3 Awesome and Cheap Content Marketing Tools for Small Businesses and Non-Profits
If you’re looking for content marketing tools to help you promote your content online, you may find there aren’t a lot available. Content marketing is relatively new in the world of marketing, and software developers are just now beginning to create packages that help people develop and deploy killer content. Many of these packages are incredibly expensive, however, and include thousands of dollars in miscellaneous “set-up fees,” putting them out of reach for the average small business owner or non-profit manager.
To help you get started with some of the tools we love, below we give our personal picks for 3 of the best, and most affordable, content marketing tools to make use of in your next campaign.
Why Do You Need Content Marketing Tools?
Let’s face it, content marketing is hard (if you’ve got that confused look on your face, check out our Complete Guide to Content Marketing for smaller organizations). It takes a lot of time and effort to develop original, compelling content every week. Then you have to figure out a way to get your content in front of people’s eyeballs. And then you need to track your efforts over time to see if you’re headed in the right direction.
This is why content marketing tools can be a godsend: they allow you to more efficiently manage your time and to focus on the hard, and most important, part of content marketing, the development of great content.
See below for some of the tools we use on a daily basis in our own content marketing.
Tool #1, Which Helps You Write Better: Grammarly
Grammarly is just what it sounds like: a grammar tool. Grammarly is a Google Chrome that checks all of your grammar for your for free. Whenever you make a mistake when you’re writing via a web browser (i.e., over social media, in a blog, etc.) Grammarly highlights it and will even tell you what you’ve done wrong. Now you can write more quickly and efficiently without having to worry about your grammar being off. And it’s free for it’s basic install which pretty much does everything you could want it to do.
Tool #2, Which Helps You Publish to Social Media: HootSuite Publisher and Suggestions
Hootsuite is another great, low-cost content marketing tool that enables you to share great content over social media. With its publisher feature, you can queue up posts over major social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. You can also create an entire content calendar that tells you when things are posted if you’re running specific campaigns. The free version allows you to manage up to five different social media accounts.
The pro version, which is just $9.99 a month per user, also provides additional features, such as Suggestions, which finds trending content for you up to three keywords and queues it up for you so your social media never runs dry again. With pro you can also manage up to 50 different social media accounts.
Tool #3, Which Helps You Deliver High-Quality E-Mail Newsletters: MailChimp
Finally, MailChimp is an email marketing tool that is completely free for email lists of up to 2,000 subcribers. MailChimp comes with a lot of the feature of more advanced marketing software including the ability to build multiple lists, to create segments within lists, and to track opens and click-through-rates. It also allows you to design very nice-looking email templates that feature your organization’s logo and links to your social media accounts and websites.
If you want to stay top-of-the-mind for existing customers or past donors, MailChimp is a great choice for your email marketing.
Tools Just Help You Create and Deliver Great Content
Tools such as these help you streamline some of the most tedious parts of content marketing, including editing for grammar mistakes, managing a content calendar for your social media posting, finding good content to share over social media, and sending emails to past customer and donors. The less time you spend on routine tasks like these each week, month, and year, the more you’ll be able to create compelling content that keeps your audience coming back for more.
January 10, 2017 @ 9:26 am
Hi Guiseppe, great article! I would also recommend DrumUp – https://drumup.io/. It is a social media manager and content marketing app that mines web content in real time to recommend fresh and relevant content to your audience, reducing your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter management time by upto 90%. It provides you with relevant content based on keywords provided by you. You also have the option of setting up RSS feeds or manually save links to your library. Once this is done, you can schedule your favorite posts across your social media channels easily with their 1 Click Add feature. This makes it indispensable to smbs. Give it a look, and if you like it, please include it in any future lists. Thanks!
January 10, 2017 @ 7:06 pm
Thanks for contributing! Looks like a great app. I’ll check it out!