Content plays a vital role when it comes to promoting your business online. As per the stats by CMI, the conversion rate with content marketing is 6X higher than any other method. Here are some of the reasons why content marketing is useful for small businesses:
- Helps to increase organic traffic on your site.
- Improves your brand awareness and brand popularity.
- Allows you to generate, nurture, and convert relevant leads.
- Enhances your brand reach.
However, it is not easy to create content or apply the required content marketing strategies that engages and attracts visitors. The content preparation should follow a systematic process like:
- Identify your target audience and create a buyer persona.
- Choose your topics wisely.
- Create high-quality and user-intent focused content.
- Market your content to reach relevant audiences.
There are several free content marketing tools that assist marketers to perform all the above tasks with ease. Here are some of the top tools that you should use to boost your content marketing efforts:
1. CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a free content marketing tool that allows you to plan, coordinate, and schedule your social media posts, email marketing, content marketing, etc. If you cannot keep track of your marketing tasks across different platforms, then CoSchedule is there to help.
What Are The Benefits of Using Co-Schedule For Your Business?
- It allows you to integrate your content and social media platforms under one roof. This helps in reducing the efforts it takes to manage both of them separately. It eliminates the risk of missing out on something important.
- CoSchedule is compatible with all the popular platforms like WordPress, Google Docs, Facebook, Buffer, Evernote, LinkedIn, Google Analytics, etc.
- It allows you to schedule your social media posts well in advance and that too in bulk.
- It provides you with a calendar that you can use to strategize your content delivery.
Features of Co-Schedule
- Schedule and publish all your content under one calendar.
- Plan your content sharing well in advance.
- Never miss out on any critical dates.
- See a consolidated view of your work progress.
- Edit pre-scheduled posts as and when required.
- Share your content delivery goals with your team.
- Track and measure the content marketing progress.
2. Hemingway App
Content writing is not easy because it requires excellent writing skills to produce error-free content. Creating content that is free from all the grammatical errors and is engaging to read is challenging. Hemingway App is the best tool that you can use to assess the quality of your content for free.
Advantages of Hemingway App
- It has an extremely easy to use interface.
- It offers both online and desktop versions.
- It uses different colors to highlight the words or sentences that require improvement.
- There is no restriction on assessing content in terms of stories or characters.
- You don’t need any sign-ups or installations while using the online version.
Features of Hemingway App
- Colour coded suggestions for content improvements are provided.
- Hemingway App gives you a readability score to your piece of content based on your content’s quality. The ideal score should be between grade 5th to grade 8th.
- It gives you an accurate word count for your blog or article.
- It comes in both online (browser-based) and desktop versions.
3. HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator
HubSpot’s blog topic generator, as the name suggests, is a free tool that allows you to generate relevant topics for your blogs and articles. All it requires you to do is add up to 5 nouns related to your topic, focused keywords, or niche, and it returns relevant topic suggestions.
Features of The HubSpot’sHubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator
- Has an extremely easy to use interface.
- Is intuitive in nature.
- Gives you blog ideas or topics quickly and in a hassle-free manner.
- Provides you unique ideas every time you run the tool.
4. Powtoon
If you are willing to make video content in the form of animated videos then Powtoon is the best tool you can opt for. It lets you create videos for free.
Advantages of Using Powtoon
- It is effortless to use as a video animation tool.
- You can create perfect animated videos without having any previous knowledge of animation.
- It offers so many free characters and elements for you to choose from to make your videos lively and attractive.
- It allows you to create animated videos up to 3 minutes long for free. This is a distinctive feature that any other free tool fails to offer.
- It gives you the power to create animated presentations as well. However, there is no restriction on the number of displays that you can make.
- It allows you to export your animated videos directly to YouTube or other social media platforms like Facebook, Wistia, and Vimeo.
5. Stencil
Stencil is one of the best tools that you can use to create content in image format for free.
Features of Stencil
- It allows you to select from a wide range of pre-made templates.
- You can easily access a royalty-free image library.
- It incorporates a drag and drop approach.
- It has access to all of Google’s font family.
- It allows you to check the live preview of your posts on social media.
- The image directory is accessible in Stencil for free.
- It will enable you to design images in a high-quality resolution quickly and comfortably.
- It offers you to choose the best picture from a directory of 22,00,000 royalty-free photos.
- You can resize your pictures effortlessly.
- It allows you to upload original photos.
- You can create separate collections for your gorgeous designs.
- Saving and transferring high-end resolution images is extremely easy with Stencil.
Conclusion
The importance of content marketing can’t be ignored. It remains one of the cost-effective ways to improve your brand presence online. There is no need to spend money on paid tools when you can do so many things with the help of free tools. Leverage the power of the above five content marketing tools to boost your content marketing strategy.
