There are more than 8,000 marketing technology (martech) solutions on the market today according to Chief Marketing Technologist Blog. Who has the time to try even a fraction of the tools depicted in this eyesore of a “supergraphic”? To cut through the clutter, here are my top picks focusing on content auditing, analysis, ideation, writing and imagery.
- Content Auditing: Screaming Frog
Improve onsite SEO and build smarter content marketing strategies by auditing where you are today. However, manually identifying site URLs can be a painstaking process. Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider website crawler extracts data to help surface broken links, audit redirects, discover duplicate content and more. Even better, you can download and crawl 500 URLs at no cost. - Analysis: SEMrush
The SEMrush platform provides extensive SEO, PPC, content, social media and competitive data to help you hone your content strategy. Its Content Marketing Platform provides insights that can help you identify, create and improve content. SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant, which reviews content for originality and suggests optimizations, is an essential Google Docs add-on. - Ideation: Answer the Public
Want to peek inside your customers’ minds to understand what topics they are searching for? Answer the Public uses search data to map out the phrases and questions people are asking about relevant to a keyword. This is a great way to think of new topics, while addressing your audiences’ real needs with relevant content. - Writing: Hemingway Editor
Mark Twain once famously wrote, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Writing succinctly is hard. B2B technology content creators face this each day when translating technical language into something that resonates with potential customers. While the Hemingway Editor’s interface doesn’t look fancy, it’s a great tool to help you sharpen your copy—whether it’s a blog post, landing page, social media copy or video content. - Imagery: Unsplash
No blog is complete without an eye-catching image, but stock photography from Getty, iStock and other services can get pricey. I like Unsplash because it has over two million free images from its community of over 200,000+ photographers around the world. You can’t beat the price, but also don’t be stingy about giving credit to the contributor (like I did below for this blog post!).
Learn more about Merritt Group’s Content Marketing services and how to optimize content using the right strategies.
Photo by Louis Hansel @shotsoflouis on Unsplash
