Businesses recognise the importance of good content marketing, to set your business as a thought leader within your industry and also playing a significant part in your website and social media interaction. The difficulty is generating fresh and relevant content on a regular basis and keeping in touch with the most popular content on the web.
Content Marketing CRM Tools can be expensive so below are some fantastic free or low-cost online options to help you to generate brilliant content marketing:
635 Brainwriting
635 Brainwriting is based on a traditional method of brainstorming. It essentially gives each person in a team an opportunity to contribute ideas but without being dominated by other members of the group.
Each person has a certain amount of time to come up with an idea before the platform is passed to the next person. This goes back around the circle until several ideas are generated within a short space of time.
Mindmeister
Most workplaces have ‘brainstorming’ ,‘mind mapping’ or ‘thought cloud’ sessions whereby everyone contributes to different thoughts based around a keyword or idea. Mindmeister is an online mind mapping tool that lets you capture, develop and share ideas visually with colleagues wherever they may be located. It ensures that your thoughts and those of your colleagues are not lost on paper but can be displayed and shared visually in the cloud.
You can then sort your ideas into a more structured project management tool, whereby they are turned into actionable tasks to be allocated to you or one of your team. It’s free to start with and then there are various low-cost options for extending your package on a monthly basis depending on your level of usage and requirements.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is the perfect tool for discovering what content is gaining the most shares via social media and so enables you to write content marketing that people want to read! You can find out what type of content is being shared the most for a particular topic i.e. videos, articles, infographics to see what media works best for that audience.
You can also search for influencers within a particular topic area. Follow them with Buzzsumo and understand what content resonates the most with users. There is the option for a free 7 day trial or reasonably priced monthly payment option once this has expired.
Answerthepublic
Answer the Public is an insight tool that uses as its basis the suggested searches from Bing and Google. It then visualises them into various categories to see the full range of what is being searched. Organised in categories such as what, where and why, these visuals provide an overview of the questions people are typing into search engines from their various devices.
This tool allows you to understand what your audience is searching for and therefore get a real understanding of what they want to read about in your content marketing. The best thing of all is that it is free to use unless you want the full access to the solution.
AnswerThePublic: that free visual keyword research & content ideas tool
Trello
Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process.
It’s a bit like an electronic whiteboard, filled with lists of sticky notes, with each note as a task for you and your team. The difference being that each of those sticky notes has photos, attachments from other data sources like BitBucket or Salesforce, documents, and a place to comment and collaborate with your teammates. It gives you the ability to access all this information on the go and is also a great place for colleagues to contribute content and structure and organise so that you can manage the process.
Trendspottr
TrendSpottr is a predictive trend intelligence platform. TrendSpottr predicts emerging trends, viral content and key influencers for any topic in real-time. The solution is able to identify content with high viral potential and impact from Twitter and other sources, hours or days before they have become “popular” and reached mainstream awareness.
There is a free trial option for this solution or a low-cost monthly subscription fee after this.
Zuum
Zuum helps you to learn about your competitors content and what sort of impact it is having on their audience. It gives you information such as:
- How much your competitors are promoting posts
- Finds out who their audience is and how they are reacting
- Looks at optimal times of when competitors are scheduling their posts
- Identifies which content of your competitors is being shared the most
- Finds out what content works best for your top competitor
- Benchmarks your competitor across social media platform
This gives you some inspiration into what content is most engaging to audiences and enables you to tap into your competitors audience.
Social Animal
Social Animal allows you to analyse a multitude of different content data. The tool can track millions of keywords and gives you useful information like when might be a good time to publish, which title and article lengths have maximum impact, as well as a raft of other useful information. You can also compare two popular articles and see what common and unique keywords they have in common.
You can also use keywords to track down the content that you want to see and see what keywords are being used in the most shared of content.
Summary
Content marketing idea generation can be difficult. It takes a mix of reflecting your brand and business ideals, showing yourself as a thought leader but perhaps most importantly it is about getting your content in front of your potential clients. The tools proposed in this blog provide a combination of both engaging content marketing and also content marketing that will be popular and generate traffic towards your social media and web platforms.
