Around 91% of companies are using content marketing as a part of their marketing activities. Content marketing remains one of the most cost-effective channels of digital marketing and it increases engagement. I’ll cover six of the most effective content marketing tools that will help you to boost your marketing ROI.

1. Mailshake

Mailshake is a sales engagement and automation software with over 43k happy customers. With the ability to integrate with tons of apps such as Zoho CRM, Salesforce, Zoom, and Slack, Mailshake performs content marketing on autopilot.

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Features

• Offers features such as A/B testing, automatic follow-ups and click monitoring.
• You can manage and track your leads’ performance via Mailshake’s “Lead Cacher” that replies to leads, and also monitors the lead status (won, lost, and ignored).
• To save time, Mailshake allows you to upload a list of contacts in one click via CSV file.
• With the “follow-up” feature, Mailshake sends follow-up emails automatically to recipients.
• Offers existing follow-up email templates for guest posts, content promotion, link building, lead generation, and PR (you can customise them as per your need).

Pricing

Mailshake offers two three pricing plans:

• Email Outreach: $59 per month (with up to 5k recipients).
• Sales Engagement: $99 per month (with up to 10k recipients and phone dialer).

2. BuzzSumo

Trusted by millions of marketers, BuzzSumo is the best tool to find top-performing content around the web. It has a database of over 5 billion articles worldwide to check the social engagements of your top competitors. Apart from content marketing, BuzzSumo also helps to find potential influencers for Twitter and Instagram.

Features

• Find thousands of relevant keywords for your content using BuzzSumo’s “Keyword Tool.”

• Search millions of questions from forum sites like Quora, Reddit, and other Q/A forums.
• BuzzSumo’s monitoring feature allows you to track your brand mentions and the competitor’s content.
• You can also track every new link acquired by your content. The tool sends automatic notifications via email.

Pricing

BuzzSumo offers three pricing plans:

• Pro: $99 per month (with up to 5 projects).
• Plus: $179 per month (with up to 10 projects).
• Large: $299 per month (with up to 30 projects).

BuzzSumo’s plans offer unlimited searches each month.

3. Semrush

Apart from SEO tools, Semrush also provides content marketing tools such as topic research, content template, monitoring and tracking, the marketing calendar, content writing assistant, and content audit. You can use these tools to plan and optimize your content marketing strategy.

Features

• With “SEO Writing Assistant,” Semrush helps you create winning content with writing and keyword recommendations.
• The “Brand Monitoring” feature lets you monitor the brand mentions of your competitors.
• You can track the performance of up to 50 external articles or blogs of yours and your competitors using “Post tracking.”
• You can effectively manage content activities using the “Marketing Calendar” to ensure the work is done within the deadline.

Pricing

SEMrush offers two pricing plans:

• Guru: $229.95 per month (with up to 800 SEO content templates).
• Business: $449.95 per month (with up to 2000 SEO content templates).

4. Buffer

Buffer is a social media tool that helps you to promote your content on various social platforms. It also lets you measure engagement over your shared content, and you can also create professional reports for clients. Buffer is trusted by big brands like Shopify, Huckberry, and Spotify.

Features

• With a powerful chrome extension, you can directly share any blog or article on sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, and Pinterest without even opening the Buffer app.
• You can track your social media profiles’ performance with metrics like posts per day, clicks, shares, mentions, followers, and retweets.
• With Buffer, you can schedule Retweets at the perfect time by using Buffer Retweet.
• You can create different custom reports with the brand logo, title, charts, and description and download them in PDF and image format.

Pricing

Buffer offers three pricing plans:

• Free: $0 per month (with up to 3 social accounts and 10 post schedules).
• Pro: $15 per month (with up to 8 social accounts and 100 post schedules).
• Premium: $65 per month (with up to 8 social accounts and 2,000 post schedules).
• Business: $99 per month (with up to 25 social accounts and 2,000 post schedules).

Buffer also offers a 14-day trial for any of the above plans.

5. MailChimp

MailChimp is an all-in-one email marketing platform for content marketers where they can send bulk emails with excellent templates. It comes with a drag-and-drop builder with a library where you can store images and videos. With over 250 app integrations, MailChimp can be one of the best platforms.

Features

• You can add order confirmation (transactional emails) directly from your MailChimp dashboard.
• The “Subject Line Helper,” lets you write catchy and engaging email heading within seconds.
• To create and add beautiful graphics to your email, MailChimp offers integration with apps like Canva and Unsplash.
• Offers 100+ designs and templates for your emails with customization features.
• You can perform A/B testing for content and subject line to see what works the best.

Pricing

MailChimp offers four three pricing plans:

• Free: $0 per month (with up to 2,000 contacts).
• Essentials: $10.45 per month (with up to 50,000 contacts).
• Standard: $15.61 per month (with up to 100k contacts).
• Premium: $312.18 per month (with 200k+ contacts).

6. Outbrain

Outbrain is an online platform that helps you advertise your content and earn revenue. Outbrain is trusted by top-notch brands including CNN, BBC, MSN, and Sky News. Using this platform, you can connect with one-third of the world’s users who engage with your content on the web.

Features

• Outbrain offers different ad formats, including the carousel, app installs click-to-watch video ads, and native, and video ads.
• It supports over 55 countries worldwide, including the US, UK, Canada, Spain, and Germany.
• It allows you to target an audience based on their interest to reach over 1 billion users every month.
• You can add native ads to your content in the form of in-feeds, google search results, and article recommendation ads (on the website).
• Outbrain allows advertising on articles, blog posts, videos, app download pages, and even SERP pages.

Pricing

Outbrain operates on a CPC (Cost Per Click) pricing model, and you are charged on the number of clicks a campaign receives.

Summing up

Whether you are a business or a freelancer, content marketing can help you reach your business goals. If you haven’t started it yet, then it is the right time to start leveraging the power of content marketing for your brand and clients. Use a combination of the above best content marketing tools to improve the ROI of your marketing efforts and boost your sales.