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 above.
Why am I doing this
In the past year, 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?
In the past few months, 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. However, since then there have been many comments to the blog post from other tools vendors requesting to be added to the deficient list. While the list currently sits at 27 tools and continues, it’s far from complete. Furthermore, Altimeter is still in the process of compiling a list of tools out there, but has yet to group and organize them in a meaningful manner.
-
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.
Lead Tracking Tools
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.
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.
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.
Marketing.ai – This content marketing and analytics tool is targeted at B2B marketers and displays detailed information about web visitors such as the name of the cmpanies visiting your website, the location and size of the company, and a detailed customer journey of pages viewed on the site.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Social Media Management & Listening Tools
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.
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.com – 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.com – 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
SEOmoz – This platform enables users to monitor social media, manage SEO campaigns, and more.
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.
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 photo-sharing app for the iPhone allows users to view and save photos across social media channels, create and share with groups, and more.
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.
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.