I am sure that you, a person interested in content marketing, has read tens, if not hundreds of blog posts about content marketing strategies and used several tools to aid with the generation of content ideas.
Yes? Well, hopefully you will have an interest in the tools that I would like to bring to your attention.
At Neil Walker Digital Group, what usually happens when we get creative is that we create internal tools to improve our own workflow and then some of these get turned into products that we sell, or into tools that we release on to the web, such as the three in this post.
Each of these tools is used by our own content marketing team to produce real content for clients. We are opening them up to the public to see if they find them useful too.
Content marketing tool #1
I’ll jump straight into the first tool, which is a content marketing ideas generator, and does “exactly what it says on the tin”, as we say in the UK.
Here is a rather boring screenshot of the tool:
A very simple interface lets you enter a target audience (let’s say SEOs), which is optional and a mandatory field which asks you to enter what your content is about (let’s say content marketing strategies). That’s all there is to running the tool!
The output of the tool will look something like this:
As you can see, and being as candid as possible, there are some great ideas and also some ‘stinkers’ (hey, at least we are honest!). But this is to be expected, and whilst there is an embarrassing, awful idea every so often, there are also some really great ideas that have surprised even ourselves. You can run the tool over and over. There are potentially 231,000 combinations of ideas to be spit out by the tool, so hopefully there is an idea in there for every content marketeer on the planet.
Here is a link to the content marketing ideas generator tool.
Content marketing tool #2
The second tool is a content marketing assessment tool. This tool requires honest input from the user, and has a longer form than we ever like to create, but such is the need for a series of honest answers, that we couldn’t get away from it.
By entering several answers about your current content marketing strategy and tactics, we calculate just how much of your potential audience is seeing the efforts of your content marketing output. It is not always nice reading, we have to say.
Another boring screenshot of a section of the input form for the content marketing assessment tool:
After filling out the form (honestly – you are only cheating yourself if you don’t), you are shown a graph which calculates just how far your efforts will be seen, compared to the total audience that could be receiving your work. A screenshot is probably best at this point:
What we have found, especially with potential clients, is that despite what you think, you are probably producing nowhere near enough content to be the leader in your industry.
We find that the tool is a great wake up call, especially to marketing managers and company owners. Even ourselves, who we think have worked extremely hard at content marketing strategies, have had to take a big gulp and realise that we need to constantly improve and be consistent with each part of the content and outreach mix. Just don’t blame us for what this tool shows you!
Here is a link to the content marketing assessment tool.
Content marketing tool #3
This tool, the competitor content tool, is a bit different than the other two mentioned above, but useful just the same – perhaps the most useful of the three to some.
The tool works like this…you want to write an article about ‘xyz’ and of course, you want to write it so that it reads well, but it also ranks well. For that to happen, the use of a range of keywords and phrases is a major part of making this happen. For example, you wont get to the top of Google if you write an article about ‘SEO‘, without ever using the phrase ‘link building’.
So this tool was created to show you what the leading webpages for a particular phrase are writing about. Sounds boring so far, but it is far from it.
To use the tool, enter the URLs of up to 10 web pages that are ranking well for a particular subject matter.
Here is a screenshot of the input page for the tool (I have included some example URLs):
As you can see, using the form is very simple, but what gets produced in the output is very useful indeed. The tool now shows the most common words used across the pages that you selected. Thrown out are the usual stop words such as ‘it’, ‘the,’then’ and so on.
There are tools that already do this, I hear you cry, and yes, there are, but this tool has one difference to most and that is the related words that are shown below the 10 most popular words. Have a look at the screenshot here to see what I mean:
But why are these important? Well, in my experience, much of the content on the web is written not by experts, but semi-experts. In the majority of cases, this is ok, but one common trait that people that write content have is that they can be prone to ‘content padding’ just to reach a set number of words.
So the tool creates not just a set of keywords, but a range of related words to the major keywords to allow for better content. Let’s try to explain, ‘cheese’
Cheese is a dairy product that is produced from milk and a staple, solid food that gives nourishment to humans.
As you can tell, I am no content writer, but the words in bold in the above sentence were taken directly from the words that the tool gave me. Perhaps I would have used just a few, rather than seven in that one sentence. Now, imagine that across a 2000-word article. It would most definitely help you to rank better than content that is padded and mentions just a few, main keywords throughout.
Here is a link to the competitor content tool.
Summary
So there you have it, three new tools that relate to content marketing. I sincerely hope that you find one, two or all three informative and useful for your own business’ content marketing efforts. If you have any suggestions for the tools, please tweet us at @ov_group.