The Ultimate Content Marketing Tools List has been updated as of August 14, 2014 to include over thirty new tools and several new categories including localization, digital asset management, web analytics, social media analytics, funnel analytics and website analytics. Demand for businesses to provide their readers with the best content available is on the rise and 71 percent of marketers are increasing their content marketing budget in 2014. Because of this, the content marketing tools universe is expanding.
I have attempted to put together a map of content marketing tools available to online marketers. My hope is that this will help guide you through the many content marketing technologies and tools alike to the right one that fits your needs. Click to enlarge the graphic after the break.
Why am I doing this
There has been a major growth of content marketing tools available to content marketers. While many of these tools have existed for years prior to the advent of content marketing and would normally be deemed as simply internet marketing tools, many of them are rechristening themselves as content marketing tools.
Yet many of these tools are quite different from each other and serve vastly different purposes within content marketing. Some technologies may help create content, others like our own Curata help create content, some may help distribute your content, yet others may help you simply measure the effectiveness of your content marketing. Based on attending dozens of content marketing conferences over the years, I have seen most marketers, and even analysts, not know where to start or how to make sense of the universe of content marketing tools.
Hasn’t this been done before?
A few dedicated folks have attempted to put together comprehensive collections of content marketing tools. But I have found each of these attempts to have fallen short in one regard or another. Some have been limiting in the amount of tools they covered, while others have been comprehensive but have not grouped the tools together in an intuitive manner.
Regardless here’s a list of honorable mentions of people and organizations who have done this in the past:
Everything PR. In January of 2013, Everything PR put together a list of 100 Content Marketing tools. While it’s one of the most comprehensive lists, I have seen, it doesn’t strictly list “tools” in the sense of technologies. Many of the entries are resource sites and blogs such as the Content Rules Blog or events such as Content Marketing World 2013. While such resources can be helpful for marketers, they are not strictly tools. The list also makes no attempt to organize and group together tools.
Eloqua. In December of 2012, Eloqua published an infographic called the Social Business Shift. While it’s a nice graphic, it doesn’t strictly focus on content marketing and instead focuses on tools with a social component such as Kiva and Kickstarter for crowd funding or Taleo for talent sourcing.
Altimeter. In April of 2013, Rebecca Lieb of Altimeter started a list of 15 content marketing vendors. We were flattered to have Curata included in the initial list. More recently, Altimeter has published a content marketing vendor landscape that includes over 100 tools. However, this list does not include some of the broader categories we have included here.
Content Amp. Also in April of 2013, Content Amp, a UK based content marketing agency created an impressive and visually appealing infographic with a wide variety of content marketing tools with an attempt at groupings as well. While this is perhaps the best map of the content marketing vendor set I have seen, it is still lacking in the number of vendors covered and the categories. For example, it missed content curation tools entirely and has a confusing category called Curated Content & Forums that including technologies such as the commenting system Disqus, which have no relevance to curated content. The infographic is not strictly restricted to “tools” and has a category for content marketing agencies (which also includes Content Amp).
Disclaimer
I have been piecing together this graphic for several months now, but it’s hard to keep up with the rapidly evolving space of content marketing tools. Here are a few disclaimers and areas where things could be better.
It’s not comprehensive. For every tool you see in the map, there is a long tail many other tools that are similar or performs parts of functions of the tool included in the graphic. I have tried to include the tools that I feel stand out the most of their categories.
It’s not as clear cut as it seems. There are many tools that fall into multiple categories, but I have placed them in the category that represents them the best. For example, Marketing AI measures analytics for your content, then helps you better optimize your content. In this case, should Marketing AI fall into Analytics or Optimization tools group? In this case, I placed them in the Analytics group. However, Parse.ly is a relatively similar tools, which I decided to place into the Optimization category.
It’s not complete. I am sure there are entire categories missing here. I hope you will recommend and suggest additions to this map.
Website Analytics
Webtrends – This digital marketing company offers tools for measuring and optimizing digital campaigns. Webtrends offers analytic intelligence including customer intelligence and behavioral segmentation, targeting and scoring, and more.
Mixpanel – Instead of measuring pageviews, this analytics tool measures actions such as searches or shares to gain greater insights into user behavior.
Woopra – Using real-time stats that can be broken down to an individual-level view, Woopra helps brands tracks visitors across multiple devices and build comprehensive timelines for every user.
Kissmetrics – This ecommerce customer intelligence tool person-centric data in real time and ties anonymous activity to known activity once a visitor becomes a customer.
Google Analytics – Google’s web analytics tool allows companies to customize reports, measure the impact of social media and mobile on website traffic, and measure conversion rates.
Docalytics – Cloud-based platform that allows departments across a company to view documents, review analytics and track leads.
Simplereach – By collecting real-time data, this tool helps track the impact of digital content and allows users to gain insight into what direction they should take their created content strategy.
Social Media Analytics
Curalate - This tool uses data to allow users to discover which images in Pinterest and Instagram are most engaging for their audiences.
Social Bakers – View metrics and statistics for Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, YouTube and LinkedIn.
Visible – This social intelligence solution lets users monitor, analyze and engage with topics across social media platforms.
CrowdBooster – Track your company’s social media engagement with information about interactions, follower growth and more.
Nuvi- Nuvi provides real-time data visualizations that portray social chatter in a way that is easy to understand and show to others.
Trendspottr - This tool uses real-time data to identify trending information across social media platforms before these topics become popular.
TrackMaven - This tool gathers together information on your competitors from across all social media channels into one platform.
Web Analytics
Quantcast - Users will receive audience insight through geographic and demographic data, in addition to information about interests and related website activity.
Alexa – This web traffic tool provides traffic data and global rankings for commercial websites.
Compete - Gain insight into the competition by examining what websites and keywords others are using to drive traffic online, compiling lists of the top websites based on a variety of metrics, and tracking online market share by industry.
Funnel Analytics
Full Circle CRM- A marketing performance management tool that gives Salesforce users insight into their overall marketing impact.
Squeeze CMM – Measure the ROI of content with this tool that generates reports and tracks audience activity and interests.
SEO Analytics
Raven Tools- Report on all marketing campaigns using metrics that pertain to SEO, PPC and social media.
SEM Rush – This tool gives users the ability to track keywords across both paid and organic search campaigns.
moz - This platform enables users to monitor social media, manage SEO campaigns, and more.
Marketing Automation
Pardot – This lead management tool lets marketers and salespeople move prospects through the sales funnel by creating automated targeted messaging that based on prospects’ activity.
Genius – Sales and marketing people can collaborate using this online-sales lead tracking software system to send personalized campaigns, see who’s visiting the website or opening emails, and assess prospect interest for follow up.
Marketo – This marketing automation tool integrates email, social media, offline events, content, and more, helping sales and marketing teams prioritize prospects based on demographic and behavioral criteria, measure performance of marketing campaigns, and more.
Eloqua – The flexible campaign editor offers a whiteboard-like canvas where users can drag and drop elements such as email, segments, actions, and more to create smart marketing campaigns.
Act-on – This cloud-based platform helps marketers organize campaigns, integrate marketing into sales and support systems, and measure results.
Silverpop – Using this digital marketing platform that unifies marketing automation, email, social media, and mobile, marketers can carry conversations across multiple devices and measure return on relationships.
HubSpot – Marketers use this integrated inbound marketing system to create personalizable landing pages, emails, web pages, and more, plus tap into HupSpot’s vast knowledge base around content marketing best practices.
Bislr – With this marketing automation tool, users can draw collaborative automated campaigns on a whiteboard, listen to prospect behavior and create database prospects through social media hashtags and keywords.
Right On Interactive - This lifecycle marketing automation software uses a Customer Lifecycle Map™ to help their users visualize where their prospects and customers are in their lifecycle/journey with the organization.
Personalization
Monetate – Turn real-time into relevant digital experiences by taking a snapshot of every visitor, creating multivariate tests and rules-based product recommendations, and more.
Demandbase – Create targeted, relevant conversations with buyers at every stage, personalize the web experience, segment and analyze companies and more using this B2B marketing tool.
40 Nuggets – Harness marketing automation strategies, audience-analytics, and predictive intelligence to personally engage with and tailor content to each customer.
Resonance - This tool retargets content for your audience, and keeps your messaging in front of them, by tracking what your site visitors are viewing and making them aware of more relevant content.
Idio – Improve content marketing strategy by examining specific customer interests and increasing the engagement of content.
Email Marketing Tools
Constant Contact – Design professional-looking emails, grow and manage your email list, and track results. In addition to email, Constant Contact offers tools for social campaigns, online surveys, and more.
iContact – Create HTML emails and signup forms, send campaigns to customers inboxes, track email campaigns, and more. iContact also offers social social media marketing tools.
Campaign Monitor – Customize your email template, send campaigns, conduct A/B testing, integrate with your blog, and more.
Sales Enablement
Seismic – This tool helps users make sure all of their content is up to date and relevant to create polished presentations and forecasts.
Savo – Savo benchmarks users’ sales enablement process against the industry they’re in and has a set of integrated sales enablement tools to accompany an organization’s existing process.
Docurated - This tool helps to create presentations with repurposed content and surfaces users’ most relevant content to be included.
Postwire – This solution helps marketers post, edit and share various types of content on their page and manage relevant content for their sales teams in one spot.
Qvidian – These sales enablement solutions help businesses reduce the sales team onboarding time and allow these teams to collaborate more efficiently.
Jive Software – This software allows teams across a company to collaborate in one workspace to get collateral out the door quickly, stay organized and better enable sales.
Social Media Management & Listening
Sprinklr – Large global companies use this social media management system to engage with customers, connect with CRM systems, build custom widgets, publish and manage content, and more.
Tweetdeck – Track brand mentions and hashtags, manage multiple Twitter accounts, schedule Tweets, and more all in a single Twitter platform.
Hootsuite – Manage multiple social media accounts, analyze social media traffic, track brand mentions, collaborate with other team members, and schedule messages and tweets through this social media management tool.
Buffer – Add articles, photos, and video, and this social media tool will automatically post the content on your social media accounts throughout the day.
Topsy Pro – This tool allows users to track tweets over the last several years, discovering popular topics, trends and experts.
Traackr - Manage influencer relationships with this tool, which lets users discover influencers, nurture relationships and then demonstrate the impact of these relationships.
Sprout Social- This management tool lets multiple users schedule, publish and analyze social media posts across several platforms.
Social Bro – Follow trends on Twitter and capitalize upon them with this fully functioning twitter listening and publishing tool.
Little Bird - With this social monitoring tool, users can create lists of peer-validation ranked influencers across social platforms on various topics to stay on top of the conversation in their industry.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud - Find and analyze what’s being said about your brand, along with your competitors, with this monitoring tool to find out what customers want, what content is working and how to keep up with the conversation.
Social Mention - Social search engine that searches for and analyzes real-time aggregated content across 100+ social media platforms.
Bottlenose - Users are able to track what’s trending in their industry and get warnings about breaking news stories using advanced topic discovery and NLP (Natural Language Processing).
Spredfast - This tool creates company-wide social media collaboration & monitoring and configures social analysis reports.
Meltwater Buzz - This social media marketing SaaS combines monitoring & analytics with engagement to give users a complete lifecycle approach to social media community management.
Marketwired Resonate - With this platform, users are connected to their industry marketplace in real time through social media and traditional distribution.
CisionPoint - PR software that helps users reach their audiences and manage campaigns across traditional, digital and social media.
Social Media
Twitter – With over half a billion registered users, Twitter lets users post messages of up to 140 characters, share photos and videos, create custom lists, send direct messages, and more.
Facebook - This social media platform has over a billion users and lets users connect with friends, share links, photos, videos, and events, join groups, and more.
Pinterest - Pinterest users share and tag images and videos on customizable boards, follow brands and individuals, “repin” images, and more. Pinterest has nearly 50 million users.
LinkedIn – A business-focused online network that includes features such as sharing links, adding connections, joining groups, writing recommendations, searching for connections by company, industry, skills, and more.
Google+ – Google’s social network that allows users to set up hangouts using video chat, create “circles” of people for organizing contacts and targeting messaging, and more.
Offerpop - Offerpop is a social media platform for businesses to recruit, engage and convert customers.
Blogging & CMS
Percussion – This streamlined CMS offers editable templates, shared assets, versioning, automatic link management, drag and drop editing, and more, enabling content producers to simplify their content editing and publishing process.
Tumblr – Known for its community of content creators and curators and its capabilities for sharing multimedia content, this microblogging platform hosts over 100 million blogs.
WordPress – This popular CMS and blogging software lets users create custom themes, add plugins, publish content, moderate comments, and more.
Livejournal – With over 63 million journals and communities, Livejournal offers a free, open-source platform for blogging and sharing content.
Drupal – This open-source CMS powers millions of websites and applications. Add-on modules and designs let companies or individuals tailor a site to their needs.
Paid Distribution Networks
Brightcove – This provider of cloud content services offers an online video platform for adding custom video players to websites, social media profiles, and mobile destinations.
PR Newswire – Distribute news releases to a global media database of more than 700,000 journalists and blogger contacts, monitor traditional and social media, and engage in real time with journalists, bloggers, and other influencers.
SlideShare – Upload and share slide presentations, gain insight into who’s viewing your presentations, collect business leads, and more.
Cadence9 – This unified solution for managing content marketing lets marketers plan content using an editorial calendar, assign tasks to team members, manage content creation and publishing workflow, and more.
Papershare – Cloud-based promotional tool for content marketers that distributes to multiple channels and alerts marketing and sales teams when content is published. Leads are also integrated into salesforce and marketing automation softwares.
Content Promotion Tools
ContentGain – This widget places links to third-party content on other websites to boost distribution. The original content publisher shares ad revenue with the website sharing the content.
Disqus – This discussion platform helps bloggers and website publisher engage readers through the comment section.
OneSpot - This tool automatically turns owned or earned content into optimized ads, distributes the content across OneSpot’s ad inventory, retargets users, and monitors results.
Gravity – Using algorithms based on users’ reading and sharing history, Gravity enables websites to deliver personalized recommendations.
Outbrain.com – This content discovery tool recommends your content to readers of other premium publishers, offering a personalized reader experience and exposing your content to engaged readers.
Vocus – This tools scans for prospects looking for companies like yours, suggests relevant social conversations and distributes your press for traffic and search.
Taboola – This promotional tool takes your content and places it on publishing websites, targeting it towards your selected audience.
nRelate – This platform helps content developers and publishers find an easier path to their target audience and grow their reader-base from their sites or elsewhere on the web.
Content Blvd – Connect with brands and publishers to create relevant and rewarding product placements.
Vibrant Media - This native advertising tool places content directly within other editorial content and all triggers are user-initiated.
issuu- Publish content such as magazines, catalogs, eBooks and more on this free platform.
Webinar Tools
ReadyTalk – This online conferencing tool offers a single interface for web, audio, and video conferencing, as well as the ability to record and share webinars and integrate with mobile conferencing.
Webex – Using Cisco’s webinar products, users can host or attend meetings using HD video, share files, and more.
BrightTalk – Run interactive live webinars with features including real-time polls, downloads, question and answer, and more.
GoToMeeting - This online meeting platform allows users to host unlimited meetings with up to 25 attendees and is supported for Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad, and Android.
iMeet - A cloud-based video conferencing platform that allows up to 15 users to talk via webcams.
Digital Asset Management
Widen - Create, manage, distribute and preserve content with this digital asset management system.
WebDAM - This tool gives enterprise customers the ability to store, organize, find, retrieve and share digital files.
Canto - Canto simplifies the management of all digital assets within a company, creating smarter workflow processes and organization opportunities.
Razuna- This tool stores, shares, secures and indexes digital files and then makes them available in a search tool.
Adobe Experience Manager - Companies can create, manage, and optimize digital customer experiences across a number of channels including web, mobile apps and sites, as well as social communities.
Sources for Content Creation
Scripted – Subcontract writing projects to an online writing team through this online platform, which also offers copyediting and the ability to request pitches from writers.
Textbroker – Assign writing projects including SEO and website localization through this online platform.
Skyword – This content production system allows companies to optimize manage and pay writers, use an SEO scorecard to optimize content, and more.
Brafton – Using its in-house search engine optimization and social media marketing expertise, this online news and content agency creates news content, videos, infographics, and other items for businesses.
Zerys – This project management tool and content marketplace allows businesses to locate professional freelance writers, assign and review content, export or auto-publish content, and more.
Contently – Find and collaborate with high-quality freelance writers, manage payments and assignments, and more using this online platform for content marketing.
Copify – Platform that helps users looking to outsource content creation. Marketers can find qualified copywriters by providing details such as topic and format.
Content Curation Tools
Curata - Easily find, organize & share relevant content for your business to position your brand as an industry thought leader, increase brand visibility and generate leads.
Scribit – Search and browse for articles and videos, share content, and track conversions using this content curation platform.
Magnify – This fully customizable platform allows publishers and brands curate and share online videos.
Content Optimization Tools
InboundWriter – Monitor topics, gain insights into what makes readers tick, boost content popularity, and more using this tool designed for writers and content marketers.
Scribe – Created by the people behind Copyblogger Media, Scribe helps content creators identify topics that are relevant to the intended audience, measure social media engagement around content, and more.
Optimizely – Conduct A/B testing about the placement or appearance of text and other elements, set and measure goals, and more to optimize your website in relation to your site’s goals.
Parse.ly – This predictive analytics tool empowers publishers to track the performance of authors or topics, capitalize on web trends, promote in-demand content, and tap into the potential of recommended topics.
Wordy – This tool pairs professional content editors with users to edit, proof and optimize various forms of written content.
Convert - Using A/B testing, this tool helps users learn the content preferences of their website visitors and optimize their site to increase conversions.
Localization
CloudWords – This translation management tool allows you to localize content by uploading it to a system and then selecting a vendor to translate it.
SmartLing- Speak to customers in their native language with this tool that automates the translation process by connecting content producers with translation professionals.
Translationcloud.net - This is a hub for hiring professionals who translate content to a variety of languages.
Phrase App – Translate content that is stored on websites, mobile and desktop applications with this translation management software.
Crowd in – Manage the localization workflow process with this software that helps control the process, but also provides tools for translators to work more efficiently.
Content Enrichment Tools
Zemanta – This plug-in creates connections between bloggers, content creators, and publishers that publish content on similar topics.
Storify – Collect social media mentions on a chosen topic, trend, or event and curate the best social media elements in one place.
Silk – Use your company’s data to create structured web pages that automatically draw connections between facts, data, and more.
Graphicly – Authors and publishers use this online tool to convert content for digital distribution and collect insights on reader behavior.
AcroLinx- Make all content consistent with this tool that analyzes each writer’s content for tone of voice, style, SEO and more to ensure it aligns with a predetermined company standard.
Atomic Reach – This content scoring system analyzes content based on quality and relevance for specific audience segments such as “Specialist” or “Academic.”
Content Collaboration Tools
Compendium – Plan your content using Compendium’s calendar-based tool, create efficiently placed content across multiple channels, and track the effectiveness of each piece of content.
Divvy - This platform combines web-based calendars, content management and online collaboration to help global content teams plan, schedule and produce any type of content across an organization.
GatherContent - Organize and streamline your website content using drag and drop features, create content guidelines, collaborate with a content team, and export content using this online collaboration tool.
Google Drive – Create, store, and share including spreadsheets, text documents, drawings, forms, and presentations.
Kapost - This content marketing platform allows marketers to collaborate, distribute, and analyze all content types within a single platform.
SocialCast – This collaboration tool organizes workflow into a single location accessible from anywhere on any device.
Marketing-AI – In this platform users are able to collaborate with team members in a calendar, build a content strategy using a framework and promote published content & measure its impact.
Curata - Easily find, organize & share relevant content for your business to position your brand as an industry thought leader, increase brand visibility and generate leads.
Content Authoring Tools
Easelly – Using a theme-based approach to creating infographics and visualizations this online tool, lets users drag and drop art into a theme to create shareable graphics.
Visual.ly – Browse infographics and data visualizations and create your own to drive traffic to your brand’s website and amplify your social media presence.
Adobe Creative Cloud – Sync and organize your creative assets across multiple devices, track comments, build and publish websites, apps, and more.
KnowledgeVision – Turn presentations and web content into an integrated, interactive online video experience that doesn’t require special software or app downloads.
Brainshark – Sync up marketing and sales people using a systematic, coordinated approach in this content-centric sales platform.
Prezi – This presentation tool helps users organize and share ideas by creating visualizations.
Lookbook HQ – Using your most relevant, compelling content, this tool compiles all the information you want to display to customers into a visually appealing lookbook that can be embedded or shared.
Uberflip - This tool pulls all of your content; articles, social channels, videos, into a single centralized content hub.
Zmags – This platform helps e-commerce users create and share online catalogs, lookbooks, magazines, etc. to increase consumer engagement.
infogr.am - This tools helps users create interactive infographics. Users can edit data, download infographics and share & embed them.
Piktochart - This tool provides infographic templates for users and helps them create and share compelling content.
Camtasia - Helps users create high quality videos without prior experience. This tool records on-screen activity and also allows users to import from HD devices to edit and share video content
Jing - This free tool helps users share images and record videos from their screens. Users are able to quickly share this media to email, social and other various platforms.
Audacity – Record, edit and publish podcasts and interviews with this free software.
Podbean – Share and create podcasts with this tool that also lets you sell podcasts with no transaction fee.
ePodcast Creator – Control and customize every step of the podcast creation process with a full editing studio that creates a professional sound.
Other
list.ly – This tool allows users to create lists, share them, add them to other pieces of content (such as blogs) and enable crowd-sourcing for continuous list building.
