The Best Technology Tools for Content Marketing. Strategic content solutions Managing successful content campaigns typically starts with detailed research to better understand your audience personas, their optimal purchasing journey and how you can align content to match their needs at the right time. The following tools can help you research, plan and create strategic content solutions for your targeted audience segments, or buyer personas. Content creation and management When it’s time to start the content creation process, you can either create internally or manage a team of content creators. Content Distribution Technology To break through the content noise, you need to identify the best processes that help you distribute your content to your audience in a polished, timely and relevant fashion. Email marketing Email doesn’t immediately come to mind for some marketers when considering their content distribution options; however, it’s still one of the most used channels of communications. MailChimp’s clean interface and competitive features, even on the free plan, make it the smart choice for small businesses or organizations building their first mailing lists. Try these social media management tools to find a process that works best for you. Schedule content, cross-post, manage approval workflows and engage with your audience better with this social media management solution. What technology solutions do you use to manage your content marketing?
The rate of content creation is growing exponentially year over year and content marketers now face more competition than ever before. Media publishers, other organizations and even industry professionals are competing for your audience’s time and attention, even though they may not be direct sales competition.
With all this clutter, content marketers must heavily concentrate on crafting an efficient strategy and set of tools to create the right content, distribute it effectively, promote it successfully and drive more results for their business goals.
Learn more about the tools that I use to address three critical content marketing areas — strategy, creation and distribution.
Strategic content solutions
Managing successful content campaigns typically starts with detailed research to better understand your audience personas, their optimal purchasing journey and how you can align content to match their needs at the right time.
The following tools can help you research, plan and create strategic content solutions for your targeted audience segments, or buyer personas.
Buyer persona creation tools
A buyer persona helps you understand what your ideal prospective customers think and do as they make buying considerations. It’s more than just a description, too. According to the Buyer Persona Institute, “actionable buyer personas reveal insights about your buyers’ decisions — the specific attitudes, concerns and criteria that drive prospective customers to choose you, your competitor or the status quo.”
Hubspot created a nifty online tool that walks users through the process of building buying personas called MakeMyPersona.com. MakeMyPersona.com is a step-by-step wizard that guides you through the process of creating your own personalized buyer persona. MakeMyPersona runs through 19 high-level questions to help you create a basic buyer persona and get you thinking about your customers in the right way. Consider this a starter option.
To dive deeper into your persona research, Akoonu helps marketers create more distinct personas and map their buyer journeys to the right types of content. Akoonu helps you identify the information you need to build personas, including the typical buying process for each persona, the types of content preferred by each, content tone per decision maker or influencer, how influencers and decision maker personas may interact in the buying process and more. Depending on what tier plan you select, you can even plan content within Akoonu and import data from your marketing automation and CRM solutions to develop a data-driven, persona-based content plan.
Ideation and content planning
Once you understand more about the people you are targeting with your content, the next step is to plan the type of content you’ll need to create to attract their interest.
One common way that marketers discover popular content is by using Google Alerts, Google Trends or some combination of social listening tools. To use these tools, create a list of five to 15 content terms or keywords that you are interested in tracking. Search each term on within your preferred platform — Google Alerts,
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