12 Content Curation Tools To Make You A Sharing Machine

As a student, I hated research papers.

Searching for the right resources, taking notes, organising all of that information, developing a thesis – all of this before I could even begin to write, the only part I actually liked.

When I got into content writing, and specifically content curation, it hit me. All of the old hatred of research papers bubbled up. But things have changed. Content curation tools have done the hard work for me, and there are 12 that have turned me into a “curation machine.” Life is good again.

I use content curation tools for two purposes – to find great stuff that I can re-purpose, re-write and publish and to share great content that others in my niche have produced.

To find that content and to get it organised, these are the best content curations tools I have found.

1. Trap.it

Trap.it is a cool and “smart” tool. The more you use it to find content, the smarter it gets. Pretty soon it is literally trapping content from all over the web and putting it in folders, neatly organized for you to access whenever you need information, research, or data. It keeps on working for you while you are onto other things.

2. Quora

A lot of content writers don’t use this, but I love it. Once you set up an account, you can search by keywords for content from all over the web. All of this content can be stored via your account. But here’s the other thing: you can set up “alerts,” based on those keywords, and when content is found it will be sent to your inbox.

3. Scoop.it

This is somewhat like Trap.It but a bit different. You join, conduct “smart searches” based on keywords, take what is important or relevant to you, and then re-purpose/re-write it. Once you have done this, you can complete a 1-click publishing to your blog and any social network platforms. Pretty slick.

4. Pinterest

Yes, I use Pinterest, and here is how. I follow people in my niche, see what they are posting, and copy that stuff to my own boards on my account. When I am looking for new content ideas, I access my boards and rummage through them. More than once, I have generated a great idea for a post of my own.

5. My Curator (for WordPress)

If you have WordPress (and who doesn’t), this is a plugin you must have. This will bring in content on a regular basis for you to read and review. It’s really a constant flow, and you can get lots of ideas.

6. Buzzsumo

Here’s what I love about this tool. You can type in keywords and immediately get a full “report” of the site and blogs that have published related content, as well as those pieces that have received the most views and where the most conversation is going on. It’s great to know what target audiences are discussing and what their questions are. It can drive content that you then decide to write. Plus, you can immediately access these posts and articles, writer better ones, and get a “leg up” on the competition.

7. Write My Paper

This writing service has a full staff of copywriting pros. If I am running out of time but have a great idea for content, I can access their site, fill out an order, and have a fully written piece in short order. These folks really do it right!

8. Learnist

One of the things about content writing is you have to stay current. If you are not producing stuff that people really want to read right now, you are left in the dust. This great tool lets you in on what your niche leaders are producing and discussing. You have to keep learning, and this is your chance to do that.

9. SlideShare

What a great resource. It is like no other that is mentioned here. But you can learn a lot here. Searching by keywords, you can bring up slideshares from others in your niche, go through them quickly without a lot of text reading, and come up with some great idea for content topics. And if you are feeling magnanimous, you can create a slide share of your own that others could use too.

10. Pocket

You are busy, and don’t always have the time to read content that you find and review it for potential topic ideas. But when you do come across something that you know will be useful at some point, you simply drop it into your Pocket account and there it will stay until you do have the time. You can categorise by sub-topics and save anything from blog posts, to articles, to inforgrahics, to videos.

11. Storify

Stories are one of the biggest draws that attract readers and keep them engaged. This is a tool that will just be fun to use. You can take visual content that is posted anywhere and drag and drop it into your own files. And you can also use others’ storyboards and curate content from those. Whenever you can weave a story into your content, you win! (PS: There is a WordPress plugin for Storify).

12. Curata

This is the tool I should have had in college. Omg – so amazing. You supply the keywords, Curata does the rest. It combs through the internet and generates lists of content sources for you to access and review. This is the lazy person’s type of research, and who doesn’t love that?

Obviously, there are many more content curation tools than the 12 listed here. But, if you start with these, okay, just some of these, you will find your job of finding good content a “slam-dunk.” It almost makes me wish I were a student facing those research papers again. Wait – no – I can’t go that far.

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The Only 14 Startup Tools You Need to Build a Unicorn

Imagine if you had to send marketing emails manually, or keep your records in a tattered binder on your desk.

Every company, even startups, needs to make a minimum investment in SaaS tools for work like email marketing, project management, and tracking sales.

But the catch is that some of these startup tools can cost huge amounts of money, and when you’re a young startup you don’t want to be forking out in excess of $2,000/user/month for just one piece of software.

The point of this post is to explain the minimum viable SaaS stack your startup should invest in, based on what we’ve found out at Process Street in our many (many, many, many) tool-testing escapades. I’ll even do the math for you, and collate the estimated annual cost at the end.

Ready to start building up your toolbox with the best SaaS out there?
Here we go: 

Database management: Airtable

Without Airtable, we’d still be storing data in various random spreadsheets, constantly having permission issues, and be unable to get a proper picture of all our data. With it, we now store all of our marketing and product data in one place that connects to over 750 different apps via Zapier.

Airtable takes you a step further than spreadsheets because it’s a relational database.

Setting up a database sounds harder than it actually is, probably because databases used to have to be made in complex apps or by using something like SQL.

Thanks to Airtable, everyone can have access to the power of a database that can hold everything from SEO data to customers and marketing contacts, all linked together so you can keep the data in a single, automatable, accessible place and stop scrambling to find what you need on your hard drive or inside Google Drive.

Pricing: free, or $12/user/month 

Marketing automation & support: Intercom

Intercom is an all-in-one platform for communicating with your customers, both for marketing and support. Last year we were using MailChimp for marketing automation, and Intercom for support, but we recently switched over to purely running our email marketing through Intercom.



Intercom consists of three products: Respond, Engage, and Educate:

Respond is an awesome support solution, with assignments, notes, automation, team inboxes, and performance metrics. It’s priced from $53/month for 250 customer contacts, but the price doesn’t rocket up as your business grows, it climbs gradually. For example, it’ll cost you $101/month for 4,000 customer contacts (and unlimited team members at every level).



Engage is Intercom’s marketing automation side. It lets you send messages manually at any time, based on user activity (perfect for SaaS and subscription businesses), or drip out a sequence of messages to anyone added to your blog subscriber list. In short, it does everything you’d expect from a marketing automation/email marketing service, but also has the layer of user insights because it’s linked to your product or service, too.

Total pricing for Intercom’s Respond and Engage products: $150/company/month for 1,000 contacts
Integrations: Zapier

Zapier is a platform that builds integrations between apps that wouldn’t usually integrate. For example, Intercom doesn’t have a natural integration with Sumo, but we need to send all blog subscribers (some of which come in through Sumo pop-ups) to Intercom. To solve that, we use Zapier to connect the two together.

And that’s just one of the hundreds of use cases. We even use Zapier with our own product, Process Street, to run checklists and add assignments to tasks when an action happens in another app.

Some of my own Zapier use cases at Process Street include:
Add new tagged Airtable URLs with titles to multiple Buffer accounts at once
Create a Google Sheet of incoming emails for analysis
Listen for the words ‘run meeting’ in our content creation Slack channel to fire off a Process Street meeting checklist
Run a Process Street pre-publish checklist when a blog article card is moved into a Trello list
Automatically tweet all RSS feed content
Add Trello cards in the ‘inbox’ list to Todoist with the same due date

So, as you can see, it’s a tool that helps you cut down on masses of data entry. Want to learn more about Zapier? We’ve written a huge ebook on the topic! Get it here.

Pricing: free, or $18.33/month for 20 zaps and 3,000 tasks 

Process management: Process Street

The scalability of your startup depends on how well new hires can pick up the pace, learn your processes, and start being efficient. Without documented processes, it’s practically impossible to scale because you’ll be spending time explaining tasks to new hires over and over again. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just hand them a process and check their progress quickly?

That’s where Process Street comes in. With Process Street, you can transfer your company’s knowledge to checklist templates that explain exactly how your team is expected to get the work done. This is great for things like sales qualification, blog pre-publish, employee onboarding, or client onboarding. That’s because all of these tasks have a structure and margin for error.

Here’s an example of an employee onboarding checklist built inside Process Street:

As you can see, each step has a checkbox and can contain form fields, images, videos, text, and more — all to help you explain the tasks that need doing, or to capture structured data.

A library of up-to-date, properly documented processes means you can scale your team with little effort and quickly check the work of your organization at a glance from the Process Street dashboard, which shows you how far each task is progressing:



Process Street also has a Zapier integration, which means you can either link checkboxes to actions in other apps (like sending all form field data to a spreadsheet when a task is checked) or run and assign checklists automatically (e.g. when a new card is labeled in Trello or when you get an email with certain text in the subject line).

Pricing: free, or $12.50/user/month 

CRM: Close.io

A CRM is where sales and marketing teams can add leads, communicate with them, and track conversations in one place. It’s an alternative to separate email inboxes, and Close.io is our CRM of choice here at Process Street.

Even the cheapest package comes with unlimited leads, contacts, and opportunities, meaning there’s no cap on the number of companies you can reach out to. But what really sets Close.io apart is its amazing search functionality. Using the app’s own variables (or even custom variables you add yourself), you can quickly filter your leads to get a targeted list. For example, you could get every lead in New York City who you haven’t emailed in the past week but have spoken to on the phone at least once.

I find it useful for marketing, too. We use Airtable to collate contacts we’ve mentioned in our blog posts, then use Zapier to automatically add them to Close.io with a tag; when you search the tag, you get a list of everyone to email telling them they’ve been mentioned, and you can bulk email them a template using the tag as a snippet for the URL of the promoted post.

We also use it in conjunction with Process Street for sales qualification.

Close.io might seem expensive at first, but it also covers the cost of calls and won’t need to be purchased for every member of the organization, like a lot of these tools do.

Pricing: $59/user/month 

Chat: Slack

Slack is a chat app for teams — check our review here. With it, you can cut email out of the equation entirely and focus on using the most efficient kind of interface instead of the long-outdated email.

Inside Slack, you can direct message your co-workers and create channels for each team inside your company. For example, we have a content creation channel where we share resources, have a quick morning catch-up chat, post our WIP articles, and generally communicate a lot more than we would do with just email.

Slack also has a ton of integrations meaning you could take it from being just a chat app like Facebook Messenger to being a fully-fledged dashboard for your notifications.

For example, you can link Slack to Trello and get a constant flow of notifications fed into the relevant channel. If you often work with someone in particular on a board, you can add a Trello integration to that channel and automatically update each other alongside the chat.



Pricing: free, or from $6.67/user/month 

Cloud storage: Google Drive

Cloud storage is one of the most basic requirements for modern businesses. Without it, you’re stuck in the ancient days where files had to be emailed from your hard drive, or accessed through the company intranet. I was always under the impression that most businesses used cloud storage, but when a recent study revealed that only 8% of companies share documents using cloud services, I was shocked.

Here are the usages and benefits of cloud storage:
Store files outside of company servers, minimizing risk of losing resources
Access files anywhere that has an internet connection
Use another server’s bandwidth, don’t clog up your own company’s
Save money on internal storage space
Control permissions and access to all your company’s resources

And, while there are a ton of different cloud storage services out there, we chose Google Drive because it gives you the best value for money and natively integrates with the rest of the tools we use in the Google suite, like Gmail, Sheets, and Docs.

Pricing: $10/user/month including unlimited storage and all G Suite features 

Google Suite vs. Office 365

This little section could be an entire article, but for the purposes of this article it’s worth quickly mentioning that Google Suite and Office 365 are parallel products as far as the tools go (Docs = Word, Sheets = Excel, etc) but the best way to create email accounts and control access for your company domain is to use Google Suite. You can get a plan that we use at Process Street that costs $5/user/month.

However, in some cases it might make more sense to get both. With Office 365, you also get Microsoft Flow (which can replace Zapier in some situations), Microsoft Teams (Slack alternative), and Microsoft Planner (Trello alternative).

I’ll talk more about this later on when we get to pricing, but due to their dominance it’s obvious some companies are looking for a Microsoft-heavy solution.
Project and task management: Trello

Trello is a kanban board app that you can imagine like an infinite amount of sticky notes, lists, and boards.



We divide our team’s functions up into boards, and use lists to denote progress through the flow, from ‘idea’ to ‘work in progress’ to ‘done’. With Trello, all of our team’s work is centralized and it’s easy to quickly see the status for particular tasks or add tasks from other apps using their integrations.

Trello is such an open-ended app you can use it to organize pretty much anything: make an editorial calendar, a list of blog post ideas, a list of growth hacking experiments, or just your personal to-do items. Because of that, it organizes a lot of our day-to-day work at Process Street and has just about every feature you could need.

Here’s an example of a Trello board we use at Process Street for managing our editorial calendar and our blog article creation process at the same time:



Pricing: free, or $12.50/user/month 

Payment processing: Stripe

For subscription businesses (SaaS included), ecommerce, or anywhere that collects payments from customers over the internet, Stripe is an essential tool. Basically, it’s a payment processing API you can build into your software or website to let users put in their credit card details, be charged, and then notify you.

With Stripe, you can accept debit and credit card payments from customers in any country in over 135 currencies. Without Stripe or a similar API, it’d be a pain in the ass.

Pricing: 2.9% of charge + 30 cents per transaction
Source control: GitHub

Most startups are in the software industry, so it makes sense to assume you need source code control and a repository.



While GitHub is most well known as a network for open source software, it can also be used privately as an internal tool to control edits and rollbacks on collaborative coding projects. At Process Street, we use GitHub to push updates live to the server after they’ve been through the review process. That way, we basically make sure nothing’s going live that will break everything.

Pricing: $9/user/month for the teams plan

 

Design prototyping: InVision

If your startup is involved with any kind of digital design, whether that’s UI design or web design, you’ll find it hard to get anywhere without a product like InVision.

InVision was built to combat the problems designers have when trying to show clients and team mates how their design will work, and what it’ll feel like to use. By uploading screenshots of your design, you can build working prototypes inside InVision complete with clickable elements.



And, when you get feedback from your team, they can comment directly on the part of the interface they’re referring to, eliminating a frustrating clarification process.

InVision is priced per active prototype, which means that if you only work on one project at a time, you can use it for free. If you need more, the pricing starts at $15/month.

Pricing: free, or from $15/month

 

Accounting: FreshBooks

FreshBooks is a full accounting suite for startups and SMBs. It includes invoicing, expense tracking, time tracking, tasks/projects, and reporting (for profits, expenses, etc.)

It’s an alternative to managing your accounts using spreadsheets, or even an alternative to hiring an accountant because much of what FreshBooks does negates the need for a dedicated accountant, especially in a small startup.

Scan receipts, request payments, and have everything automatically logged in one place so you don’t run into any compliance issues.

Pricing: from $15/month 

Social media management: Buffer

For an organization without a dedicated social media team (or at least a member of the marketing team that spends a certain number of hours per week managing social media), maintaining multiple social channels can be a huge drain on your company’s time, but with Buffer you can run social media on autopilot.

At Process Street, we combine Buffer with Zapier to automatically add new RSS feed items and new Airtable records. We also have a zap that adds any newly Buffer’d article to all of our Buffer social channels at once. These methods are much more effective than manually adding content, especially for use cases such as adding new posts to every employee’s Twitter feed, too.

Pricing: $10/month 

SaaS metrics: ProfitWell

ProfitWell is a 100% free tool from the creators of Price Intelligently. It works with Stripe, Braintree, and Zuora, all of which are tools for processing payments. So, whenever a customer pays you for your SaaS product, you get free metrics that guide the future of your product and give you an indication of its health.



Pricing: free forever 

The total annual cost for your startup: free plans where possible

The cost of a SaaS stack is different for every startup, so there’s not an entirely accurate way to estimate costs, especially when some tools are priced per company, some are priced per user, and some will only be used by one member of the organization.

Regardless, I’ve tried my best to make an estimate based on assumptions like: the CRM will only be used by one person, Airtable will be used by everyone, etc. In this estimate, I’ve assumed that a startup consists of 10 people, but there’s also a per user cost breakdown for tools the whole company will use.

Phew. Here goes:



Notes:
Intercom costs the same no matter if one person uses it or the whole company uses it. What you pay for is $X/contact, and this example assumes 1,000 contacts
I’ve listed the necessary users for Close.io as 1 because it’s likely to be a shared account with multiple email addresses connected
Stripe has been omitted from the list of costs because it’s impossible to calculate 

The total annual cost for your startup: premium plans without Office 365

Because of the nature of freemium, any growing company will get too big for the free plan in time. For a company of 10, it’s likely some of the tools will need to be paid.

Using the same estimated user counts and going by annual pricing, here’s what you’d pay to use these tools on the premium plan:



Notes:
I’ve kept Trello on the free plan because it’s not absolutely necessary to upgrade when there’s so many great unlimited features already. 

Alternatives: Microsoft Office 365

While we were brainstorming for this article, we realized that some of the tools listed here are bundled together in Microsoft’s Office 365 suite. Namely:
Microsoft Flow replaces Zapier
OneDrive replaces Google Drive
Microsoft Planner replaces Trello
Microsoft Teams replaces Slack

It’s cheaper to get the full Office package than pay separate charges for every product ($12.50/user/month) — but only marginally, because you’ll still need Google Suite otherwise you’ll be using gmail.com email addresses at your workplace. Here’s a version of the table with Office 365 substituting out similar products, saving $120 annually.



While it makes financial sense to opt for Office 365, you’ll still need to pay $5/user/month for G Suite if you want to use a company email and bulk-control the Google accounts of your employees.

So, in conclusion, it’s possible to pay just $2,600 annually for a high quality SaaS stack for your startup. Some tools, like CRMs and marketing automation, don’t come cheap. In contrast, a lot of tools are available for free.

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The 7 Essential Elements of Effective Social Media Marketing

By now you know it’s a bad idea to be a digital sharecropper and build your business entirely on someone else’s land (like Facebook, Tumblr, or any other third party you don’t control).

But you may be asking yourself, “What type of social media marketing should I be doing?”

How are savvy businesses using social media effectively to find more customers, boost their reputations, and make more sales?

Here are the seven essentials that will turn your social media marketing from an annoying time-waster to an effective bottom-line booster.

1. Get your home base together

Your home base is your website. It’s on a domain you own. You control the user experience — from the content to the site design to the user interface.

This is where you show that you know your stuff. That means building a nice cornerstone of high-quality content that demonstrates your expertise in a likeable, accessible way.

First impressions matter, so make sure the design is clean, professional, and smart. It can still be stylish or funky if that’s your thing, but it shouldn’t look amateurish or confusing.

Your home base is where you post content to answer your readers’ questions, give them interesting tips, and help solve their annoying problems.

When someone wants to know more about you, this is where you send them.

Your home base is a content marketing tool, which means you need to be communicating primarily with customers, not with other experts in your topic.

Don’t just pontificate to show what you know — tie your news and opinions back to how those things affect your customers.

2. Who’s the face of your business?

If you want to use social networking platforms like Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, you need a human face to make your social media marketing work.

So, does that mean potential customers want to know about your personal struggles finding high-quality organic dog food? No. (Unless your company sells organic dog food, that is.)

Just like people have always done in public settings (work, church, volunteer activities), you’re going to adopt a persona — a selected range of your thoughts, emotions, and observations.

You don’t want to share absolutely everything about the “real” you with your social media connections.

You’re going to be social and informal, but in a way that’s relevant, appropriate, and interesting to who you’re talking with.

That doesn’t mean I want you to be a fraud. I want you to be friendly and genuine. Sound like a human being, not a corporate robot.

And you certainly don’t have to stick to business all the time. It’s fine and good to show that you have a life. It’s not so good to show the world you’re careless, rude, or boring.

The truth is, the definition of “appropriate” depends on your audience.

If it works for your customers, it’s appropriate.

Authenticity for a business doesn’t come from oversharing or boring your audience to death — it lies in doing what you say you’ll do.

3. Who else has your customers?

Social networking platforms were designed to make it easy and fun for people to hang out together. That means you’re going to use them to build relationships that will help your business.

Look for people who have healthy-sized audiences who are a good fit for your product or service.

They may be bloggers, they may be authors, they may have a popular podcast or column in mainstream media. They may simply be social media mavens who have lots of friends and like to share good stuff.

These are the people you want to share and promote your excellent content.

Cultivating professional relationships isn’t rocket science. Stick to the basics — link to them from your content, comment intelligently on their blogs and social platforms, and be a nice person.

Don’t think that picking fights or manufacturing controversy makes you stand out. It doesn’t; it just makes you look like a troll.

If you’re going to take a controversial position, make sure it’s one that really matters, and express it with respect.

4. Pick a primary platform

Again, think about where your customers are.

If you love Twitter but your customers spend hours every day on Facebook, you need to recognize that Facebook is probably a better venue for your business. It may not be as fun for you — but that’s why they call it work.

Only move beyond your primary platform when you’re sure you’re handling it well. A lot depends on the industry you’re in.

If you’re a copywriter, social media consultant, or professional content marketer, your customers spend a lot of time in these venues, which means you probably will too.

5. Manage your time

If you don’t decide how much time and focus you’ll put into social media, the default will be “all of it.”

Sites like Twitter and Facebook are seductive places to drop in and just check what’s new.

But when your five-minute check turns into twenty-five minutes, and you’re doing that four or five times a day per site, you’re going to find your productivity taking a dive.

Remember your home base. That (and actually delivering whatever it is you do) are where the bulk of your time and energy need to go.

The best tool I’ve found for managing social media time is a $3 kitchen timer. Decide in advance how much time you’ll spend checking in and being social, set your timer, and stick to it.

6. Content first, conversation second

You’ve been told again and again by social media “experts” that your entire business should revolve around something called “The Conversation.”

Too often, this form of Conversation leads to business owners spending hours every day chattering with potential customers and hoping someone will buy something. (Or, more often, chattering with peers and friends and hoping this counts as work.)

Yes, be personable. Yes, keep an ear out for customer complaints so you can respond appropriately. And yes, network with peers in your industry to keep your links healthy.

But if it feels like goofing around all day instead of working, it probably is.

Instead, spend the bulk of your time creating content, whether it’s on your own home base or for a guest post so you can find a wider audience.

Use content to educate your customers about what they need to know to make an intelligent purchase. Focus on customer objections, questions, and problems.

When you find someone else’s content that your customers will find valuable, share that too — and add a few insights of your own, if you like.

Even a 100-character tweet can have content value. Think about what you can say that makes readers’ lives better, rather than just filling up time before you run to Starbucks.

Make sure your reader has a good experience every time she hears from you. Keep it both useful and entertaining.

Social media conversation is a seasoning that makes your content more appetizing. It’s not the main dish.

7. Don’t forget SEO

Too many people think that social media sharing means they don’t need SEO anymore. The fact is, social media marketing is a superb complement to SEO.

Play the long game.

The same elements that make social media work (sharing content that’s both useful and user-friendly, doing what you say you’ll do, building healthy relationships with others in your industry) are the elements search engines prefer to serve up.

Search engines want to find the content that’s a widely valued resource.
Skip the time-wasting ego game

For too many businesses, social media is a time-wasting ego game.

But use the tools strategically — with a focus on content and getting a useful message in front of a wider audience — and they can be brilliantly effective.

How about you? What do you consider the most essential element of social media marketing?

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How to Create Content People Will Love

The internet has become increasingly cluttered since its development. Studies say that an average consumer is exposed to over 10,000 brand messages per day through social media. With that much content being targeted at consumers, it can be difficult for your message to stand out and be seen by your audience.
Unfortunately, there is no secret formula to make social media posts go viral, but we do have some advice to better your chances of standing out from the crowd.

What Is Content Overload?

From Facebook to Snapchat, and all of the platforms in-between, there is a plethora of platforms your company can utilize to target your customers. Studies show that 94% of small businesses and 93% of B2B’s use content marketing on these platforms, that’s a lot!



The average attention span of any consumer cannot physically handle the amount of content that  is driven towards them on a daily basis. To produce content that brings value to your company, you’ll have to stand out among the millions of advertisements and brand messages your audience is already exposed to.
Why is content overload an important aspect to consider while you develop your digital marketing strategies? According to data from DOMO, there are 347 blog posts published every single minute on WordPress alone. There are also 200 million emails sent and 48 hours of videos uploaded to YouTube. With statistics like that, it’s more likely that your content will go un-seen by your consumers than it is that they will receive your message and respond to it. If you haven’t been considering content overload before, you definitely should now!
At this point, you may be wondering, “What can I do? How do I develop a successful content marketing strategy?” Let’s find out.

Know Your Audience

One thing that successful content marketers all have in common, despite the various platforms and unnerving amount of content within them, is their knowledge of their audience. Not only do they know exactly who they’re trying to target, they develop separate pieces of content that targets each of their potential users.



Although it may be difficult to hone in on the various segments of your audience, it’s not impossible. There are a few different avenues where you can gain valuable understanding on what type of content to create.

Competitive Research

This is simple, what is your competition doing? Have they shared videos, posts, or blogs that have gained great traction from their audience? If so, your mutual target audience responds well to such content and it might be a good idea to develop similar content that can achieve similar results.

Feedback

Feedback is valuable at any stage during marketing strategy development. What’s the best way to get this feedback? Ask! Reach out to your audience and ask what type of content they’d like to watch on YouTube or read on your blog. Building surveys is easy! Pick a simple tool such as SurveyMonkey and administer them through your social media platforms, apps, newsletters, or website!

Analytics

Most websites or hosting platforms offer some sort of analytics page, even on Facebook and Pinterest! Take time to review these and discover what your users do on your website. What section of your website is most popular, which page yields the most utilization from your customers, and which pages tend to have a high drop-off rate? All of these analytics are clues to what your target audience is interested in. Build content around these topics and keywords to increase the amount of times they’ll land on your page, rather than your competitions!

Use Formatting that Works

Formatting can make or break the success of your content. Simple details, such as the font type you use, can impact how effective your content marketing is. There have been hundreds of studies that show most consumers respond well to interactive images or videos that are well-researched and are relatable to the consumers they’re driven towards.

Images

Images have clearly been the most effective form of content marketing on social media. Turning a long winded paragraph of information turn into a, highly-shareable, infographic can yield powerful results for you and your company. Proof of this can be seen in the mass amount of social sharing sites that revolve around images, such as Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, and recently, Facebook!
Did you know that a post that includes an album or picture receives 120-180% more engagement from consumers than text-based posts. On Twitter, Buffer has reported that tweets with images received 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites, and 150% more retweets! Images are clearly preferred by consumers, utilize them!

Supported by Research

Another frustrating aspect of information-overload and the ability to publish on the Internet is the amount of false information that can (and is!) published. Consumers know this, consumers see this, and consumers think about this as they’re exposed to digital marketing strategies. It’s important to prove your credibility to your consumers; it allows them to feel confident in sharing and quoting the data later. An easy way to break through some of the content overload clutter is by researching and sharing valid information!

Interactive Design

Interactive games, activities, and content are naturally appealing to our brains (and your consumers’ brain too!). This is why content like interactive infographics and quizzes gain so much traction among audiences.



You don’t need to design a quiz or develop a game in order to be interactive with your customers, but if you want to give that a try, Apester is a great resource! You can also try your hand at interactive videos through Zaption!

Videos

Similar to interactive design, videos are also known for getting positive results from target consumers. YouTube has been popular but we’ve also seen an increase in video popularity as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Periscope have developed more video-friendly platforms!
Axonn Media recently conducted a study on 600 consumers and found that 75% of users shared video content more than any other type of content. 7 in 10 of those people stated that their perception of brands becomes more positive after consuming video content from brands!

Personality

One of the most important aspects about content marketing is relating to your customers and your audience. One thing, that has been proven time and time again, is real and relatable content that sparks some sort of emotion from your audience. Credibility of brands is more important now than it has ever been before, and adding personal touches and personality to your content is key.
One great example of this is the Facebook page for Humans of New York, which continues to see follower growth and user engagement like no other.



The reason this page has become so popular revolves around the emotional vulnerability that each photo and post brings out.

Making an Impact

Content marketing is difficult; there is no secret recipe to building content that will immediately go viral. Making your brand stand out takes research through analytics, well-crafted content and effective delivery methods.
Already have some fantastic content crafted and need to be sure it gets exposure? Use PushConnectNotify to share content with your audience.
Combine your carefully crafted content with an effective delivery method, like push notifications, to stay in touch even when you may not be the first thing on a potential customer’s mind. When used correctly push notifications help your content stand out, rather than contribute to the information overload.
And what could be better than that?

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10 Content Marketing Tools That Will Improve Your Efficiency

DID you know that 60% of marketers create at least one piece of content each and every day? Furthermore, those who adopt content marketing have 6x higher conversion rates than others who don’t!

There is no question that content marketing is effective and it’s growing in popularity, but it also demands time and effort.

There is a little secret, however, that the most successful content marketers don’t want everyone else to know…Content marketing tools can take a lot of the work out of the process of content creation while maximising productivity.

In this post, we’ll show you 10 amazing content marketing tools that industry experts are using to simplify the content creation process.

Let’s dig in…

1. Trello – Project Organizing Tool

When creating content, staying organised is of the utmost importance. You need to know who is in charge of what, when things are due, and what all is going on. Trello is a tool (essentially built to be used by teams, but great for individuals too) that’ll help you keep your work organised. Groups of users can join together in this one place to collaborate and stay on the same page (literally and figuratively). No more searching through email threads to piece together your content campaigns.

You can create “boards”, each with their own “cards” as shown above, to organise projects. Also, add members to work on tasks as needed and move cards between boards to keep up to date with what’s been done and what items are still due. An added bonus about Trello is it’s free.

2. Feedly – RSS Feed Tool

If you’re looking for hot topics that’ll help you come up with ideas for a piece, the best place to look is at what’s being published on popular blogs in your niche. Visiting each blog one by one is an enormous time vacuum. Enter here Feedly.

Feedly is a super easy place to search for industry leaders in specific niches, add them to your feed, and then stay up to date on what they are posting. The interface organises them all in one neat place for easy browsing. What you can do manually in an hour, Feedly can do in just a matter of seconds. Do you feel your day getting freed up already?

3. MozBar – Domain and Page Authority Stats Tool

MozBar is a toolbar you add as an extension in your browser that allows you to measure domain and page authority along with social sharing stats. Once installed, your Google search results will look like the screenshot below.

If you click on link analysis, a new tab opens which gives you a wealth of information about that search result. See below.

This allows you to research your competition very easily and in depth in terms of domain/page authority and backlink data. If you’re keen on exploring niche competitiveness in search results, there’s also a button available with the premium subscription that lets you get keyword difficulty.

4. Easel.ly – Image Creation Tool

It’s no secret that traffic and conversions get a boost when visual content is integrated with the text, but creating images, videos, and infographics can be time intensive, hard to make to a professional standard, and expensive to continuously hire out. This is why I love Easel.ly. With templates like this one below, you can simply input the text you have in the graphic and you are good to go.

Seriously, anyone can make awesome looking infographics in just a few minutes. If you want more templates and variables to choose from, you can upgrade from the free version to the premium option.

5. Grammarly – Proofreading Tool

The biggest turn off for someone reading your content is annoying grammar and spelling mistakes. However, it can be hard to catch every little one yourself. That is where professionals use a tool like Grammarly. You can download Grammarly and integrate it into Microsoft Word and your internet browser. It will automatically scan your documents, show your errors, and offer suggestions to fix them.

You can also upgrade to a paid version to get a more in-depth analysis of your writing. A bonus is that Grammarly analyzes the corrections it suggests to your documents each month and sends you a summary which can help you improve your writing skills.

6. TrendSpottr – Trend Spotting Tool

How do you gain attention and engagement? Create and share content on a trending topic before the competitors catch up with the hype. However, spotting a trend isn’t always easy (even for experts), but with TrendSpottr, it becomes virtually effortless.

You simply log in and search for the general term you are interested in using the search bar at the top of the page. Then, you will get results like these that show you top trending specific terms on the left, along with recent posts on that topic in the middle column. You can also look at the sentiment the term is receiving, the momentum it’s gaining or losing, and compare your search term to another term to gauge trending strength. This is very cool and allows you to write about what people care about most at the moment.

7. Buffer – Social Media Management Tool

In order to see real results on that great content you’re creating, you need to effectively promote and manage it on social media. But, you don’t want to do this manually because it’s truly like a full-time job in itself. This is where Buffer is the perfect tool because you can connect your social media accounts (like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn etc.) and automate posting to them.

The page you see above is where you schedule your posts on Buffer so you can create a consistent stream of content for your followers. This helps to keep them engaged and grows your follower base without missing a beat. The content tab on the left is where you add in the posts you would like to be scheduled and then, of course, you can monitor performance with the analytics tab. This is a huge key to saving time and taking a few steps closer to content marketing success.

8. Buzz Sumo – Industry Listening Tool

Buzz Sumo is a resource that listens to what is going on in various industries. It is another tool that is helpful for spotting trends. You simply type in the topic you are interested in and you can see which content is most shared and trending. You can also analyse the content, compare domains, and see top authors. Easily view how many shares each piece of content has received on various social media platforms, as well as the backlinks each piece of content has.

This can help when researching topics to write or share and also to locate influencers in your desired industry.

9. Check My Links – Link Auditing Tool

Broken links on your website hurt your SEO and the experience of your users. You don’t want to risk losing a visitor because your link is a dead end, so it is important to ensure that your cited resources deliver valuable and contextual additions to the content on your page. Check My List is a very simple extension to your browser toolbar which will check any page for broken links. Easily identify and fix them, without using up hardly any time.

10. SEMrush – Competitor Research Tool

Last but not least we have SEMrush. In order to ensure that you’re creating and marketing content that’s going to do well, you’ll need to know what the competition is putting out there (yes, you need to do a little spy work).

SEMrush is one of the best tools for this purpose. If you want to find out what keywords the readers and researchers use to find a specific website online, SEMrush will pinpoint that data. The tool tracks and analyses rankings, competitors, links, keywords and PPC ad spending for any domain you need info on. Plus, the dashboard is really nice and easy to understand.

Industry Experts Agree

There you have 10 of the best content marketing tools to help boost efficiency and save your precious time. We all want to be successful, but also want to have time to enjoy off. Not only do these help you do that, but they can significantly increase how effective your content is at the same time. Don’t just take it from me, see what other content marketing experts are saying about these tools:

TopTenReviews named Grammarly the “The best overall online grammar checker; it offers thorough and accurate tools, features and explanations of grammar rules. You can’t go wrong with this online service.”

Gael Breton from Authority Hacker says “Who doesn’t want to know what their competitors rank for?” He says SEMRush is his #1 way of finding keywords.

Adam Connell of bloggingwizard.com says Buzz Sumo is one of his favourite tools. He says the following “Not your usual keyword research tool and well, it’s not. Keyword research has been a foundation of content planning for a good while and it’s about more than specific keywords, it’s about topical reliance and intent. I use BuzzSumo to validate my keyword research and get an idea of how much certain topics get shared.”

Are there any other tools that we missed? Help us out by sharing your favourites!

Or, perhaps you need a bit more help in the content management area? This 2-in-1 spy tool for Facebook Advertising helps expedite your content creation and eliminate the guesswork of creating relevant ads for your target audience. Check out Adsviser today!

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