Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to attract an audience, build your brand, and ultimately drive sales. Consider these statistics:
- Content marketing generates 3X as many leads as traditional marketing, but costs 62% less (Demand Metric)
- 72% of marketers say content marketing increases engagement and the number of leads (Content Marketing Institute)
- Conversion rates are 6X higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters (Aberdeen Group)
However, creating high-quality, engaging content on a consistent basis is no easy feat. Many content marketers struggle with:
- Producing a variety of content types
- Ensuring content is search engine optimized
- Promoting content to the right channels
- Measuring ROI and tying efforts to business goals
The good news is, you don‘t need a massive budget or team of experts to overcome these challenges. With the help of some key tools—many of which are completely free—you can become a much more effective and efficient content marketer.
In this comprehensive guide, we‘ll walk you through 9 of the best free tools for taking your content marketing to the next level. For each tool, we‘ll explain how it works, highlight key features, and provide actionable tips you can implement today. We‘ll also discuss how to integrate these tools to create a well-rounded content marketing toolkit.
Let‘s dive in!
1. Canva: Easily Create Stunning Visual Content
The human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text. Adding images to your content can help you capture attention, communicate your message more effectively, and increase engagement.
Consider these eye-opening visual content statistics:
- Articles with images get 94% more views than those without (Skyword)
- Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without (BuzzSumo)
- Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images (Buffer)
While you may not have the budget to hire a graphic designer for every piece of content, Canva makes it easy to create professional-looking images yourself.
Getting started with Canva is simple. Here‘s a quick step-by-step:
- Sign up for a free account at canva.com
- Choose a template based on the type of image you want to create (social media post, banner, infographic, etc.)
- Customize the template with your own text, colors, and graphics
- Download your finished design as a JPG or PNG
Canva offers an extensive library of templates, icons, illustrations, and stock photos to work with (many of which are free, others cost $1). You can also upload your own images and logos to incorporate into your designs.
The drag-and-drop interface is intuitive, even if you have zero graphic design experience. Canva will automatically suggest complementary colors and fonts, or you can use your brand‘s style guide for a customized look.
Pro Tip: Create a series of templates with your logo, brand colors, and other elements you use frequently. This will save you time and ensure visual consistency across your content.
With Canva, there‘s no need to wrestle with complicated software like Photoshop. You can whip up stunning images in a matter of minutes and download them in web-ready formats.
2. Evernote: Capture and Organize Content Ideas
The most successful content marketers have a strategic plan and publishing schedule. But that doesn‘t mean you should ignore spontaneous moments of inspiration. Capturing ideas when they strike is key to keeping your content pipeline full and preventing creative burnout.
This is where Evernote shines. Evernote is a cross-platform app that allows you to quickly capture notes, images, and audio across your devices. Everything is synced to the cloud, so you can access your ideas anytime, anywhere.
Here are a few ways content marketers can use Evernote:
- Jot down blog post ideas as they come to you
- Snap photos of whiteboard brainstorming sessions
- Record interviews or webinars for later reference
- Clip articles or studies to cite in your content
- Create to-do lists for your content calendar
With Evernote‘s notebook system, you can keep your ideas organized by topic, campaign, or content type. Use tags to make notes even easier to find later. You can search your notes by keyword, and Evernote will even recognize text inside images.
Evernote also makes it easy to share notes and collaborate with your team. You can share individual notes or entire notebooks, and work together in real-time with the Work Chat feature.
The free version of Evernote includes all the core features you need to streamline your ideation process:
- Sync across 2 devices
- 60MB monthly upload limit
- 25MB maximum note size
- Clip web pages and images
- Search for text inside images
- Share and discuss notes
Pro Tip: Use the Web Clipper browser extension to save articles, screenshots, and even simplified versions of webpages directly to Evernote.
With all your ideas in one central location, you‘ll never waste time scrambling to recall that brilliant blog post title or statistic you want to reference. Evernote can help you become a more organized and productive content marketer.
3. Grammarly: Polish Your Writing
No matter how compelling your ideas are, sloppy writing can undermine your credibility and authority. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors make your content look unprofessional and can turn readers away.
In one study, 59% of UK adults said they would not use a company that had obvious grammatical or spelling mistakes on its website or marketing material. Can you afford to alienate more than half of your potential customers?
Grammarly is a writing assistant that can help you catch and correct mistakes before you hit publish. It scans your text for errors and provides suggestions for improvement, which you can accept with a single click.
Grammarly looks for issues like:
- Misspellings
- Incorrect verb forms
- Misplaced or missing punctuation
- Run-on sentences
- Wordiness
- Unclear antecedents
In addition to catching technical mistakes, Grammarly also provides suggestions for improving the clarity, engagement, and delivery of your writing. It can help you adjust your tone to sound more confident, friendly, or formal depending on your audience.
Grammarly offers a free browser extension that integrates with wherever you write—Gmail, social media, your CMS, and more. There are also desktop apps for Windows and Mac, and a mobile keyboard for on-the-go writing.
Pro Tip: Run your headlines through Grammarly to ensure they are error-free and conversational. Since headlines are often the first thing potential readers see, it‘s critical to make a good first impression!
While Grammarly isn‘t a substitute for human editing, it can help you clean up your writing and communicate more effectively. With the confidence that your content is error-free, you can focus on the more strategic aspects of content marketing.
4. Answer the Public: Find the Questions Your Audience is Asking
To create content that resonates, you need to understand what your audience cares about and the language they use to describe their problems. Keyword research is essential, but it can sometimes feel disconnected from real human questions.
Enter Answer the Public—a free visual keyword research tool that maps out the questions and queries people are searching around a given topic. Simply enter a keyword, and Answer the Public will generate a spider diagram of related questions, prepositions, and comparisons.
For example, if you search for [content marketing], you‘ll see questions like:
- What are the benefits of content marketing?
- How to measure content marketing ROI?
- Where to publish content marketing?
- Content marketing vs. social media marketing
These are the types of questions your target audience is likely typing into Google. By addressing them in your content, you can attract organic search traffic and establish your brand as a trusted resource.
The questions in Answer the Public are pulled from autocomplete data—the predictions that appear when you start typing a query into Google. This data reflects real searches and provides a window into the minds of your potential customers.
Pro Tip: Use Answer the Public results to inspire new blog post ideas, flesh out your content calendar, and structure your posts. You can even use the questions verbatim as H2s or H3s to optimize your content for featured snippets.
By aligning your content with the questions your audience is asking, you‘ll be more likely to rank well in search results and drive qualified traffic to your site. Remember—the best content doesn‘t just provide information, it provides solutions.
5. BuzzSumo: Analyze Top-Performing Content
Want to see what content is generating the most buzz in your industry? BuzzSumo is a powerful tool for analyzing the most popular content by topic, author, or domain.
Simply enter a keyword or phrase, and BuzzSumo will show you the most shared articles across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit. You can filter results by date range, content type (article, infographic, video, etc.), word count, language, and more.
For each piece of content, you can see key metrics like:
- Total engagements across platforms
- Number of backlinks
- Estimated monthly visits
- Trending score (how quickly engagements are increasing)
BuzzSumo also shows you the top sharers—the influencers and thought leaders who are amplifying content in your space. This can help you identify potential partners for co-marketing campaigns or guest blogging.
How to Use BuzzSumo for Content Ideation:
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Analyze the top content for your target keywords. What topics and angles resonate with your audience? Can you put a new spin on a popular post?
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Look for content gaps. Are there any topics that aren‘t well-covered in the top results? These could be opportunities to differentiate your content.
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Study the characteristics of viral content. How long are the top posts? What formats do they use? What kind of headlines do they have? Use these insights to optimize your own content for shareability.
While you should never copy someone else‘s content, seeing what has performed well in the past can help spark new ideas and steer you in the right direction. Aim to build upon the best practices you identify to create something even more valuable for your audience.
6. Google Analytics: Measure Your Content‘s Impact
You put a ton of time and effort into creating great content—but is it actually delivering results for your business? The only way to know for sure is to measure your content‘s performance.
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that can help you track key metrics like:
- Pageviews
- Unique visitors
- Bounce rate
- Time on page
- Traffic sources
- Conversions
By seeing which pages get the most traffic, how long visitors stay, and what actions they take, you can start to connect the dots between your content marketing efforts and tangible business outcomes.
For example, let‘s say you notice a spike in organic traffic to a particular blog post. Upon further investigation, you see that the post is ranking on the first page of Google for a high-volume keyword. This insight could prompt you to update and optimize the post to drive even more traffic.
Or maybe you find that while your blog posts are getting a decent amount of traffic, the bounce rate is high and visitors aren‘t converting into leads or customers. This could indicate that you need to work on creating more compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) or adjusting your content strategy to align with your sales funnel.
Pro Tip: Set up goals in Google Analytics to track specific actions you want visitors to take, like signing up for your email list or requesting a demo. This will give you a clearer picture of how your content is driving business results.
Google Analytics can be overwhelming, especially for beginners. Start by focusing on a few key metrics that are most relevant to your business goals. Over time, you can dive deeper into the data to uncover more actionable insights.
Creating Your Content Marketing Toolkit
With so many great free tools available, it can be tempting to try them all at once. However, the key to success is choosing the right tools for your specific needs and integrating them into a cohesive workflow.
As you‘re getting started, focus on addressing your biggest pain points first. For example:
- If you struggle with creating visuals, start with Canva
- If you‘re always forgetting your content ideas, try Evernote
- If you‘re not sure what topics to cover, use Answer the Public
As you become more comfortable with each tool, you can start to explore more advanced features and add new tools to your arsenal. The goal is to build a toolkit that supports and streamlines your content creation process from start to finish.
Here‘s an example of how you might use these free tools together:
- Use Answer the Public to generate content ideas based on real user queries
- Capture your ideas and outline your post in Evernote
- Write your draft in Google Docs or your CMS, using Grammarly to catch any errors
- Create custom images for your post in Canva
- Publish your post and promote it on social media, using Bitly to track clicks
- Measure your post‘s performance in Google Analytics and BuzzSumo
Over time, you may find that you outgrow some of these free tools and need more robust features. At that point, you can evaluate whether it‘s worth investing in paid tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or CoSchedule.
But remember—no tool is a magic bullet. The most important thing is to focus on creating high-quality, user-focused content that aligns with your business goals. Tools should enhance and support your efforts, not replace the need for creativity, strategic thinking, and hard work.
Conclusion
Content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes time, patience, and a commitment to continuous improvement. But with the right tools and tactics, you can work smarter, not harder, and start seeing real results from your efforts.
The 9 free tools we covered in this guide can help you:
- Create more visually appealing content
- Come up with relevant, targeted content ideas
- Improve the quality and clarity of your writing
- Promote your content more effectively
- Measure and optimize your content‘s performance
Best of all, you can start using these tools today without blowing your budget. So what are you waiting for?
If you‘re feeling overwhelmed, start small. Pick one tool that addresses your biggest challenge and commit to using it for your next piece of content. As you build momentum and confidence, you can add more tools to your workflow.
Remember, the goal isn‘t to be perfect—it‘s to make consistent progress. By investing in your content marketing skills and toolkit, you‘re setting yourself up for long-term success.
Now go forth and create some killer content!
