If your goal this year is to use cutting-edge technology to optimize your content marketing and connect with audiences, now’s the time to make it a reality. But even as e-commerce booms and hours spent behind the screen continue to skyrocket, it can still feel like a small army is required to help your content cut through the noise. Here’s the good news: with the right content marketing tools, making your brand shine is a little more doable.
Work smarter with these platforms in the new year.
Zubtitle
To mute, or not to mute? Today, as every website’s “pivot to video” keeps moving at full force, the question is more relevant than ever.
Marketers need a breadth of ways to connect through video content while striving to be as inclusive as possible, especially given that nearly 85% of total video viewership on Facebook is done on mute. One option is Zubtitle, a transcription software company that can generate accurate captions in minutes. When time is of the essence, automatic transcription can save you hours of work without sacrificing a meaningful audience segment.
BuzzStream
So many Excel sheets, so little time.
When it comes to centralizing your media planning and outreach, BuzzStream makes things a little simpler. In one database, BuzzStream users can keep topic-relevant profiles, sites, and bloggers in one space, while also creating lists dedicated to individual projects. This eliminates the need to sift back through endless tabs and sheets to find the right resource when campaigns overlap.
BuzzStream also lends a hand in finding the balance between volume and the human touch. The software lets you send automated, personalized emails based on correspondence history with a contact and their social media posts—that’s one way to avoid getting lost in a sea of boilerplate messages that really hope to find you well.
Later
According to a study from Edelman, nearly 40% of consumers are “unlikely to become emotionally attached to a brand unless they interact and communicate with it on social media.” Even as new platforms spring up and others fall out of favor—Clubhouse, for example, managed to do both in a single year—social media continues to drive brand awareness and customer engagement.
For the savvy digital marketer, that means a lot of posts, and even more planning. Later, a scheduling platform, lets users plan posts for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Pinterest without toggling between each site and planning content separately. It also offers analytics like “best time to post” by measuring when audiences are most likely to engage with content—an especially helpful tool as marketers navigate changing algorithms and the return to a chronological Instagram grid.
SentiOne
Humanizing your content pays dividends. A survey from Microsoft revealed that 90% of respondents list customer service as a driving factor of brand loyalty. Still, as companies scale and queries arrive across an array of mediums, it’s no small task to find the balance between responsiveness and personalization.
That’s where SentiOne, an AI-powered social listening and customer service automation tool, comes in. The software integrates social profiles into one online management tool to monitor mentions and can provide instant, automated responses to queries with text and voice bots. When delayed responses can mean lost connections, it’s worth exploring new ways to keep up.
Google Analytics
Some tools never go out of style. Google Analytics is still a benchmark for digital marketing insights, providing reliable metrics like bounce rate, time spent on each page, and illustrating what content is driving conversions.
Moving into 2022, utilizing Google Analytics will be crucial to understand the “before and after” of a website’s performance amid the phase-out of third-party cookies. As Google and other search engines transition to first-party data, marketers can observe changes in sites’ performance and get a better sense of how new traffic is acquired as the rules shift.
Hotjar
To get down to the details of how, exactly, users interact with content on a website, Hotjar is a natural complement to Google Analytics. While Google Analytics can analyze data like which pages receive the most visits and identify traffic sources that fuel conversions, Hotjar goes a step further. The platform can collect in-the-moment feedback and record sessions to uncover how visitors engage with web content and highlight any broken features or bugs holding them back. Hotjar also uses a ‘heatmap’ visualization tool to show aggregate user behavior, demonstrating where visitors click and scroll the most and what page elements are most important.
MailChimp
Email marketing and the newsletter format are having something of a renaissance. And with an average return on investment (ROI) of $36 for every dollar spent, it’s no surprise that it’s hugely popular among content marketers.
How can you do it right? Start with an email marketing platform that keeps things simple and gives you a full slate of options.
There’s a reason Mailchimp continues to be a favorite choice for email campaigns. Its plans are flexible while allowing digital marketers to design custom templates, develop localized campaigns, and manage audience data in one centralized interface.
Ahrefs
The power of SEO is undeniable. And even if unlocking the true secrets of Google results rankings is a lofty goal for the new year, you can still find ways to let your content make waves and reach new audiences with the right SEO tools.
Ahrefs is an SEO toolset preferred by many marketers for its user interface and its wide-ranging keyword recommendations, which include YouTube and Amazon data for omnichannel marketing. It also has its own keyword research function, Content Explorer, and can offer visualizations of other metrics like domain rating, traffic potential, and website authority.
It’s evident that some trends—such as personalized content and video-first marketing campaigns—are here for the long haul while others seem destined to fade away overnight. Through utilizing tools that help you understand what content truly resonates, you can approach the new marketing landscape of 2022 without the fear of getting left in the past.
