Best content marketing tools of 2022

The best content marketing tools, apps, and software make it easier to produce engaging content for converting website visitors into customers.

Content marketing is about engaging consumers with your brand and empathising with their pain points (in relation to your product/service as a solution) via content mediums including business blogs, videos, podcasts, OOH and digital advertising, and other mediums.

Once your audience is engaged, you can empathise and relate to them, positioning your own services as a solution they can benefit from. This type of soft selling coes across organically, and can help in growing visibility of your business. Strong content marketing consists of: communicating your brand, a call to action, and providing unique selling points to customers, using a combination of publishing tools, apps, or software.

Whether it’s business to business (B2B) or business to consumer (B2C), the content of your marketing needs to be clear and targeted.

In the old days this could be as simple as a slogan on a poster, but these days with the profusion of digital and social media there are so many different ways to connect with a buying audience. There is no longer a best way to reach an audience, simply many different ones, all with varying degrees of targeting, action, and success.

Strong articles and other features can pre-sell your audience to buy into your brand, product range, or a particular product, especially if targeted at an already receptive audience.

The result is that modern marketing needs a good content marketing strategy, and that means being able to play to different audiences with different media, with different messages properly targeted toward them.

Here therefore are the best in content marketing tools, for helping get your message out there.

• Building your website? We’ve highlighted the best CMS.

(Image credit: Hubspot)

Hubspot Marketing Hub is a platform that provides a range of tools for content management, sales and marketing, and social media advertising. Hubspot goes way beyond simply setting up a website and editing its content, as much as delivering a wide-ranging toolkit to help improve conversions.

It does this by offering options for split testing, content hosting, communications within a sales team and with customers, along with goals and targets that can be tracked using Hubspot’s analytics software.

There are also a number of additional integrations available such as for Salesforce, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365.

All in all, Hubspot probably isn’t the best at any individual feature that it offers, but the comprehensive set that it does offer makes it a clear market leader, and the best at what it does.

Even better, there’s a free tier for trying out Hubspot.

(Image credit: Uberflip)

Producing content to attract business is one thing, doing it in an orderly manner to reach customers at every stage of the buying journey is another altogether – and that’s what Uberflip aims to do.

Describing itself as ‘a content experience platform’, Uberflip aggregates all your content – from blogs and eBooks to videos, whitepapers and more – so you can manage and optimize a tailored content journey for clients.

A key component is the ability to create content hubs, relevant to specific topics and audiences, which subsequently helps you distribute content faster and accelerate lead generation.

To monitor and adapt your content marketing process, an analytics engine is built into the platform, but if you’re struggling to draw insights, Uberflip offers a wide range of useful tips and tricks to support your campaign. What’s more, the service’s customer support team is widely praised, should you run into any problems along the way.

(Image credit: Adobe)

Adobe Marketing Cloud aims to provide a single end-to-end marketing platform, by providing the ability to manage multiple channels, campaigns, and personalization from a single platform, which controls four key software products.

The Experience Manager serves as a central content manager, allowing you to create and manage the content you need for marketing, whether in the form of images or text. Adobe Campaign provides a single place to automate ads, email, and campaigns, underpinned by analytics.

Adobe Target allows for personalization with marketing campaigns, using machine learning to test and optimize content across different channels. And Marketo Engage aims to help manage lead management as well as provide cross-sell and account management for existing customers to increase sales prospects.

When it comes to big name businesses, the Adobe Marketing Platform is regarded as a leader for enterprises. It’s data-centric service helps you track your online marketing and website performance, as well as delivering search engine results from third-party sources.

(Image credit: Populr)

With speed and efficiency at its core, Populr challenges you to ‘create a page for anything in 5 minutes’. The service aims to empower marketing and sales teams with a toolkit that assembles web pages with the same ease as PowerPoint slides, removing the obligation of using developers.

Populr supplies a host of web template options to give a professional feel without the need to use a designer, while the automatic layout engine enables users to easily drag and drop items onto their own customized web pages.

The platform then enables you distribute your assets via its share options – covering social media, email and more – while engagement trackers and analytics tools help you measure and refine your content.

Other handy features include collaboration options so multiple users can edit a web page, customized branding allowing the easy upload of logos and fonts, plus password protection and encryption for added security.

Even better is that there’s a free tier you can use to experiment with the service and see how it fits your needs. Although there is a 12MB document limit, you do get full access to the drag and drop page builder, as well as collaboration and sharing tools.

(Image credit: Ion Interactive)

Ion Interactive gives marketers a digital toolkit for getting their content online in a variety of formats. Think you need a team of developers every time you want to produce a new web page? Think again, as using Ion takes the back end out the equation.

Functioning as a kind of souped-up, user-friendly CMS (content management system), Ion offers up a host of customizable web page templates if you don’t want to start from scratch, plus data-based content formats like calculators, assessments, report cards, quizzes, interactive infographics, look-books, white papers and more.

Linking up with Ion also brings customized training and ongoing guidance from a dedicated customer services team, as well as best-practise webinars and access to support videos and articles to help build the expertise within your team. The package you adopt is scalable too, so if the content marketing remit expands and your organization takes to Ion well, you can easily expand your service.

For such a feature-rich platform, the reporting and analytics tools are perhaps lacking a little depth, but it’s otherwise difficult to find pitfalls. You can get a quote on pricing via the link below.

Other content marketing tools, apps, and software to consider

Widen’s digital asset management (DAM) allows you to consolidate digital articles, images, videos and creative files into a central content hub, helping organizations analyse and adjust their digital content from anywhere around the world.

Influitive helps you leverage the power of influencers and supporters. It’s AdvocateHub is a marketing platform that helps you build relationships with advocates and create content through them to connect with customers.

Instapage arms marketers with a landing page builder, publishing tools, plus an optimization & analytics system to deliver personalized content to their customers. The landing pages, according to the platform, have scored an average conversion rate of over 22%.

Lucidpress enables your team to centralize, create, and share content. From proposals and presentations to flyers and brochures, Lucidress helps sales and marketing staff to stay unified and on brand with their communications.