A well-written blog can make a powerful impact in boosting all your business’s digital marketing strategies. When we say “Well-written” it’s not just using attractive language (although that is also important).
A good blog should be able to explain and elaborate on the main topic as efficiently as possible for the readers. For instance, when you write a blog about your products or services then your blog should be informative enough for the visitors to understand what your brand is all about.
If done the right way your blog can play a key role in converting your visitors into valuable customers. In this article, we will discuss the number of ways blogging plays a key role in your digital marketing strategies.
Why blogging is essential for your brand
People just don’t want to purchase products or services from your business, they wish to form a connection to which they can relate. In this regard, blogging can help your business to a great extent.
Empowering SEO and SERP
Blogs greatly boost your SEO activities both off-page and on-page. Producing trending and relevant content is a sure shot of coming on top of the competition on the search engine results page.
The Google search engine is a big fan of updated content, new content on your website can help to improve SERP rankings. Using specific keywords about your product or service also helps to boost your search keywords.
You can add some engaging new topics from your team members by getting them to share their experiences at events or write about the latest trends in your brand’s market.
Adding value that helps build relationships
As we mentioned above, customers wish to build a relationship with businesses and that is what you should focus on. Blogs provide an excellent medium to enhance that connection between your brand and the customers. Consumers like to be informed of the updates and appreciate that you are educating them.
Think about what is important to your prospect or customer, how your product or service will benefit them and write on that. The better you are able to resolve your customer, the more chances there are for them to remain loyal to your business.
By focusing on features and answers instead of benefits, and by shifting by blogging to respond to your customers’ wants and needs you are adding and building value for your business.
Boosting Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is a crucial element of digital marketing, blog posting will allow your business to showcase the personal side of your business to your potential prospects and existing customers.
The best branding campaigns are comprised of fantastic storytelling and what other way to directly provide that epic story than blogging? A comprehensive yet entertaining blog is an excellent way to reinforce your brand’s image on the market.
Posting hot content on your website shows your up-to-date knowledge about your product or service. Now there is constant arrival of new content formats and features, but your blog remains the core of an effective digital marketing strategy.
Lastly…
Blogging will always remain a very powerful key component when it comes to executing a successful digital marketing strategy, Building trust with your customer by providing them with helpful content is crucial and important in growing your business.
In case you have any questions or you need our help your jump-starting your blogging journey, then please feel free to book a 30 minutes free session with us and we would be happy to assist you in any way we can.
When it comes to your SEO practices, along with link building, keywords, and on-page elements, content is also one of the most significant elements. Are you wondering content is still the king of SEO? Well, as per Lee Odden, Content isn’t king, its kingdom. Content curation strengthens your content marketing strategy.
According to Content Marketing Institute, content curation assembles, selects, categorizes, comments on, and presents the most relevant, highest quality information to meet your audience’s needs on a specific subject.
According to Curata, 42% of companies have an executive responsible for content marketing, reaching 49% in 2017
Basically, content curation is not about creating new content. However, to a certain extent, it is about discovering and compiling existing content written by industry experts and sharing it with your online followers.
Why content curation matters?
The reason why a content curation matters are simple; content curation boosts your target audience reach. Content curation also has a role in your SEO. Of course, duplication of content will be penalized by search engines and your rankings will get hampered. But, a correct approach of content curation will augment your SEO, as mentioned below:
Furthermore, content curation will help you establish as a thought leader in your industry. The good thing about content curation is it is not restricted to sharing others’ content. You can curate your own content and share it again and again, which is called repurposing of content. Last but not the least, content curation does matter a lot for you because in this exercise you are going to learn a more about our content and your industry since there will be extensive research and reading of similar other content.
In short, to preserve booming online presence, it’s vital for you to adopt content curation as a digital marketing tactic.
How content curation helps on social media?
Content curation is more like an art rather than science. There isn’t any particular technique to be followed for any particular social media platform. In the case of twitter, curating quality content from industry influencers and sharing it on your feed will send them a notification. In turn, there are high chances that they’ll follow back you and your brand. This way you can engage with others while connecting your content with their audiences.
The most important thing for a digital marketer is to understand that content curation helps you build invaluable relationships while providing value to your audience. That is why your social media page should not be snowed under only curated content. Your social media page should strike an ideal balance between curated content and your own created content.
Most of the acquainted content marketers prefer a content mix in their content marketing strategy as:
If content curation is done right, it assists you to build valuable relationships while providing value to your audience on varied social media platforms.
What are the most preferred content curation tools?
Till now, we talked about why content curation is important. Now let us move to the main point, how to curate the content. For content marketers, content curation is integral to online strategy. Effective content curation helps position you as a thought leader in your domain. Moreover, it is an affordable way to retain a consistent publishing schedule of quality content.
“Content curation is the process of both creating and linking to pertinent content on a B2B website”
Content curation process can be graphically represented as:
However, don’t you agree, manually attempting to search for the most relevant content in a given industry and then publishing it across multiple channels can be time-consuming?
Yes, it is not only time consuming but it is also less effective. For perfect content curation, you need to take help of automation.
Here, we present the most preferred and ultimate list of content curation tools.
As we discussed in the above paragraphs, content curation is a grand manner to support a created content strategy, consistently publish content, and keep a track of your desired information sources. Let us know each content curation tool in a deeper way to understand how it can boost your overall content marketing strategy.
1. Curata
Curata is the leading provider of business-grade content curation software (CCS). Curata’s content curation software will ease you if you are struggling to scale your content marketing due to a lack of content. Curata’s CCS enables content marketers to discover fresh content, create new content, curate content from various sources, refine content flow, and publish & promote the most relevant and highest quality content as part of a successful content marketing strategy.
As a part of content curation, Curata’s CCS easily organize, interpret, and contextualize the content. Curata digs content from hundreds and thousands of relevant sources, keeping your content engine buzzing without a requirement of constant creation of your own content. It provides great support on content marketing platform by adding your own unique perspective to curated content and filtering content by relevancy & timing. CCS is best for planning, developing, and evaluating your content marketing.
According to several resources, Curata services start from $1,500 on a month-to-month basis.
2. Pinterest
Reading at first sight you might be surprised how can a social media platform act as content curation, right? But yes, it is indeed a content curation tool.
According to Julia McCoy, Pinterest is also fantastic for collecting useful “hacks”, tricks and tips you can build your content around
It is often called as an online pinboard. Pinterest is a visual discovery platform since it works on images, video clips, and infographics. Open your business account on Pinterest and follow people in your industry and pop culture icons to catch access to millions of great content ideas. You need to save these content ideas to interactive boards on your account and pin them. Apply these pins to curate exceptional videos, podcasts, and images content for you and for your clients.
Furthermore, the content you pin can easily comprise an image and a link that drives back to the source. The source can be either a blog or infographic. With the help of Pinterest search, you can reveal great content that is probably interesting to your audience. It is a great platform to search and share content by domain to various social platforms.
The icing on the cake is Pinterest is a free means for content marketers to discover great content.
3. Scoop.it
A tool called Scoop.it is fantastic for content curation since it builds your relationship with other content curators. Scoop.it helps individuals and businesses to publish their content in a proficient and impacting way. This tool uses big-data semantic technology to assist you in promptly finding relevant content. Scoop.it displays the content curated by other users and offers similar topics shared. This allows you to get insight from influencers and industry leaders regarding a specific topic. It also gives you an opportunity to share your information with others and help them curate their own content.
Its top features include choosing specific keywords with the help of Boolean research, adding own sources with RSS feeds, suggesting content based on big data, and filtering content based on various criteria.
Scoop.it is a free tool; however, its paid options come with a more robust search.
4. Storify
Storify is a wonderful visual content curation tool that creates ‘stories’ or ‘timelines’ by gathering and publishing your content from social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It is intended for organizations of any size, looking for integrating curated content into their own website or their social media page. Either you can create the content and offer people to curate the content, or you can glance through the storyboards and curate content from others.
Storify helped one woman raise $650,000 when her Storify story went viral and had 1.5 million hits
Jeff Bullas
In addition, Storify enables you to research and pool content from multiple sources, merge that content with original content, and then share the mixed content as a unique story. Once can use Storify to search blog posts, comments, and videos that others have shared online.
Storify is a free tool and it also has options of paid versions.
5. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo believes that there is ample content on internet and web pages, no shortage at all. But what matters most is to search the relevant content and use it on a timely basis. BuzzSumo gets content research to a new level using social search. The key to getting relevant content is to search using filters. You can make out the total number of shares on a particular content resource and even can identify content by author. Buzzsumo masters the art of filtering out the content that resounds with audiences, the content that is currently trending, and the content about to trend.
Buzzsumo was a go-to resource of mine to find the most shareable content that resonated with the largest audience
Margot da Cunha
It is a highly popular content curation tool which is FREE till limited searches and then offers some advanced features underpaid options. Their plan starts from $79/month and goes beyond that based on the package you opt for.
6. Triberr
Basically, Triberr is a marketing platform for influencers. However, it also acts as a content curation tool by providing the ability to discover great content. Triberr is a community where tribes curate their own content and promote others’ content.
Either you can create an account or can log in with your twitter, facebook or LinkedIn ID to join as a tribe and follow relevant people.
Triberr has various plans as follows:
7. Post Planner
According to Ian Cleary, The content engine in Postplanner is a great way to find content.
For smarter content, better posts, and mind blogging results – reach out to only one social media destination called Post Planner. It aids you to find the best and the right content for your audience and post it. Furthermore, it delivers content based on users’ keywords, provides status ideas, and assists users to search blogs and experts in their forte.
Post planner plans start from $9/month.
8. Feedly
Feedly is known for its user-friendly design. It delivers fast, mobile-optimized content using RSS feeds. Feedly enables you to browse and share content from your favourite news sites, blogs, feeds, and YouTube channels. Feedly displays the latest content being shared on a particular website or using a precise keyword on top of the entire content.
Cas McCullough : I use Feedly to categorize content for my own social platforms, as well as my clients’ platforms
Up to 100 feeds, services of Feedly are FREE, and its paid plans start from $5.41 or $18 for a team.
9. Pocket
Pocket, as the name suggests, works like a pocket where you can save your content and view it later when required. Pocket provides service for saving web pages and articles. There you can view later when you want. Pocket, as a content curation tool, enables content discovery as well as arms you with the skill to search for content on specific topics. It displays the most trending and ‘must read’ sort of posts and articles.
Pocket is a great place to get into the habit of accruing content to save and share later.
Pocket is user-friendly, can work in your browser, as well as from apps such as Twitter, Flipboard, and others. If the content is stored in Pocket, (your phone, tablet or computer), you don’t even need an Internet connection to view it again and again.
The pocket can be used for FREE; it’s paid plan starts from $44.99/yr for an ad-free experience…
10. Trap.it
Trap.it is a content curation tool and a social selling service. It is considered as the best social media management solution too. It assists you to manage employee advocacy. With the help of Trap.it, you can search relevant and new content within minutes, which can be shared via email, LinkedIn or other social media platforms. Its top features include salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics Integration and Artificial Intelligence for content curation.
11. Curation Suite
Curation Suite is the renewed version of Curation Traffic. To discover, curate, publish and share multiple types of content, curation suite is the most popular platform. Curation Suite is a robust WordPress plugin that works right within your WordPress dashboard. It works with any theme and any plugin you have, to search content in the form of posts, articles, videos, infographics, and others.
Curation Suite plans start from $97 which is a one-time payment and then you can go for a top-up according to your content curation needs.
12. Quora
Quora is yet another underestimated but most important content curation tool. It is a great place to share your knowledge and ideas and engage with similar interests people. It is a forum where questions are asked and pertaining replies are given by the varied users.
You can set up an account, and then search your keywords to find outstanding content for future use. In addition, you can turn on notifications about specified topics pertaining to your field. By doing so, you can get access to more and more relevant articles and interesting ideas in your inbox.
Quora platform is FREE and can be accessed for multiple times a day
Closing thoughts
The list does not end here, there are much more content curation tools available in the market which can help you boost your content marketing strategy. Over and above these 12 tools, 39 more tools have been listed here for you as additional reading.
Sr No
Content Curation Tool
Description
13.
Addict-o-Matic
· Search the best LIVE sites across the web. · Dig the latest and trending news, blog posts, videos and images
14.
BagTheWeb
· Search, create and share ‘bags’ of web content on varied topics
15.
Bundlepost
· Aggregate and plan social media content · Find, edit, and schedule with the browser plugin or social media dashboard
16.
Channel kit
· Enables you to tag and organize all sorts of information in one place · Includes articles, websites, contacts, PDF files or various format images—all showcased as neat cards in channels
· Mechanically integrates real-time social content beside editorial content to raise engagement and boost revenue
19.
CurationSoft
· Helps establish brands as a reliable voice, and a “not to miss” source of information
20.
DrumUp
· Mines web content in real-time to suggest to your audience · Reduces your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter management time
21.
elink
· Offers a swift way to transform a bunch of links into content · Enables to curate, publish, and share content online in a visually appealing manner
22.
Flipboard
· Create your own personalized magazines and brochures · Catch up on news, read stories across the globe, and browse articles,videos,and photos your friends are sharing across the web
23.
Flockler
· Combine all your content, including what your fans and followers say about you, into one social hub. ·Create your own social hub or bring social content into your existing websites, applications, eCommerce sites, and other services
24.
Folloze
· A great B2B platform to create content experiences that dynamically adapt to a visitor’s profile, company, industry, and stage of the deal
25.
HeadSlinger
· Saves your research time by 50%, find all your news in half the time · Scan your favourite sites’ headlines in a matter of seconds and store your favourite news sources in a swift and simple manner to find folders
26.
Huzzaz
· Video curation platform that enables you to search, mine, collect and showcase YouTube and Vimeo videos · Analyze user’s viewing behaviour and figure out which videos matter most to your viewers and to enhance the site engagement
27.
Juxtapost
· Swift, simple and FREE way to bookmark online images · Gather and handle categorized post boards
28.
Kbucket
· Being it a user indexed search site, here, skilled “content curators” categorize, comment, tag, and publish their research to support their content marketing strategy
29.
Curator
· Persistently publish fresh and new content on websites or blogs in minutes a day to keep up readers engagement
30.
LinkHubb
· Curate and share multiple links from around the web in one organized page, upload documents and files to the cloud, and use affiliate technology to generate ad-based revenue
31.
List.ly
· Curate, crowdsource and engage readers via LIVE rooted list content inside blog posts
32.
Newsle
· Track users’ Facebook friends, LinkedIn connections, and email contacts in the news. By no means miss a key story about a follower, professional contact, or public figure
33.
papaly
· Bookmark management and discovery tool
34.
Paper.li
· Publish ‘newspapers’ comprised of content from anywhere on the web to treat your readers to fresh news daily
35.
Pearltrees
· Visual and collaborative curation tool. Allows you to collect, organize, and share any URL, and upload personal images and notes
36.
Pluggio
· Secure web-based system that helps individuals, businesses, organizations and marketers easily grow and manage their social media profiles
37.
RebelMouse
· Create a blog, website, or social page in seconds. Simply connect your social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+ or LinkedIn.
38.
RockTheDeadline
· Simplifies for brands, agencies, and publishers to create and manage compelling content ·Curate timely and trending news and promote that content over multiple channels
39.
Roojoom
· Create Smart MiniSites, online magazines, and e-newsletters · Content can be personalized to increase engagement and improve conversions across the customer life-cycle
40.
Shareist
· Capture bookmarks and ideas, share them on social media and save them for building and publishing pages to blogs
41.
Sharpr
· Segregate information silos, advance collaboration, and share what matters most with the users who matter most to your business
42.
Spredfast
· Helps brands, media, and agencies involve and connect with audience integrating social media into their marketing and advertising efforts
43.
sprinklr
· Helps brands and organizations distribute curated social media content to support their content strategy. Platforms include websites, event displays, retail signage, and mobile apps.
44.
Storyful
· Helps newsrooms find the most valuable content on the social web. Uses a “human algorithm” to sort through verified curated news from various mediums.
45.
Sutori
· Create and share visual stories, collaboratively
46.
symbaloo
· A personal Startpage that allows you to easily navigate the web. Compile your favourite sites into one visual interface. Save your bookmarks in the cloud and access them from anywhere with any device.
47.
TagBoard
· Social media hub for hashtags · Collect, moderate, and follow hashtags, as well as create and follow your own hashtag conversations
48.
The Tweeted Times
· Comprehends news in your Twitter flow every hour · Ranks each section by its popularity amid your friends
49.
UpContent
· Content mining and content curation tool that crawls the web to draw news, articles, and blog posts · Sorts by parameters such as the social influence · Reduces browsing needs of surfing 1000s of page results
50.
Vidinterest
· A platform to discover social videos that enables you to bookmark videos and create private or public playlists of videos · Allows surfing any website featuring videos from Vimeo, YouTube, and Daily Motion.
51.
Waywire
· Video curation tool that embeds hundreds of top-quality sources from trusted media makers to improve your site with current, timely, trending and contextually-relevant videos
Again, this is not an exhaustive list of content curation tools. Feel free to drop in the comments section if you use any of the other tools and how is your content curation experience with that content curation tool. We are excited to hear from you regarding your insights on content curation tools!
Content marketing is considered as one of the most influential things when it comes to SEO trends for 2017. Until recent past, it was probably underestimated parameter, but now marketers are paying special attention to their content marketing. Content writing has now become the most vital portion of digital marketing. Day-by-day, the quality standard of content is getting versatile and competitive. Quite a few search marketers attempt to attract their target audience with their content development skills, along with other social media skills and engagement tactics.
It emphasizes that in order to sustain competition you are in a constant need to boost the quality of your content. Most of the audience is engrossed in reading good content over the web while searching for something that is similar to your content.
You would have read a lot many articles and blogs on the tools for search engine optimization and social media marketing. Here, we present the top 11 content marketing tools which you need to explore in 2017 to stay ahead in the digital marketing race. These are regarded as the best content creation tools.
These tools will not only help you write your content but also assist you in the optimization of your content. They act as a polish for your quality content which is ready for publishing.
Content marketing tools
1. Co- schedule Headline Analyzer
According to HubSpot, only 60% of people who click into an article end up reading past the headline. This explains how important your headline is for your marketing.
Co- schedule Headline Analyzer is a free tool, widely used in the field of digital marketing. This tool calculates the score for your overall headline quality and rates its ability to result in social shares, increased traffic, and SEO value. It is very simple to operate. The scoring format is also informative. An overall score of your headline is judged on the basis of four parameters; common words, uncommon words, emotional words, and power words. You should definitely use this tool to improve your article or blog headlines.
2. Content Ideator
An easy to operate the tool. Content Ideator helps you find good topics to write about e.g. blogs, articles, and others. It lets you generate content ideas that your audience reads and shares. This tool is also popularly known as a Content Forest tool. The beauty of this tool is it allows you to generate a number of blog topics and ideas in a little amount of time. Once you enter a single keyword or a phrase, it will come up with a long list of ideas out of which some may be helpful and some may not be.
3. Grammarly
Grammar is of utmost importance to avoid confusions when it comes to oral or written communication. Incorrect usage of grammar and spelling mistakes can actually slow down the overall flow of communication. Grammarly is yet another powerful tool that helps you correct your content. It highlights the most possible grammatical slipups, wordiness, and suggests better articles/prepositions strengthen your content. It also provides apt synonyms for the words that you double-click. This content tool helps you with the correction part of your content. Moreover, it also helps with the correct sentence formation part of your content if you are mistaken at any of the sentences.
4. HubSpot
This specific tool promotes inbound marketing platforms. It consists of various tools to monitor and devise effective blog posts, personalized landing pages, and other compelling content along with excellent consumer support. It also includes effective content-marketing campaign activities. HubSpot also helps social media analytics and message-scheduling so that you can advertise your content easily to your social carriers.
5. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a great and invaluable content creation tool. The first five searches of Buzzsumo are absolutely free. If you would like to identify which online outlets or influencers are getting the most traction in your space, you should definitely look to Buzzsumo for analytics-driven insights.
Based on your search, Buzzsumo will colonize the trending content, which is most social, highest ranking, and most influential. This will give you a perfect idea of how to title your content. In addition, it will help you find out where to advertise your content based on relevant audience reach.
6. Copify
Everyone wish to create quality content. As a business, you need content for everything, from the website pages that drive sales to the blog posts that engage customers on social media. It does require a good amount of relevant research. Based on the research, you can come up with the draft content. Post that proofreading, copy editing, substantive editing, and designing finally shapes your final output. As you can see, it’s a lengthy process and a challenging job!
Imagine neither you are a professional writer nor you have an in-house writer. No need to worry, a simple solution is just a click away, Copify. As an entrepreneur, you can easily access quality copywriters through Copify. Copify helps businesses to source quality content from a network of approved writers, promptly and hassle-free. They do take responsibility for proofreading and formatting and deliver mostly within 48 hours.
Outbrain is the best option to solve the problems in the distribution of your content. Even though it is a paid tool, it will broaden your audience to a huge extent.
With Outbrain, you can easily increase your audience engagement with your videos, articles, blogs, articles, and infographics. Your posts will be advertised as suggested posts besides other articles.
8. Canva
Struggling and juggling with the creation of images? Then you should use a tool called Canva. This is considered as one of the most preferred content marketing tools. Canva offers ready-to-use templates, custom image sizes for all social media channels. It provides a drag-and-drop interface, cool fonts, and many user-friendly features. The images created by Canva are absolutely original and exclusive that you witness on the web.
9. Hemingway editor
Hemingway Editor is yet another important tool, which you should not miss. It points out the general concerns pertaining to complex words, vague phrases, lengthy sentences, too many adverbs, too many nouns, and others. Precisely, it helps you to eliminate your language-related errors and make your content simple and easy to understand. While highlighting errors, it also gives a description that why it is an error. The only limitation is that it just points out issues, doesn’t provide solutions or alternatives.
10. ClearVoice
ClearVoice allows you great flexibility and competence; it is a complete content marketing network. You will get an inbuilt market through ClearVoice. It helps in promoting your content and brand. It allows you to create your content and get connected with the brands in order to produce quality content. The studio of ClearVoice enables the brands to recognize the influencing factors and their competitors so that they can produce the content which is both relevant and valuable.
11. Pocket
If you are looking for a perfect content curation tool, the pocket is an apt solution. This content marketing tool includes the search, arrangement, and share the function of the most relevant and high-quality digital content.
Pocket safeguards all of your articles, images, charts, and videos at a single place for reference. It aids you to bookmark your content, ranging from blogs and articles to images and posts.
Conclusion
With the growing competition of quality content, it has become necessary that you publish your posts with accuracy and efficiency. There are lots of content marketing tools available on the web that will help you optimize your content and make it perfect to be published on social channels.
