Top Content Marketing Tools of the Trade

Every business discipline has its own unique tools that help people accomplish tasks more efficiently and measure their progress more accurately.

For marketers like myself, there are a plethora of Web-based services and crafty new tools that help our content marketing and social media programs thrive. Whether it’s a tool that automatically optimizes your corporate blogs and content for SEO or an online platform that allows you to stay connected to your followers, each one serves a very valuable purpose.

So which content marketing tools are my favorite?

There are several that I’ve come to rely on, but there are a handful that have become critical to managing our everyday operation. At OpenView, they’ve helped us achieve our content marketing goals and measure our content’s impact in the marketplace.

So without further ado, here are the content marketing tools I can’t live without:

PitchEngine

Let’s face it: the days of boring, plain and contrite press releases are dead. If you want people to read about your exciting product release or your company’s newest offering, you need to try harder to get their attention.

PitchEngine is a great service that allows you to create and send social media releases to your networks, and personalize them with images, videos, bullet points, and graphics. Brandon Uttley provides a great slideshow on how PR has changed and why services like PitchEngine will be critical in the future.

PRWeb/Vocus

In the same way that PitchEngine helps companies create social media releases, PRWeb/Vocus is a tool that helps you distribute news releases to more traditional media outlets. The combined tools also submit releases to Google and Yahoo news services, along with industry blogs and influencers.

WordPress

At OpenView, we use WordPress as the foundation of all of our sites. It provides a super-customizable content management system that allows us to organize, edit, schedule, and publish a variety of content to the site.

Kevin Hendricks describes WordPress’s value quite simply: it’s free, it’s easy, and it packs a lot of punch. He also dives into WordPress’s key features a bit more.

Google Alerts

Using Google Alerts is a great method for finding and following new resources on any topic. But it’s also a must-have tool for tracking what’s being said about your company, brand, people, and products or services.

Google Analytics

For smaller, expansion stage companies, a free tool like Google Analytics can be life-changing. It offers a feature-rich platform to help marketers gain insight into all aspects of their content marketing and social media efforts.

The folks at Marcel Media provide a quick Google Analytics how-to, drawing on anecdotes from their own experience using the tool with social media conversion tracking.

CoTweet

Mashable’s Christina Warren agrees with me on this one. CoTweet is a great social media tool for helping companies stay connected with their followers.

As Warren points out, CoTweet brands itself as a Twitter CRM tool. There have been major brands like Ford and JetBlue that have taken advantage of its usefulness, but it still has value for smaller growth stage companies (or the venture capital firms that invest in them!). The service is free, but there’s an enterprise version for major corporations that can cost more than $1,500 per month.

Not familiar with CoTweet? No problem. David Turnbull at TwiTip explains why businesses should use the service and offers tips for getting started.

ExactTarget

Email marketing is still a big piece of any good content marketing strategy, and ExactTarget helps OpenView stay connected with our newsletter and blog subscribers.

And for those that think email marketing is losing relevance, think again. According to research, 93 percent of consumers continue to willingly receive emails from companies and sign up for newsletters that prove their value. ExactTarget has helped major corporations and small businesses alike reach targeted groups of customers with on-demand email marketing solutions that do just that.

So there you go. Those are the must-have tools that have helped us propel OpenView’s content marketing and social media strategy forward. But there are plenty of other services out there.

What are your favorite content marketing tools?

Amanda Maksymiw is a mar­ket­ing asso­ciate at Open­View Labs, respon­si­ble for con­tent cre­ation and strat­egy for Open­View and its port­fo­lio com­pa­nies. You can fol­low her on Twit­ter @AmandaMaks.