13 Best Content Marketing Tools to Make Your Content Pop

Are you ready to take your content to the next level with the best content marketing tools available?

In this article, we’re sharing all the top paid and free content marketing tools you can use to get the most out of your content marketing efforts.

13 Best Content Marketing Tools

Content marketing is hard, but these tools can make it easy, fun, and more profitable.

1. QuestionDB

QuestionDB is a powerful tool to help writers and marketers find topics to write about. It really is a question database that lets you search through a gigantic collection of real questions from users to get insights about your target audience’s pain points and interests so you can create content that will engage them.

To get started, you simply pick a broad keyword. For example, let’s say you want to write about getting more backlinks. You’d enter “backlinks” into the search tool and click Generate.

You’ll get a list of related keywords and questions that you can use to create new content.

QuestionDB sorts question by popularity (how often the question gets asked) by default. But, to get a high-level overview of what people want to know about your topic, you can sort by topic (paid version).

Cost:

Free for a max of 10 results per search. Pro plan is $10/month and includes complete results (up to 800) per search.

2. Pexels

If you’re looking for a free collection of professional, high-quality stock photos, Pexels is the content marketing tool you’re looking for. Pexels offers an enormous collection of gorgeous images and videos that you can use completely free.

Photographers upload around 100 new images to Pexels every day, creating a database of images that is sure to add depth to your content marketing efforts. Looking for images for an article about social media? Simple search Pexels for “social media” and you’ll get results like this:

Pexels uses two types of licenses: Pexels License and the Creative Commons License. Both licenses let you use and edit images for personal or commercial use with or without crediting the photographer.

You can use this free content marketing tool without creating an account, but many users opt to create an account to get access to additional features. When you create an account, you can take certain actions such as liking photographs, collecting pictures, and following specific photographers.

Cost:

Free.

3. CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer

Headlines are vitally important to your content marketing results. A great headline can pull in readers, getting them to click on and read your content. A bad headline sends them scrolling on by.

But how do you know that your headlines are irresistibly clickable? CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer tool for content marketing is a great place to start.

Type your headline idea into the site and click Analyze. You’ll immediately be presented with an easy-to-understand analysis of your headline, along with a score (out of 100).

As you scroll down the results page, you’ll get additional tips to improve your headline, length analysis, Google search preview, and more.

The best part is that you can tweak your headline and analyze it again!

And, if the changes you made didn’t work out, you can choose a headline from your headline history.

Cost:

Free.

4. SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is the best content marketing tool to compare your linking strategies and marketing efforts to your competitors. It’s a competitive intelligence tool, providing key marketing insights to your marketing, business, and product teams.

If you want a better understanding of your competitors' user acquisition channel mix, user funnel and retention, top of the funnel user behavior, and more, you should definitely give SimilarWeb a look.

One of the best features of SimilarWeb is the Referrals tool. You can use Referrals to see exactly where your competitors’ traffic is coming from.

This opens up opportunities for linkbuilding since you can reach out to those referrers and offer up your link as a replacement.

Cost:

Free plan; enterprise pricing by quote.

5. Canva

Canva makes it so easy to create presentations, blog headers, social media graphics, and a ton more using a simple graphic design tool with drag-and-drop functionality. It includes templates to get your visual content marketing started in moments, digital or print.

Canva is always adding new features to keep the product fresh, and their customer support is excellent.

With the free version of this content marketing tool, you get access to more than 8,000 free templates, 100+ design types, and hundreds of thousands of free photos and graphics.

Cost:

Free version; paid plans start at $9.95/user/month (billed annually).

6. Alltop

Alltop is a curated list of popular blogs in roughly 50 different niches. This content marketing tool was created with the goal of providing the best news sources for any topic.

So, what does this mean for you as a content marketer?

You can use Alltop to find out what other content marketers in your industry are writing about to give you even more content ideas. You can also research industry blogs to find guest blogging opportunities for linkbuilding.

One of the coolest features of Alltop is the Viral tab. This shows you the content that’s getting the most engagement so you can piggyback on this content and stay hyper-relevant.

At the bottom of the Viral page, you can see the most viral content by day, week, month, or year.

Cost:

Free.

7. Hemingway Editor

Hemingway Editor is one of the best content marketing tools around. You just enter your text into the site or app and it automatically gives you a readability analysis showing grade level, number of words, and improvements you can make within your content.

The suggestions for improvement are color-coded, so you can see right in the text where your issues are. Here’s what the colors mean:

• Yellow: Hard to read sentences that are lengthy or structurally complex

• Red: Very hard to read sentences that can confuse readers

• Purple: Words or phrases that have a simpler alternative

• Blue: Adverbs or weak language

• Green: Passive voice

The analysis changes automatically as you make edits, so you’ll be able to see the impact of your changes on your score.

Cost:

Free or $19.99 for the desktop app.

8. Airstory

Airstory is a flexible writing system that brings your notes and research into the document where you need it. Airstory offers an easy-to-use drag-and-drop system to let you drag your notes onto the page and move them around.

You can also highlight text you’ve written and turn it into a note with just a click so you can save it for later. Plus, Airstory offers tabs, which is something you won’t get with Word or Google Docs.

Bonus: Airstory Researcher

With the Airstory Researcher Chrome extension, you’ll be able to clip notes from all over the web and send it to your Airstory document. Then, you can just drag it into your blog post when you need it.

Airstory Researcher lets you:

• Clip text and images

• Capture source info, like URLs

• Tag your clips

• Send clips to any of your docs

• Cite all your research

• Drag your clips onto the page

Cost:

Robust free version; pricing for business is $6.47/user/month.

9. Google Analytics

Google Analytics tells you every single thing you’ve ever wondered about your content marketing efforts, like traffic sources, user engagement metrics, highest converting web pages and marketing campaigns, and so much more.

Why does this matter for your content marketing?

Google Analytics is the best free content marketing tool you’re going to find that helps you figure out exactly which of your content and campaigns wins you more sales. When you have that information at hand, you can create a content marketing strategy around generating more of that high-converting content.

One of the Google Analytics reports we love for content marketing is the traffic report. To access this report in Google Analytics, go to Behavior >> Site Content >> All Pages.

The pages report is the perfect place to start improving your content marketing since it looks at the pages getting the most traffic to your site as well as metrics like time on site and bounce rate.

Cost:

Free.

9. Buffer

Buffer is an intuitive, streamlined social media management platform that can help drive meaningful social engagement and results. It comes with a suite of products for publishing, engagement, analytics.

If you are serious about social media marketing, you’ll need to create a lot of social media-specific content and post it throughout the day. But that can quickly become a time suck.

That’s where Buffer comes in.

With Buffer, you can batch schedule your social media posts, freeing up your time for other things.

Cost:

Buffer offers two products: Publish pricing starts at $15/month and Analyze pricing starts at $35/month. There’s also a free plan that allows 3 social accounts, 10 scheduled posts, and a single user.

11. Grammarly

Grammarly is a spelling and grammar checker, but it goes deeper than that. With Grammarly, your content marketing will benefit from spelling, grammar, tone, and style analysis. Plus, it has a plagiarism checker so you can make sure that the content you’re adding to your site is original.

One of the coolest features in Grammarly is goals. You can set goals in Grammarly to target:

• Audience

• Formality

• Domain

• Tone

• Intent

Cost:

Grammarly has a great free plan, but if you’re a professional content marketer, we recommend a paid plan starting at $11.66/month (billed annually).

12. Yoast SEO

If you’re a content marketer, you need a quality SEO tool to ensure your content is getting ranked in search engines and seen by the right people. Yoast SEO can help you get more visitors from Google, Bing, and social media as well as increasing engagement.

Both free and paid versions of Yoast SEO come with keyword optimization, readability checks, indexables, duplicate content checks, and a ton more.

With the premium version, Yoast SEO provides internal linking suggestions to improve your SEO even more. Plus, you get a redirect manager to keep you from losing visitors due to a 404 Not Found page.

Cost:

Free version; Yoast SEO Premium is $89/year.

13. Trello

Trello is a great content marketing tool for managing your process. It’s a simple kanban project management tool that uses cards and lists to keep you on track.

Trello is used by major sites like Mashable, ReadWrite, and Changelog to name a few, so it will be able to handle just about anything you can throw at it.

If you’re part of a content marketing team, Trello can bring you together to work collaboratively and get more done. Here’s an example of an editorial calendar created in Trello:

One of our favorite features of this content marketing tool is Butler. You can use this bot for the automation of tasks with:

• Rule-based triggers

• Custom card and board buttons

• Calendar commands

• Due date commands

Trello also has tons of templates available for business, design, marketing, project management, and more.

Cost:

Free plan available; premium plans start at $9.99/user/month.