Time-Saving Content Marketing Tools and Tips

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience—and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. The success of your content marketing strategy, therefore, directly relates to the success of your advertising campaign as a whole.

While some stages in this process are lengthy and unavoidable, you are able to automate certain other steps to get some relief from your most time-consuming tasks. For one of our favorite social media automation sites, check out Zapier.

To help you jump start your content marketing efforts, we’ve come up with a list of content marketing tools and tips you can use to refine your strategy:

Tap into Innumerable Content Ideas Through Keyword Research

Keyword research is the old school way to brainstorm content. This method will result in hundreds of potential keywords that can be used as inspiration for content. Long-tail keywords are a safer option than primary keywords, in that they help you avoid red flags by Google’s algorithm updates.

To start, go to Google Analytics and pull up a Search report by keyword (Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Overview). Next, change the number of keywords displayed to 100. Then go to www.authoritylabs.com and use those keywords to run a ranking report. With these results, you can more quickly and easily identify keywords that you are not ranking in the top 5 for, but have brought you traffic. This will help you determine existing content that could use improvement, while also providing insights into topics you may want to explore further.

Scour Infographics for Content Ideas

Infographics are an excellent source of quality, relevant information that can be easily interpreted back into text. Search engines can’t read/crawl all the information on infographics, making a lot of the information “unsearchable”. You can take advantage of this by creating a plethora of custom content through the extraction and organization of important statistics and facts into text format, which is both SEO and mobile-friendly.

Expand Your Keyword Research with Pinterest Images

Pinterest is an incredibly powerful tool for content creation and content marketing; it is useful for creating content because pictures are worth 1000 words and can quickly help inspire you to write. When you are suffering from writer’s block, just use images.

Pick a category of content you want to create and you can quickly get a visual of what type of content is trending by searching that hashtag (ex. #emailmarketing). The popular pinning site has also come up with a Trending page, which makes it that much easier to discover the current top-performing content.

Check out my Pinterest profile to get an idea of how to use it as a tool for content marketing.

Repurpose High-Performing Content:

Reusing content that you already know is successful is a smart way to increase your reach. Let’s say one of your blog articles gets a lot of traffic, why not convert it into an infographic, video, podcast, etc. Not only can these tactics grow your reach, but certain advertising methods, such as video, can also increase your chance of gaining conversions (by almost 80%) and securing purchases, as online shoppers who see videos are 1.6x more likely to buy a product or service.

Regularly Consult and Analyze Benchmarking Tools:

Benchmarking tools help you to better understand your audience so you can continue creating valuable and relevant information. If there is ever a spike in traffic and social shares, go to Google Analytics and find the landing page that generated this spike.

Utilizing these tools will provide a multitude of new insights into which of your content ideas and campaign strategies are seeing the most success.

• Google Analytics – Check the performance of your content marketing based on Landing Pages and Keywords. See the bounce rate, engagement, conversion rate, etc. so you can determine how your content is performing.
• AuthorityLabs – Keyword Ranking – Enter your most popular keywords, as well as keywords that bring you the most traffic from Google. Create more content around keywords that bring in traffic but don’t rank in the top 5.
• Buffer, HootSuite, Cyfe – Consult social media analytics software that tracks your social shares and in-depth statistics for Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, and more.

Here are some ideas for content as well as different formats through which you can present them. Which tips and tricks did you find most helpful? Let us know!