content marketing
Laptop blogging

By Disha Dinesh

To succeed at content marketing, you have to consistently create and distribute relevant and valuable content to pull your target audience onto your site and communities and eventually generate sales from the process. But the process is hard, and several brands see engagement levels as low as 1%, which dilutes the conversion and revenue expectancies to rock bottom.

With a dozen tasks to handle, content managers seldom find time to focus on what matters most – the numbers and the insights they hold. Insights that can help refine content for better engagement.

There are apps that can help spare valuable time and apps that can help boost engagement rates. Here is an interesting mix of apps that can do both for you.

Quora

With over 180,000 Monthly Active Users and 68% searches, Quora is one of the most sought after communities for information.

Content marketers need to know which questions their audience is asking. Technically, this would require identification of the audience, conduction of a survey and analysis of the results to draw conclusions about what the audience wants.

Quora is a nifty shortcut to circumvent that extra effort. Search for keywords related to your niche, and see how much activity is present on each question in the search results. If several questions are echoing the same theme, and they’re recent, you have found a trend.

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DrumUp

According to a MarketingProfs citation, 2 million blogs are written each day. Battling against those volumes is a challenge and a pain, plus your audience is being flooded with content from multiple sources.

How can you help?

Filter content, curate high-quality and useful content for your audience to read and share it with them. That doesn’t mean you have to sift through millions of pieces of social media content, you could use DrumUp’s powerful machine learning algorithm to do it for you, based on keywords that you set. The app also includes scheduling, a content library to store posts and analytics.

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GIMP, Google Presentation & Canva

For your visuals, you could use a combination of tools. I recommend GIMP, Google presentations and Canva. Canva works brilliantly for blog covers and simple posters. The tool has a wide range of predesigned templates to choose from. Select one that reflects your idea best, drop text boxes over it and download your image.

For graphs and objects, you could use Google slides.

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Create the objects and export them to GIMP to assemble them. If you’re creating an infographic this plan works well and is easy to execute.

Remember that visuals increase the possibility of engagement by 80%.

 

MailChimp

Email newsletters and campaigns are integral to content marketing; They are great for better targeting, reaching mobile users and powerful because you are marketing to people with their consent.

The email marketing tool MailChimp allows you to create emails and delivers them to your mailing list. The tool features pre-made templates, a flexible editor and a bunch of sending options.

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It also allows for management of subscribers, segmentation of emailing lists and better management over the email marketing process.

Post mail delivery, the app also makes available detailed analysis of click rates and open rates.

 

Quintly

Once you have created your content and have distributed it, it is necessary to analyze your efforts and draw conclusions on what worked and what didn’t so you can restructure your approach for better results.

The analytics app Quintly has a series of features worth looking at.

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Among them are competitive benchmarking for your social media accounts, and visuals to help your make informed decisions about content. Interestingly, the app also lets you share data and reports with colleagues, making communication within marketing teams convenient.

Finally, you can also identify key influencers to connect with on social via the app.

For small businesses, who are plenty pressed for time and money, it is important to discover alternatives to social media and content marketing tasks that save both. This tools list is a great start.

Disha Dinesh is a content writer at Godot Media, a leading content agency. Her interests include social media and content marketing. When she’s not writing, she’s on the hunt for social media trends and inspiration. @Disha_Dee.