In the past we have written many articles about the incredible importance of content marketing for any competitive, modern small or medium-sized enterprise (SME). Where once it was enough for a small or medium-sized business to simply run some poster ads or simply buy some space in the local newspaper, today, no business of any size gets around a coherent online content marketing strategy if it wants to stay long-term successful in the market. Still, we are also the first to admit that devising such an online strategy, and then actually sticking to it, can be extremely overwhelming and challenging.

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A holistic content marketing strategy, that goes beyond just posting the occasional company Facebook update, requires attention to a multitude of different factors and can easily eat up a lot of time and people power for the company.

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Luckily, in our modern age, there are plenty of tools available for a SME to help out with all those various aspects of online content marketing. These tools are designed to make things easier for your company's content marketeers, make the processes involved more efficient and raise the overall quality of your content marketing game.

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To make things even easier for you and to give you an overview over what kind of tools there are and what they can be used for, we have collected and categorized the top most important types of content marketing tools out there. Whether your company is just starting out on the path of online content marketing or already a real weathered professional in it, we are confident that these types of tools can save you both time and energy and raise your online marketing to the next level. We are also planning a series of blogposts for each individual category of tools where we will take a more in-depth look at some specific tools, so please stay tuned for that.

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1. Social Media Planner Tools

To be truly successful in social media marketing, it is no longer enough to simply post on one single platform. Just as the average modern user has accounts to several social media platforms, so must your company to optimally reach and satiate your content audience. With that many accounts, that all want to be fed and attended to, it can be easy to lose track. This is where social media planning tools like Hootsuite, Sprout or Buffer come in, that let you easily create, schedule, view and publish posts for all your accounts in one central tool.

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2. Content Creation Tools

One of the most time-consuming aspects of online content marketing is the actual creation of new content for your various online platforms. Here, the type of tool you might want to use can differ, depending on what type of content you are mostly creating. But whether you want to make writing new blogposts more efficient with a tool like Grammarly or improve your video content production with our own Mate Studio tool, we guarantee that there is a tool out there to fit your specific content creation needs.

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3. Email Marketing Tools

Another great way to reach large audiences with your content is via email marketing. A well-maintained newsletter allows you to target a large core audience with selected content and minimal effort. In order to keep things organized but also still personal as your email audience grows, email marketing tools can be a great help to your company. Tools like Mailchimp or Sendible allow you to automate tasks involving larger audiences, while still personalizing emails and better connecting with your audience.

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4. CRM Tools

Indeed, connecting with your audience and clients is vital to any successful content marketing strategy. This is where CRM tools come in particularly handy. Customer relationship management tools, like HubSpot or Hotjar are another important tool to keep track off, analyse, manage and ultimately build better relationships with your clients. Ultimately, its this kind of account-based marketing that CRM tools enable that will help you to convert your audience into actual customers and grow your business.

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5. Data Analytics Tools

All your content marketing efforts create a ton of usable data for your company. Understanding this data and adapting your online strategy based on that is key for your company's growth online. But not every piece of data created by your campaign will be helpful or even meaningful to you. Ultimately, it’s the KPI, the key performance indicators, of your content that you will be particularly interested in. How well did your content perform, which people did you reach and where did your strategy fall flat? To help you sort through the masses of performance data and collect and visualize those numbers that actually matter to you, a good data analytics tool like semrush or Google Analytics will be invaluable to your efforts.

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6. Social Listening Tools

The extreme reach and platform that social media grants not just to companies but to everyone comes with both opportunities and threats. A modern company can live or die by the quality of their reputation and social media has made it easier than ever for consumers to both spread a brand's praises or condemn it to eternal damnation. That’s why listening to what people say about your business online, and reacting to it appropriately, is more important now than ever. Monitoring tools like AgoraPulse or BrandMention will do this listening for you and summarize their findings so that you don’t have to lose any sleep about it.

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7. Website Design and Search Engine Optimization Tools

The best content in the world will not help your company much if audiences are not easily able to find and consume that content online. Creating brilliant landing pages for your content with a tool like Wix and making sure your website and content are search engine optimized (SEO) with tools like Ahrefs or Sistrix, will ensure that the maximum amount of people will get to see and enjoy your content.

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8. Audience Data Enrichment Tools

Reaching a maximum amount of people with your content is important. But even the largest random online audience only gets you so far if you don’t reach your particular niche of target customer with it. This is why understanding your brand's audience and being able to intelligently target them online is so important for effective content marketing. Luckily, we live in a times where potential customers are all to happy to share large parts of their personal data online and where you can use data enrichment tools like Apollo.io or Audience play to collect and analyse that data for your content marketing purposes. Creating virtual target audiences for your next social media campaign based on such data will be sure to send engagement for your content through the roof.

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Ok, we admit, sorting through all these tools and finding the right ones fitting for you is somewhat of a daunting task all on its own. But it is a task worth doing and one that will pay its cost back to you manyfold by saving your company time and effort in the long run. To make things even easier for you, we are planning a full series of blogposts over the next couple of weeks, looking at each of these tool categories mentioned here individually and comparing specific tools in them. We hope you stay tuned and keep looking to improve your online content marketing game together with us.