The time you spend on marketing will likely mostly be spent on content. Content marketing comes with its challenges. Creating content requires that you master writing skills, video production, social media skills and project management.
Fortunately, technology is available to us to make content marketing not just better and created easier but also more competitive. Here are 7 tools and techniques to help you with your content marketing efforts:
1. Writing Tools
The content itself is the most important element of your marketing. It’s crucial that you deliver content that is accurate and professional. Plagiarism is the quickest way for your brand to lose credibility. Tools like Paper Rater and Copyscape are powerful software that detect plagiarism.
And the last thing you want to do is publish content that is full of grammatical errors, typos, and misspellings. Tools like Grammarly can check your work for grammar mistakes while scanning to check if the content is original.
2. Livestreaming
Livestreaming is a powerful new marketing tool with the ability to connect you with your audience on a more authentic and human level that consumers now demand. Make livestreaming a part of your content marketing strategy by leveraging Facebook Live or livestreaming services such as Periscope. Take your audience behind-the-scenes, live events, or hold live Q&As with your audience.
3. Image and Design Tools
Tools like Canva, Easel.ly, Piktochart, Design Wizard and PicMonkey are all excellent tools to help you easily create engaging infographics and images. They make editing photos, creating collages, adding text to images, and resizing easy tasks.
4. Virtual Reality
VR marketing is growing and if you have the ability to utilize VR and AR (augmented reality) now, take advantage of the opportunity. Integrating immersive storytelling into your content marketing takes your brand to another level and your audience on a visually stimulating adventure, allowing you to showcase your products and services in a remarkably innovative way.
5. Artificial Intelligence
To gain a competitive edge, use AI-powered solutions in your content marketing to help you enhance your digital presence. While there’s no real replacement for human writers, AI can create content with simple rules, such as hotel descriptions, business reports, stock insights, and sports game recaps.
AI-powered chatbots can even provide you with advice during the content creation research phase while AI algorithms can map out an email subscriber’s experience to help you understand how they interact with your content, allowing the algorithm to create “personalised” emails.
Curata is an AI software tool that uses machine learning to allow you to recognise your users’ content preferences, reducing the time it takes you to build content calendars and social media sharing. Crayon is another AI tool that gives you a competitive edge by telling you exactly how your competitors are performing online - from their content strategy to messaging to targeting.
6. Screenshot Tools
Screenshots from reliable sources can help make your content more trustworthy. By taking screenshots, you are providing your audience with the evidence they demand. Snipping Tool, Skitch, and Jing are all great tools; best of all, they’re free. Faststone and Snagit are other great screen capture tools; however, they come with a price.
7. Video Creation Tools
Video is the perfect medium for attracting the attention of busy audiences. It enables storytelling in a short but unforgettable way that viewers can enjoy. It is the perfect tool for quickly getting your point across to your audience and expressing yourself in ways that you can’t do with text. You can use video editing tools like Videoshop and Animoto to create visual content that looks professional and complete with pictures, videos, captions, and graphics.
Content marketing is difficult enough as it demands your time, skill, and creativity. Fortunately, new technologies have been developed, and techniques are evolving to help your communication efforts stay competitive.