Content marketing is a strategy focused on creating content that is relevant and valuable to your audience. The goal is to attract customers through your expertise and helpfulness, rather than inundating them with traditional ads and other explicitly sales-focused content.
“It’s content in service of your customer, rather than trying to sell to them directly,” says Erika Heald, a business-to-business (B2B) content marketing expert and consultant with more than 25 years of experience. “You use your expertise to provide them with informative and interesting things, so you build a relationship over time—rather than simply having a transactional customer experience.”
A successful content marketing program can be a major boost for ecommerce businesses looking to stand out, resonate with audiences, and build long-term customer relationships. But they take effort to build and sustain. This is where tools come in—they can help you streamline your process. Below, we rounded up Erika’s favorite content marketing tools, along with a few other popular picks to round out your content tech stack.
Table of contents
What are content marketing tools?
Content marketing tools are software that can help you with your content marketing efforts, from asset creation to measuring performance and return on investment.
Content marketing assets span channels and formats, including everything from educational blog posts, ebook guides, video content, expert Q&As, helpful social media posts, and more.
Good tools will help you be more efficient and create better materials, whether you’re writing a blog post, editing images, or even creating videos. Artificial intelligence—specifically the mainstreaming of generative AI—has fueled the development of new content creation tools (or the advancement of existing tools) to make writing and publishing content easier than ever.
6 expert-picked content marketing tools
Erika uses multiple content marketing tools for editing copy, designing assets, and tracking performance. She notes that marketing teams don’t have to shell out tons of cash to get started; several companies offer free content marketing tools alongside paid services that include more features.
There are also tools that can help scale your content marketing output and manage your workflow from idea to publication. Here are some of the top content marketing tools for content marketers.
1. Grammarly
For Erika, perhaps the best content marketing tool is the one that prevents you from publishing a piece of content with a big glaring typo or incorrect word usage—which will immediately ding your credibility with readers. Grammarly is a freemium AI-based tool that can generate content based on information you supply, including quick replies to emails. But its main draw is its ability to correct and improve existing content. Grammarly’s Google Docs and browser plug-ins can rewrite paragraphs, edit for clarity and conciseness, flag passive voice, anticipate readers’ questions, suggest additions to the text, adjust tone, and proofread. Business accounts include additional tools like the Brand Tones feature, which ensures your content stays on brand.
“The No. 1 thing I recommend everyone do is at least download the free version of Grammarly. It’s one of those tools that I think literally everyone should use,” Erika says.
Price: Free limited version; paid versions start at $12/month.
2. Headline Studio by CoSchedule
Coschedule’s Headline Studio offers a suite of tools designed to help you write the best headlines possible—to increase the chances someone reads what you publish. It offers a free headline analyzer tool, along with a paid AI-powered headline generator that creates headline options based on your topic, audience, and brand voice.
“I use this tool for everything,” Eriks says. “I think to myself: This seems like a decent email subject line, but could I do better?”
Price: Free limited version; paid versions start at $4/month.
3. Perplexity
Perplexity is an AI search engine that provides summary answers to search queries and provides links to sources, as well as relevant related material. The source links give Erika confidence that the summary of information is correct.
“Perplexity is especially great if you’re concerned about using something like ChatGPT and getting wrong, hallucinated information,” she says.
Erika also uses Perplexity to assess an individual’s perceived authority on a topic—which is especially useful for those who prioritize thought leadership in their content strategy.
“What happens a lot is that people think that they’re doing the right content to be known for something or to be found for something,” says Erika. “Perplexity is a really good way to check if they’re [accomplishing that] with what they’ve been publishing.”
“What I do specifically is: I go to Perplexity and type in ‘who is’ plus a person’s name. If you don’t get the right person, you can expand your search to ‘who is’ that person in their industry. It will show you where it’s looking, and if it’s not finding anything for that person, it means that they’re chasing after the wrong opportunities.”
Price: Free limited version; paid versions start at $20/month.
4. Canva
Creating visual content, whether that’s a logo, photos, animations, or video, is an important and often expensive part of marketing. Canva is easy-to-use design software that simplifies the process.
Its drag-and-drop editor lets you create content of all kinds: social media images, blog cover photos, presentations, videos, websites, landing pages, and more. You can design from scratch, but many users start creating images by tapping into Canva’s wealth of assets, including customizable templates androyalty free images.
Canva also offers collaboration features like centralized brand assets, the ability for team members to comment on designs in real time, and AI tools that generate on-brand copy.
“I’m not a designer, and Canva makes it really simple to create visuals for literally all the things,” Erika says. “I also love that it integrates with other tools I already use. I always recommend looking at a company’s integration partners, because that’s almost always a good indication of how well it’ll work with your process.”
Canva integrates with several content management systems and social media platforms.
Price: Canva’s free tool includes millions of templates and stock images; the Pro version is $120/month, and Teams costs $100/person per month.
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5. Semrush
Semrush is a popular content marketing tool for tracking a brand’s online visibility, with tools for assessing organic search engine optimization and paid search performance. By tracking site metrics with this tool, you can determine your most valuable pages and invest in content areas where you’re seeing success.
Semrush’s SEO tool goes much deeper than Google Search Console. It allows you to conduct in-depth keyword research, showing you Google trends and search volume for certain phrases over time. Semrush also tracks your website data and performance and suggests new keyword ideas so you can outrank the competition.
“I like Semrush because I find it easier than Google Analytics to see your domain authority. It’ll help you set up reporting, and create a really easy-to-parse kind of dashboard or report in your email inbox on a regular schedule,” Erika says about the content marketing tool. “I absolutely use both, but Google Analytics only tells you part of the story. Semrush does a nice job of providing context about all the keywords that are driving people to your content.”
Price: Starts at $140/month.
🌟 Discover how SEO content marketing can increase your search rankings, and learn how creating content can drive traffic and build brand loyalty.
6. Notion
Notion is a project management tool you can use to organize content projects and enable team collaboration across your digital marketing team. Whether you have a full team to create content or simply a lot of projects going on, a centralized tool can help you streamline and organize your materials and your process.
“Notion is good for project management and for capturing stuff that you want to find later and reuse,” Erika says.
Notion’s Projects tool uses AI to streamline workflows, automatically check off completed content marketing tasks, and generate reports. The Notion AI assistant also helps by summarizing notes, calling out takeaways, and creating actionable content like to-do lists.
Price: Free limited version; paid versions start at $10/person per month.
Content marketing tools FAQ
How do you start content marketing?
You can break into content marketing by first studying your audience: What types of content do they consume? Where do they find it? Tailor your content marketing strategy to their needs and favorite platforms, which could involve posting thought leadership content on LinkedIn, sharing memes on Instagram, or publishing free ebooks on your website.
What are content marketing tools used for?
You can use tools for many different aspects of your content marketing efforts: writing copy for blogs and social media posts, creating and editing images, managing workflows, doing keyword research, and tracking analytics.
Does Shopify offer content marketing tools?
Yes, Shopify offers a variety of content marketing tools, including email designs that reflect your brand image, customizable templates for your website, and Shopify Magic, which can generate both written and visual content. Additionally, many top content marketing tools integrate with the Shopify platform, providing you with a seamless experience.
