesses equipped with Google Docs, a blog, and a Facebook page, can create, publish, and distribute content that will attract, engage, and retain customers. To these tools, there are many other applications that may make content marketing more effective. What follows are several categories of tools to consider for your content marketing technology stack. Content Creation Whether you’re composing a blog post, recording a podcast, or shooting video, you’re going to need software. At this point in your content marketing technology stack, you could be employing web technologies as frequently as you’re using a software solution. Or you could find specialized tools. Find an analysis tool that helps your business make good decisions about content creation and promotion. Build Your Content Marketing Stack In short, content marketing requires a way to create content and a way to publish that content. Any solution you include should make your content more effective.
A content marketing stack is a collection of software tools and technologies gathered for the express purpose of helping a business use articles, graphics, podcasts, videos, or similar to attract and keep customers.
At its core, content marketing relies on the principle of reciprocity and on building trust. If a business — such as an online store — provides helpful, entertaining, or informative content that has value, folks are likely to feel grateful for the content and recognize the business as an expert in the field.
When it does come time to make a purchase, those folks may be more likely to buy from businesses they respect and trust.
Content marketing can also be comparatively easy to produce. Even the smallest of businesses equipped with Google Docs, a blog, and a Facebook page, can create, publish, and distribute content that will attract, engage, and retain customers.
In fact, Google Docs, a blog, and Facebook taken together represent a basic or even fundamental content marketing technology stack, since they fall into the most elementary categories of necessary software solutions.
To these tools, there are many other applications that may make content marketing more effective. What follows are several categories of tools to consider for your content marketing technology stack.
Content Research
Your company’s business goals and objectives should guide your content marketing research to an extent. But it is unlikely that it will point you to the specific topics you’ll need to cover.
As an example, consider a brick-and-click retailer that sells large animal grooming supplies, accessories, and supplements — think horse shampoo to make a colt’s coat shiny or vitamins for a pet pig.
This retailer has a goal of increasing large animal supplement sales by five percent this year. It hopes to use content marketing to reach this aim. This sort of goal might help a content marketer know whom to produce content for and give some hint about what kind of content to produce, but ultimately more research may be required.
In this category of software solutions, look for tools that will help:
- Identify customer needs (perhaps personas),
- Monitor social media and blogs,
- Generate concepts (keywords),
- Establish content schedules and calendars,
- Identify possible distribution channels,
- Reuse existing content or data.
Solutions in this category might include Google AdWords Keyword Planner, Google Drive research, Post Planner, gShift, BuzzSumo, and Rival IQ, to name some.
Content Creation
Whether you’re composing a blog post, recording a podcast, or shooting video, you’re going to need software.
For written content, you might use a word processor like Google Docs or a more specialized solution like the Hemingway Editor. A tool like Grammarly can help with spelling and punctuation. There are, without exaggeration, hundreds of other…
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