Cool Content Creation and Marketing Tools

For content creators, the right tools can help in several ways, from helping you organize your thoughts, come up with great ideas, and create a wider variety of content. And for content creators who also manage contributions from others, there are tools that can help streamline the pitch, submission, and editing processes.

Here are 25 Cool Content Creation and Marketing Tools that help.

Editorial Calendars

Whether you are a one-person content creator or part of a content development team, editorial calendars can help you keep things on track. For businesses that tend to focus on revenue-generating projects, editorial calendars also keep you from forgetting to update the blog that attracts business.

Here are some tools to use.

Google Calendar

Looking for something simpler? Google Calendar also does a great job at allowing you to manage content dates with people both inside and outside of your organization. If your content creation lies within your organization only, Outlook Calendar also works.

Trello

Trello is a project management tool that can easily be utilized as an editorial calendar for content. You can create a board for your blog, multiple lists that represent different stages of the editorial process (idea pitches, article submission, editing, publishing, promoting, etc.).

Content Management Tools

Having content creators enter their content into WordPress is a great way to simplify the content submission process. For those who prefer to keep access to their CMS restricted to a small group, or those who have outside content contributors for other platforms such as YouTube, SlideShare, etc., here are some tools that will help convene content into one place.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a popular file sharing service that allows you to create shared folders with others to send content files such as documents, images, videos, and other media.

Google Drive

Google Drive (formerly Docs) is also a great file sharing service. It's especially helpful in the editorial process as multiple people can edit and leave comments on documents as well as upload files related to each piece of content.

OneDrive

OneDrive is the one place for everything in your work and personal life. It gives you free online storage for all your personal files so you can get to them from your iOS device, computer (PC or Mac), and any other devices you use.

Project Management Tools

Tools like Trello, Basecamp, and other project management tools can help you incorporate your calendar, file sharing, and editing all into one tool. Most allow for file attachments per task.

Topic Generators

If you're stuck on coming up with new content ideas, here are some tools that will help you discover what your audience is interested in and even lay out titles for you.

Content Forest Title Tool

Content Forest's Title Tool allows you to input a keyword and anywhere from 10 - 100 blog title ideas to go with it. Be sure to save the ideas and use them for future reference.

Portent's Title Maker

Want title ideas plus fun quips and tips? Try Portent's Idea Generator. You supply the keyword, and it supplies some witty titles to go with it.

Idea Generators

If you want to spark even more ideas for your content, here are tools you can use to see what your audience wants.

Feedly

Start by subscribing to popular blogs in your industry using Feedly. This will allow you to view lots of titles in one screen. You will also get to see which pieces of content are the most popular on social media.

Rank Tracker

Want to know what your audience searches? Rank Tracker will give you the top suggestions for keywords that you enter, which could leave you with over 200 new content ideas.

Image Creators

Great images are vital for content - they make your articles stand out on social networks when shared by others, they can help you get traffic from both Google web and image search, they turn dull presentations into captivating ones, and so much more. Here are some tools that make image creation simple

Canva

Canva is a free tool you can use to create images for different purposes, including blog posts and social media. While there is a specific category of templates for blog images, you may want to go through other categories to find different sizes, designs, and text options.

Jing

Jing allows you to capture custom-sized screenshots for your content. You can also annotate your screenshots with text, boxes, and highlighting to make them even more valuable for your audience.

Survey Tools

Surveys can be the foundation of great content. You can use them to collect expert tips, customer insights, and much more. Here are some tools you can use to collect and analyze survey data.

Survey Monkey

SurveyMonkey is a popular survey tool that allows you to collect responses for a survey, analyze the data, and export it in PDF format for easy sharing amongst other content creators on your team.

Google Forms

If you prefer a free survey solution, Google Forms are the answer. You can create a Google Form with different question formats, and Google will automatically create a spreadsheet to collect the answers. While there is no automatic analysis or easy PDF export of the responses, it is easy enough to copy and paste the answers out of the Google Spreadsheet and into a document.

Screencasting Tools

Screen recordings can make for great video content, especially tutorials and demos. Here are the top two popular tools for creating them, depending on whether you are PC or Mac.

Screenflow

Screenflow is a Mac-based software for screen recording and editing for video demos, tutorials, training, and presentations. You can connect Screenflow to Google Drive, Dropbox, Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms for faster sharing and publishing.

Camtasia

Camtasia is screen recording and editing software for both Mac and Windows users.  It's great for collaborating with content creators, regardless of whether they are using Mac or Windows. It even has a feature for imposing yourself within the video with a green screen effect.

Social Curation Tools

Sometimes, you don't have to actually create content yourself - you can use social media content that's already out there and ready to publish. Here are two ways to embed social media updates and turn it into a unique piece of content highlighting the views and opinions of others on specific topics.

Embeddable Social Media Posts

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Google+ allow you to embed public posts from their networks. Just look for the option to embed posts, which can be accessed using the "more" link when you hover over a tweet, the triple dots at the bottom right of an Instagram photo, or the dropdown arrow at the top right of Facebook and Google+ posts.

By embedding social posts, you automatically give credit to the original source. If you can include an embedded post from your own social networks, you can encourage even more discussion about the topic on your own platform.

Storify

If you would prefer to select posts from multiple networks and embed them with one piece of code, Storify is a great curation tool to try. You can grab content from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Getty, Flickr, Instagram, and other sources.

Interview Recorders

Instead of just relying upon yourself to come up with great content, rely on others through one-on-one and group video interviews. In addition to giving your audience a new perspective on a topic, your interviewee will likely help you with the promotion of your content. Here are some tools that most are familiar with when it comes to recording interviews.

Skype

Skype allows you to conduct one-on-one and group video calls with up to five people. Use this when you want to record interviews to edit and share at a later time on your blog or YouTube channel.

Google+ Hangouts

For one-on-one and group video interviews with up to 10 people, try Google+ Hangouts. In addition to recording the video, you can stream it live and give your audience the ability to chat live with you and your guest(s). It's almost like having a webinar, but on a free platform.

Content Marketing Tools

Content marketing is a large part of SEO strategy today. According to new research from Content Marketing Institute, MarketingProfs and Marketo (B2B Enterprise Content Marketing 2015) bigger companies use more tactics to target more audiences and have a more difficult time with overall effectiveness and measuring ROI – especially compared to small businesses and B2B content marketers overall.

According to the report, enterprise marketers are more challenged with nearly every aspect of content marketing when compared with B2B marketers overall. Last year 70% of marketers were creating more content and in this year’s report, 65% are creating more. But is more better?

As it can be difficult to determine what content to publish when and where, marketers need plenty of valuable tools in their arsenal – it is even more difficult to calculate that content’s return on investment (ROI), manage the content marketing team, and curate content.

TrenDemon

TrenDemon is the perfect tool if you’ve been struggling to quantify ROI of your content marketing efforts. The tool analyzes your content and provides real-time, personalized recommendations to help boost your conversions.

ClickMeeting

ClickMeeting offers a teleconferencing software that makes it easy to meet with your team and flesh out the next phase of your content marketing plan.

Share your desktop with others to make it easier to demonstrate tasks. Save your teleconferences for later viewing, in case a team member could not attend the live event. The software is also useful for creating webinars that can be used to train team members on any company specific workflows. Since the webinars can be saved and shared later, you can create quick and easy a training library to make onboarding new team members easier.

CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a platform that allows you to work your social media activity into your editorial calendar, right within the WordPress platform. Multiple people can access the calendar if need be, and tasks can be assigned so you can easily see who is responsible for what. By managing your editorial calendar and social media posts in a single place, you save time.

The tool makes it easy to re-share old posts and bring fresh traffic. It integrates with many other tools besides WordPress, tools like Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Analytics, Buffer, and more.

Curata

Curata offers content curation software and a content marketing platform to make your content management more efficient. It helps you cut through the “noise” on the Internet and find out what’s most likely to be relevant and interesting to your audience no matter your niche. Then, it gives you the chance to go through the list of resources, take notes and organize all so you can choose what to share, what comments to add, and where you want to share it.

Curata makes it easy to take the content you find and share it across all your channels on whatever schedule you choose. It integrates with many popular content management systems, social channels, and email marketing platforms to make sharing content easy.

With all these tools, content creation and marketing management becomes much easier. You’ll have everything you need to easily track and monitor ROI, communicate with the team behind content creation, curate content, and more. what do you think?