This blog will help you:
- Understand which social media marketing tools are right for your business.
- Find out how email marketing tools can help you reach more customers.
- Discover some of the SEO tools that can boost your keyword and search strategy.
- Decide on which analytics tools can give you the insights you need to grow your business.
Welcome to the second instalment in our ultimate tech stack for content marketers guide. There was just too much to include in the first article so we’ve split it in two to make sure you get the complete lowdown.
The ultimate tech stack for content marketers #2 will cover the best tools and platforms for social media marketing, SEO, email marketing and research and analytics. If you want to find out more about martech that can help with project management and communication, marketing asset creation, spelling and grammar and content management and blogging head on over to the ultimate tech stack for content marketers #1.
Let’s take a look at some tools and tech that can help you optimise your social media and email marketing, boost your SEO and help you better understand your marketing performance.
Social media marketing
Even if you don’t post a lot on social media you could still benefit from a scheduling or social listening tool in your techstack. You may be surprised by how much time you save being able to set up posts in bulk in advance. Plus, it’s well worth checking in with your community to see what people are saying about your brand, your marketplace and – of course – your competitors.
We like: Buffer is a good choice for busy content marketers, allowing you to add and share content and schedule posts on multiple channels in seconds. You can install the free Buffer extension on Chrome, FireFox, Safari or Opera and Buffer Analyze makes it easy to see which content is performing well over time.
Email marketing
Today’s email marketing platforms do far more than report on opens, clicks and so forth. Marketers can now invest in tools that help you build and segment your audience, A/B test your messaging, personalise each campaign and even track leads through the buyer journey.
We like: MailChimp remains a great choice for brands on a budget. Users can manage up to 2,000 contacts and send 10,000 emails a month on a free-forever plan. The interface is a doddle to use and customise and the analytics are clear and easy to understand. You only get A/B testing with paid plans so the freemium isn’t really suited to more advanced marketing teams.
HubSpot is considered to be one of the best email marketing platforms as it enables busy marketers to track performance and engagement across all channels, throughout the entire customer journey. As you can imagine, these capabilities incur more cost though users only pay for the contacts you are marketing to. HubSpot also offers an excellent training platform and community to help marketers optimise their campaigns and platform use.
SEO
SEO presents a number of challenges to busy content marketers. There’s learning the skills in the first place, then you have the added burden of keeping up with trends, and monitoring and optimising your performance. Luckily there are some handy tools to help you boost your SEO activities and drive more high quality traffic to your website.
We like: Ahrefs is an established favourite among SEO practitioners. The website audit feature alerts users to technical issues site-wide, and you can identify and track keywords, conduct competitor research and analyse backlinks – all from one easy to navigate portal. SEMRush is another SEO contender with useful features that alert you to changes in rankings, compares your website to competitors’ and identifies opportunities for improvement.
Want to ensure your content gets the search rankings it deserves? Check out Jeroen’s guide to Topic Clusters for SEO Success.
Research and analytics
Every content marketer knows how important it is to track your performance and monitor engagement. However, we also know how few hours in the day we have to do this well.
There are a number of great options for both research and performance analytics on the market to help you manage your time and resources more effectively, and get valuable insights into how your different campaigns and channels are performing. When you are setting up your tools make sure you take the opportunity to schedule and automate reports on a fairly regular basis so you can get in the habit of checking in with how you are doing.
Popular choices include:
- Google Analytics: A free and user-friendly tool with various features, though limitations exist. Most content marketers already utilize it, but revisiting your setup to optimize its potential is always worthwhile.
- Airboxr: Airboxr is an all-in-one analytics tool for e-commerce businesses that allows you to import and combine data from Google Analytics, ad channels, and e-commerce platforms such as Shopify and Amazon in your spreadsheet. This tool can be used to know how much traffic, engagement and revenue your content drives.
Conclusion
If you need a more comprehensive view of your customers across all the channels you’re using, it could be worth investing in a paid analytics platform. Improvado streamlines data from over 200 sources including Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Salesforce and a variety of e-commerce platforms like Shopify. Customisable dashboards offer users a complete view of their performance metrics and you can manage cross-channel attribution models to get insights into each campaign’s impact on KPIs and budget.
We hope this second instalment on the ultimate tech stack for content marketers has helped you get a better understanding of which platforms and tools could help your business attract a wider audience and build customer loyalty. If you want to find out more about the trends in content right now, take a look at our State of Content Creation 2022 report today. Don’t forget to check out the ultimate tech stack for content marketers #1!
