In the advanced world of content marketing, there’s a lot of competition to be significant and unique. How does your company stand out? How can your company show your audience you are the top choice among peers? To get an edge up on the competition, we’ve identified ten marketing tools we keep in our toolkit that will most certainly help you, too.

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Stencil

This is an amazing tool that can take any content writing– especially blog posts, to the next level. Stencil allows you to create supporting images for your content. It’s sort of like a meme-generator, but more professional and useful. Stencil comes with free options you can use, text overlay options, and thousands of images. There is also a paid version that allows you to create more complex images. We frequently use it to create supplemental images to blog posts. Check out our use of Stencil in our lastest budgeting blog post here.

Canva

Not a graphic designer? No idea how to use tools like Adobe Photoshop? Then Canva is the solution you’ve been looking for. Canva is a marketer’s dream tool that gives you the option of using premade layouts to design all different types of social media posts, print, business cards, infographics, and more. The interface is easy to navigate, and gives you all the control you need to make each design your own.

Evernote

If you’re the person that is constantly writing lists and always losing them, Evernote will be your new best friend. It’s a note-taking platform, made easy and accessible from any screen you own. You can create a note of almost anything: web pages, photos, actual hand-written notes, etc., and then save it to your account and access it from any device. No more losing the meeting notes you wrote on your Macbook– you can access it from your phone or tablet, anywhere. A really cool aspect of Evernote is that within your notes, you can also have attachments and save files.

Google Drive

Meet the mother-of-all storage systems: Google Drive. Google Drive is an amazing platform for storing, sharing, and collaborating. You can create documents within drive itself, and share them with editing capabilities with your entire team. It’s an easy way to share notes, presentations, invoices, and more for your business. For a design or marketing team, it’s also a great way to share designs, images, etc without having threads and threads of emails cluttering your inbox. You can upload just about anything to the drive, share it with your team or clients and collect their feedback.

Buffer

Buffer is the ultimate tool for amping up your social media presence, and driving more traffic to your content. The main purpose of the tool is to share your social media content so that, as Buffer says it– you can be social again. Buffer allows you to fill up your queue with any and all posts you’d like shared to any social media account. You can schedule them in advance, share immediately, and post across multiple platforms. The Buffer platform is very user-friendly, and will have you feeling like a social media pro in seconds.

HubSpot

HubSpot is one of the most advanced yet simple-to-use inbound marketing solutions available. Basically, HubSpot turns your website into a hub of lead activity. It allows you to integrate your website and blog with social media, produce targeted landing pages, and even send personalized email campaigns. HubSpot is more than a tool, but a way of marketing. It’s your one-stop-shop to taking your website to peak performance.

WordPress

WordPress is essentially a lighter version of HubSpot and other expansive inbound marketing tools. WordPress is one of the most popular website creation tools, designed to be straight-forward and user-friendly. You can create any type of website, by template or even customized code. There are hundreds of plugins you can use within WordPress to help you get exactly what you need out of your site. WordPress also integrates with several other website development platforms, making it extremely universal.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a tool that goes hand-in-hand with any WordPress site you create. It is the gold standard of SEO marketing, and makes you feel like an expert. Yoast is a plug-in for WordPress that gives you control of all things SEO on your site. Discovering untapped keywords, nailing down technical and structural issues on your site, and geotargeting are just some of the features Yoast SEO can add to your website.

MailChimp

MailChimp is an amazing email marketing tool. You can build your email database, create custom email designs, or use responsive templates– all within MailChimp. MailChimp has endless resources, industry standards, and webinars you can view to really set up your email marketing game. This tool also integrates with a lot of population marketing automation tools and makes personalized email marketing simple.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the best tool out there to manage and track your website data. The dashboard for the tool can be slightly overwhelming if you have never used GA before. The great thing is, is Google has resources and trainings you can complete online to be an analytics pro. Why is understanding GA worth it? The amount of data Google captures on your website is stunning. You can begin collecting data as soon as you install the GA code on your site, and begin to understand the trends and behaviors of your target audience. What is more important than that?

All of these tools can help increase the success of your content marketing platform. But, don’t stop here: keep searching and researching for the tools that will best fit in your marketing toolkit.

If you like what we’ve pulled out of the masses for this article, we’d love to talk with you further on how to take your content marketing strategy to the next level.

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