Which tools do we recommend at Summon?
Using the right tools can speed up and simplify the process of creating a solid digital marketing strategy. There are so many content marketing tools available online today – so, we thought we’d give you a summary of our favourite sites and their top features.
CoSchedule
CoSchedule is an agile marketing platform that is used to organise all of your digital marketing in one, clear place. The main features of this platform include:
- Being able to organise and track pieces of content on your calendar
- Integrating with other digital marketing tools
- Organising and managing both small and large marketing campaigns or projects
- Accessing powerful insights
We also recommend using CoSchedule to create workflows for your team – meaning you can easily share files and documents throughout any project. On top of this, the platform gives you access to a really handy headline analysis tool called Headline Analyser. The Headline Analyser will score your headline quality based on how likely it is to generate social shares, valuable traffic and SEO value!
Grammarly
Even with years of writing experience under your belt, you may still benefit from gaining a second opinion, before publishing a piece of content. Grammarly is a helpful writing tool that can detect everything from grammar and spelling, to punctuation, sentence types and word variation. We recommend submitting articles, blogs and even social media posts into Grammarly before publishing them – especially if you’re just getting started in the world of content marketing.
The great thing about Grammarly is that it can be tailored towards your brand voice – for example, informal or formal. So, it’s suited to a variety of businesses and industries.
WordPress
WordPress is a popular CMS (content management system) and is a powerful tool for anybody who wants to get high-quality content in front of their target audience. As a digital marketing agency, we use WordPress to share our content – including blogs and webpages.
WordPress is used to host and build your own website – which might be a blog, portfolio or even an online store. It offers templates suited to various types of businesses and is widely used by bloggers. If you are just getting started in the world of blogging – it’s definitely worth checking out.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a great tool to use in the research phase of your content campaign, as well as helping to build awareness once it’s published. The platform can help to establish the type of content that works and the content that tends to produce less results. It covers four primary areas, which are:
- Discovery – Finding the highest-performing content that will generate maximum likes, links and social shares.
- Research – Carefully analyse data points that can improve you content marketing strategy.
- Influencers – Identify and get in touch with influential people in your industry, i.e. those with a high social media following. This can help to power-up your digital campaign and your brand in general!
- Content Monitoring – Track comments, likes, online conversations and trending topics so that you can respond with the more relevant and up-to-date content.
SEMrush
SEMrush is a helpful SEO and content marketing tool. It provides insight into all things search marketing and can answer key questions such as:
- What keywords are your competitors bidding on?
- What do your competitors search ads look like?
- Which keywords are providing competitors with the best organic rankings?
It’s a simple yet effective tool, which will only ask you to enter a URL. Once you’ve entered your chosen URL (whether that’s yours or your competitors), you will be able to access tons of valuable keywords information to lead you closer towards your target audience.
Search engine optimisation and content marketing often come hand-in-hand, and SEMrush is prime example of this being the case. To achieve the best results when it comes to creating content, it is crucial that your writing is optimised for SERPs.
Using a tool such as SEMrush will provide you with the engagement data that will help you to rank higher in search engines, and therefore gain more exposure within your target market.
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is another great tool – especially if you’re interested in why your competitors are ranking so high. It allows you to keep track of competing brands while tracking your own progress. It can track in terms of mobile racking, locations per site, keywords and more. We suggest using Ahrefs before writing an article, blog or web page in order to get a real understanding of what will work for your target audience. Once your content is published, you can also refer back to this tool to find out how well it performed. A few examples of the things we’d be interested in as a digital agency, include:
- Did we gain any backlinks, if so, how many?
- How many times was our post shared on social media?
- What type of search queries led a user to our page?
Ahrefss offers some great extra features, for example, being able to analyse the pages on a site with the highest value. A personal favourite would be the ‘content gap’ tool which lets you find out what your competitors are ranking for that you haven’t. This is a way of generating new ideas and creating fresh, likeable content.
HootSuite
We’ve previously touched on how important social shares are when it comes to content marketing – and HootSuite is likely to make this process a lot easier! If you’re planning on sharing a lot of content on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or even Pinterest – you can use HootSuite to schedule posts and automatically share them at your chosen time and date. In fact, HootSuite can connect to over 30 social platforms.
We recommend scheduling your content at peak engagement hours to ensure you’re not missing an opportunity to reach out to your target customers. Think about your industry in particular – and when your audience are most likely to be browsing their social platforms or looking for your product.