For any marketer, the task of being top of their marketing activity is a big challenge. The ever competitive market is no longer forgiving to those who show lapse in their approach. One simple mistake can cost you a lot of monies.

Bigger organizations can afford to hire an army of marketers to manage their day to day marketing operations. But what about the small players or solopreneurs out there?

Thankfully, there are a lot of tools available, some for free and some are paid, which can offer you a lot of bite power. This means you spend less and less time doing grunt work and spend more time doing research and coming up with a strategy.

Because at the end of the day, it is going to be your strategy which will position your business ahead of the competition.

In the longer run, it is your content that’s going to bring you recurring business and establish you as a brand. And if you can’t keep your pace with producing quality content then you are setting yourself up for failure.

We can divide the tools into five different categories based their usage in four different stages of the content lifecycle. That is Content Audit, Content Creation, Content Distribution/Syndication, Content Measurement, Content Repurpose. In this blog we will only look at the Content Audit, Automation and Social Media aspects.

Content Audit

In order to know where you stand in terms of your content health, you need to first do a content audit. This exercise is very important to find out where are the areas that are doing good and where you need to plug in the holes. But doing an audit is a lot easier said than done. It requires a lot of collaborative effort in the form of coordination and analysis.

Now, what if you can automate the entire process using an automation tool. Given below are some of the tools which you can use to launch an audit of your content. We suggest that you try out the following two tools which can let you audit your content. Unlike most of the content auditing tools, these tools show you how to track the actual content.

This is an automated content auditing tool which can let you track your already published work all over the web and show you how to turn the non-performing content into result generating content.

Like Blaze, this tool can easily scan through your content inventory and tell you which are the areas that need improvement. The best feature of this tool is that it will also capture a screenshot of a particular page to pinpoint the crawled content page.

Marketing Automation

Lately, there have been new tools coming up in the marketing automation segment which can make your life a lot easier. We are going to list down a few of them and explain a little bit on how the tools can work wonders for you.

This tool can easily help you manage leads, email marketing, consumer marketing, customer base marketing, mobile marketing. It gives you the option to try the platform for free before taking a call whether to go ahead with it.

Like Marketo, Pardot offers integration with CRM, Lead management, Lead Scoring, ROI reporting, and email marketing. This tool can be instrumental in shortening of the Sales cycle. If you choose a higher plan, the platform offers features like advanced email analytics, email rendering preview, and spam analysis.

The prime objective of this tool is to convert all the outbound leads into inbound leads. The higher paid plans (Pro and Enterprise) offers Salesforce integration, smart content, marketing automation, goal-based lead nurturing, custom workflows, attribution report, user roles, A/B testing for CTAs and Emails. Owing to its diverse offering, HubSpot is ideal for Content Marketing.

Other honorable mentions are Zapier, Eloqua, Act-On.

Social Media

With the ever-increasing intensity of social media in the overall marketing scheme, a marketer has to be always on top of the things and will not able to do everything on its own. It is quite obvious that a lot of things should be automated in order to save time for other important things like strategy, content research, and campaigns. Here’s the list of best social media tools that can become a crucial arsenal in your marketing armor.

As the name suggests this is an excellent tool for you to start delivering content on all your social media channels without getting into too much into manual scheduling of posts and executing repetitive tasks. The platform offers features like Auto Hashtags, Category Manager, RSS feed integration, EverQueue which allows you to automate your post scheduling, research, and adhering to your content timeline. The best part is you can get started with their Basic plan which is absolutely for free!

This tool is not only useful to automate social media posting but it has a much larger application for the Internet of Things (IoT) like smart devices like smartwatches, Alexa, House Lights, among others. IFTTT’s environment offers more than 600 apps which allows you to formulate a chain of automated steps based on a predefined trigger point. For example, you can post the same picture on all your social media channels by choosing one of the IFTTT apps. The best thing about IFTTT is that you can avail these apps for absolutely free! You can also partner with IFTTT to come up with your own apps for your customers. You should definitely check out their website and browse for all the cool apps they have created.

Buffer has been there for a while and has come a long way since its early days. Since it helps you automate sharing on social media, it will also suggest you content that you often like to share or the current trending content related to your domain. Additionally, it offers integration with many third-party apps like Feedly, Mention, and others. It also has inbuilt analytics feature to ascertain the success of your ongoing social media campaign. You can also use tracking feature to keep a track on all your campaigns and repurpose the old content by adding them again in the content queue.

This blog will continue to grow as and when we come across different functions within the eCommerce marketing domain and has the potential to increase the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. Stay tuned.