Content plays an important role in any marketing strategies. You need it for SEO, social media marketing, email marketing, lead generation and lead nurturing. To effectively engaging the right prospects with the correct content, one has to master a solid knowledge of content marketing and match buyer persons with the right marketing materials.

There is dozen of tools out there to help with nearly every aspect of content marketing. The list that follows is by no means comprehensive. It highlights many of the popular tools available to marketers that will aid in their content marketing efforts, some of which you may have seen before and plenty that is sure to be new to you.

By exploring what’s available and playing around with some of these tools, you’ll discover a tool or two that will make your content marketing initiatives better, faster, more relevant and more efficient. Discover how to improve the content creation and optimising your existing content through these tools.

So dig in, and have fun.

Listening Tools

Google Alerts are email updates. It enables you to monitor your ‘bookmarked’ topic/interesting content.

Google Reader is an aggregator, capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds. It constantly checks your favourite news sites and blogs for new content.

BackType Acquired by Twitter recently, BackType is a marketing intelligence platform that helps brands and agencies understand the business impact of social media.

Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user-generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information.

Quora is a question-and-answer website created, edited and organized by its community of users. It is one of the best sources of knowledge. Ask any question and get real answers from people with first-hand experience.

Addict-o-Mantic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images.

Press Release

Marketwire is a full-service newswire and communications workflow solutions company. It provides press release distribution to major media. Also provides newswire services and online media monitoring.

PR Newswire provides end-to-end solutions to produce, optimize and target content – from rich media to online video to multimedia – and then distribute content and measure results across traditional, digital, mobile and social channels.

PRWeb is the leader in online news distribution and online publicity. It is a highly effective channel for organizations of all sizes to distribute their news on the Internet, increase their visibility online and attract customers.

PitchEngine is one of the premier content creation tools for publishing beautiful marketing messages to the web and mobile. It helps connect organizations with their audiences through content and provide brands and agencies with the robust content creation and management software.

Content Sharing

Digg is a social news website. It allows people to vote web content up or down, called digging and burying, respectively.

Slideshare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations.  Besides presentations, SlideShare also supports documents, PDFs, videos and webinars.

StumbleUpon is a discovery engine that finds and recommends web content to its users. Its features allow users to discover and rate Web pages, photos, and videos that are personalized to their tastes and interests using peer-sourcing and social-networking principles.

Youtube provides a platform for you to create, connect and discover the world’s videos.

Vimeo is an online video sharing website on which users can upload, share, and view videos. Vimeo was the first online video sharing website to support HD upload and playback.

Scribd is a social reading and publishing website. The company houses tens of millions written works, including best-selling books, magazines, research reports, recipes, presentations, and more.

Storify  Social network service that lets the user create stories or timelines using social media such as Twitter and Facebook.

Blogging

Technorati supports the real-time search for user-generated media (including weblogs) by tag or keyword. It is an integrated online media company with an ad network, three owned web properties, and an ad technology.

Google Blog Search provides fresh, relevant search results from millions of feed-enabled blogs. Users can search for blogs or blog posts and can narrow their searches by dates and more.

Zemanta is a platform for assisted on-line content production for any web user. A blog, an article or a web. It exposes your content to highly engaged audiences by recommending content on your blog and on sites of other publishers.

IceRocket is a real-time search engine that searches blogs, tweets, news etc in real-time. They have a couple different blog tools including Link Tracker, Topics and Trends.

OnlyWire is an Auto-syndication tool to submit articles and content to the web’s top Social and Business Networking services.

With the click of a single button, users can update their content to the web’s top social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon as well as business media sites like LinkedIn and Plaxo.

AllTop All the top headlines from popular topics around the web.

Curation

Curata provides easy-to-use marketing solutions for content curation and content marketing. Curata allows marketers to quickly curate content on specific issues or topics in order to establish thought leadership own industry conversations and drive qualified web traffic.

Daylife is a platform for curating, discovering, and combining high-quality content. Its platform serves some of the world’s best-known media.

Idio personalizes the customer experience across web, social, email, and mobile channels based on the user’s behavioural and social context, delivering the perfect communication that moves the customer towards a business goal.

OneSpot marries content marketing with the power, data intelligence, and infrastructure of online advertising. OneSpot’s platform turns owned and earned content into native advertising that drives positive business outcomes.

Outside.in is a hyperlocal platform that organized the web around neighbourhoods for consumers, publishers and advertisers across the internet. It has been acquired by Patch.
Perfect Market

SmartBrief is an online publisher of targeted business news and information in a wide variety of markets.  SmartBrief is an essential resource for “must-read” industry news because of its high quality and its trusted content.