As a content marketing agency that has achieved #1 rankings for Adobe, QuickBooks, Brex, and other large brands, we are deep into the Google rankings game. Take it from us — the SEO content creation process is a whole lot easier with the right tools at your disposal.

Having grown from a solo operation to a seven-figure agency that publishes dozens of articles per week, we’ve tested almost every content tool out there.

Now, we’re spilling the tea and sharing our content marketing stack to help you level up your content game in 2024.

What are Content Marketing Tools?

Content marketing tools refers to a wide spectrum of tools, each serving a unique purpose in the content ecosystem.

From brainstorming new content ideas to creating compelling content in different formats and distributing it across various channels, these tools ensure that every aspect of your content strategy is data-driven and efficient.

By leveraging these tools effectively, your business can ensure that your content not only resonates with your audience, but drives tangible results, increasing your content marketing ROI.

How Content Marketing Tools Make Your Life Easier

Creating truly great content takes a lot of time, resources, and expertise. But with today’s best content marketing tools at your side, you can make the process a whole lot smoother.

Here are some ways that content marketing tools can improve your content, thereby improving your online presence:

1. They increase your team’s productivity. With a tool that allows you to automate tasks, schedule content in advance, and manage your content calendar more effectively, you can free up your team’s time to focus on other areas of growth.
2. They improve content quality and consistency. With so many excellent writing tools to choose from, there’s really no excuse for spelling or grammar mistakes in your content. Not only do writing tools ensure that your content is error-free, they also offer guidance on tone, word choice, and can even check for plagiarism.
3. They boost your visibility in search engine results. Many of today’s content writing tools have SEO integrations designed to help you win the favor of search engines. From content ideation and competitor analysis to keyword research, a good SEO tool is a non-negotiable in your content marketing stack.
4. They help uncover new insights. By providing data on user behavior, content performance, and current trends, content analysis tools can help you understand your audience better and make more informed decisions about your content strategy.

15 Tools to Take Your Content Marketing to the Next Level

Below, we’ve broken our go-to tools into five areas:

• Content Creation
• Content Optimization
• Content Management
• Content Distribution
• Content Analysis

Content Creation Tools to Help Craft Your Message

Remember the days of endlessly scrutinizing your content in an attempt to create an error-free, quality piece of writing? Or fiddling around on Adobe apps, moving elements around for hours trying to create a cohesive graphic?

Brainstorming new content ideas and bringing those ideas to life with thoughtfully crafted prose and visually stunning designs has never been easier, thanks to these tools.

1. Grammarly

An indispensable tool for content writers, Grammarly checks spelling, grammar, and even the tone of your writing.

It also has integrations with web editors like Google Docs, as well as popular CMS platforms like WordPress, reducing the time required to transfer content back and forth.

Pro tip: If you manage a team of content writers, Grammarly has a great plagiarism checker tool to ensure that your content remains original. We use this at Growth Machine to ensure that the content from our writers is 100% original.

2. Canva

It’s hard to imagine the world of digital marketing before Canva came along.

Canva’s free tools and user-friendly interface have made it one of the most widely used tools for creating visual content.

With everything from graphic design templates to stock imagery and even video content, you can create stunning visuals for your blog posts with Canva.

3. Jasper

Think of Jasper as your marketing team’s assistant: It can summarize key ideas, provide copywriting assistance, and even help you refine your brand voice, so you can use language that will resonate with your target customer.

Especially if you’re just starting out or don’t have the budget for an agency or hiring out a contractor, Jasper can help you be more efficient with your marketing tasks. But it should never be used to write content completely.

After all, today’s search algorithms aren’t stupid. They can spot AI-generated content from a mile away, and might even penalize you for it, which can affect your hard-earned search rankings.

If your goal is to get more traffic, clicks, and ultimately, more conversions for your business, your best bet is to work with a partner with a proven track record of SEO success. 

At Growth Machine, we work with hundreds of skilled (human) writers with expertise in every subject imaginable to find the perfect fit for our clients, so you can stay at the top of your content game and outrank the competition every time. No AI needed!

Content Optimization Tools to Boost Your Online Visibility

As marketers, there’s nothing more exciting than seeing a piece of content you poured your heart and soul into performing well and attracting more traffic for your business. 

So how do you increase the odds of your content being seen by people that are truly interested in what you have to say? It all comes down to tweaking your posts so that search engines like Google take notice and blast your content out to more people.

These three tools have distilled SEO writing down to a science and can help you prep your best pieces for search engines.

4. Clearscope

At Growth Machine, Clearscope is our go-to tool for optimizing client content for search engines.

When you input your focus keyword into this handy tool, it gives you a report with a list of related keywords to integrate into your blog content. As you’re drafting, it provides insights on readability, word count, and a content grade. 

It’s also the perfect tool for optimizing existing blog posts — after you input your article, it tells you what keywords and topics to add to raise the grade.

Its competitor analysis functionality is top-tier, allowing you to quickly browse which websites are ranking for similar keywords, including content structure and heading choices they’re using to capture search traffic.

5. Yoast SEO

If your content lives on Wordpress, leveraging the Yoast SEO plugin can significantly boost your digital presence.

Yoast is an SEO powerhouse that ensures your blog content is fully optimized for search engines, increasing your visibility and driving more traffic to your site.

The Yoast Wordpress plugin offers real-time SEO insights as you write, which makes optimizing content for search engines a breeze.

It also optimizes your posts for readability by assessing sentence length, paragraph structure, and use of passive voice among other factors. This ensures your content is not only optimized for search engines, but also engaging and easy for your audience to digest.

6. Semrush Writing Assistant

Securing a spot on the first page of search results these days is no easy feat. With search engines constantly refining their algorithms, the competition for search rankings is hotter than ever.

A tool like Semrush Writing Assistant sets you up for SEO success right from the start. With instant feedback guiding you on how to optimize your content for search, you can strike the perfect balance of keyword density and readability without disrupting your creative flow.

Content Management Tools to Keep You on Track

The most efficient content marketing teams know that it’s not just about creating and distributing good content — it’s also about managing your workflow effectively.

That’s where a good project management tool comes into play. Marketing automation has come a long way, so why not use that to your advantage to make your process as seamless as possible?

Here are some tools to automate your workflows and allow your team members to collaborate with ease.

7. Asana

At Growth Machine, Asana is our project management tool of choice. We use it to create editorial calendars, organize different types of content we need for each project, and communicate with both clients and writers.

Asana’s multiple views (such as the list, board, and calendar views) make it easy to visualize projects, track progress, and set deadlines. This comes in handy, especially if you’re managing a large team of writers, like we do.

You can also assign tasks to certain team members and create separate workspaces for different projects or teams, ensuring everything stays organized and accessible.

8. Trello

For the visually inclined, Trello’s board and card system offers a great alternative to Asana.

Trello allows you to organize tasks visually, making it easy to manage workflows and monitor progress, as well as create customizable cards with checklists, due dates, and attachments.

You can also add comments to cards for more effective collaboration or create a content research board to encourage your team to add fresh content ideas when inspiration strikes.

9. Slack

For many of today’s digital marketing professionals, it’s hard to remember communicating in an era before Slack. The name has become all but synonymous with corporate messaging — it’s not uncommon to hear “Slack me,” or “I’ll Slack you the file,” in this day and age.

Slack isn’t just a chat app — it integrates with other tools and services, making it a vital project management tool.

Say goodbye to lengthy email threads and messy Google Drive folders and hello to instant team communication, right at your fingertips.

Content Distribution Tools to Get the Word Out

As the battle for online visibility rages on, having great content just isn’t enough anymore. 

If you really want your business to make an impact and rank higher in the search results, you need to have an effective plan in place to distribute that content.

Here are a few tools that can help with that.

10. HubSpot

HubSpot goes far beyond your average CRM. It’s an all-in-one marketing and content distribution tool that allows you to create, schedule, and publish blog posts, emails, and social media content, all from one convenient place. They even have their own podcast network if you’re a podcaster.

Especially for B2B businesses, HubSpot is a lead generation machine. Their integrated forms, pop-ups, and chat tools can help you capture more leads, while their email workflows allow you to effectively nurture those leads.

By distributing your content strategically for maximum impact and reach, you can close more conversions for your business and generate a better ROI on your content.

11. Hootsuite

Juggling multiple social media platforms can be enough to make a digital marketer’s head spin. Yet at the same time, social media is becoming more and more important to engage with your target audience online and build your brand’s presence.

A social media tool like Hootsuite can help you manage all your accounts in one place. You can schedule social media posts, have real-time conversations with your audience, and measure your social media content’s impact, all in one place.

12. Mailchimp

While much of today’s conversations about content center around blogs and social media, email marketing remains a powerful tool for converting leads into paying customers. It delivers bang for your buck with an average ROI of $40 for every $1 spent on email marketing.

An email marketing tool like Mailchimp offers a wide range of features for creating, sending, and tracking email campaigns, ensuring your message reaches the right people at the right time.

The easy-to-use campaign builder makes it easy to drag and drop your best pieces of content in so you can generate more revenue for your business.

Content Analytics Tools to Measure Success

The final piece of the content puzzle is to measure the impact your content is having online.

Here are three tools to help inform your content strategy, see what’s resonating with your target audience, and offer insight into where you might need to pivot.

13. Google Analytics

Understanding your audience is the key to creating high-quality content. That’s exactly what Google Analytics (GA4) does — provides comprehensive insights into how users interact with your site.

You can also track metrics like page views, user engagement, and conversion rates to measure your content’s performance.

14. Ahrefs

A favorite of ours, Ahrefs offers great tools for keyword research, competitor analysis, and backlink tracking.

For example, our team uses Ahrefs to pinpoint what keyword gaps might exist in our clients’ content, then use that data to uncover new keyword opportunities for future posts.

Using these insights, you can understand where you stand in search rankings and how your content is performing, which is invaluable for refining your digital marketing strategy.

15. BuzzSumo

When it comes time to curate your next piece of content, BuzzSumo is your secret weapon. 

This research tool helps you analyze content engagement, track industry trends, and spot opportunities for outreach across social and search. 

You can also monitor your business’s keywords and content to see what’s resonating, even breaking down engagement patterns by network or content format. This allows you to plan your marketing campaigns accordingly and put your dollars behind content types that have been proven to generate higher engagement.

Streamline Your Content Process With an Experienced Content Partner

While individual tools are powerful, their true potential is realized when they are integrated into a cohesive content marketing strategy.

You could invest tons of time into creating a sustainable, repeatable content system that may or may not work — or, you could hire an expert to get results for you. With a partner like Growth Machine creating SEO-optimized blog content for you on a regular basis, your business will become an unstoppable force in your niche.

Thanks to our work, one of our past clients garnered nearly 2,000 #1 keywords, 100+ featured snippets, and a 303% increase in traffic in a trending niche.

Get in touch with us today to learn how we can get you more traffic, more customers, and #1 blog rankings.