10 Tools That Can Help You Promote Content Better

Want to sky­rock­et your con­tent promotion?
Keep read­ing to learn about 11 tools you can use to design art­work, tools to help you with your con­tent out­reach strat­e­gy, and some great tools for paid promotion.

Tools to Help You Create Eye-Catching Visuals

Art­work is almost every con­tent marketer’s best friend.
Visu­als have become inte­gral to most mar­keters, with “85 per­cent of them using visu­als in their mar­ket­ing and 73 per­cent plan­ning on increas­ing their use of visu­als,” accord­ing to a Social Media Exam­in­er report,
OK, but how does design­ing a visu­al actu­al­ly affect a mar­ket­ing strategy?
Instead of telling the online world how much does visu­al con­tent mat­ter, folks at Ven­gagge, a plat­form for design­ing info­graph­ics, rolled up their sleeves and sur­veyed 300 dig­i­tal mar­keters to find out how visu­als influ­enced their mar­ket­ing strate­gies in 2016.
Need­less to say, they dis­cov­ered a lot of inter­est­ing details, such as the fact that a mind-bog­gling major­i­ty of mar­keters (71 per­cent) spend only five hours a week on cre­at­ing visuals.
They also find out that DIY tools are still on top of a marketer’s list for cre­at­ing visuals.
The biggest chal­lenge fac­ing mar­keters? Consistency.
Can you relate?
If so, check out these tools.

1. Canva

Can­va is a tool for cre­at­ing sta­t­ic images and GIFs.
What’s so great about it is the fact that it’s 100 per­cent free, unless you want to add some extra paid features.
And this free tool has a lot to offer.
Can­va has a huge vari­ety of free images and photos.
Besides that, it has tons of tem­plates for every social media chan­nel you can think of.
You can also find tem­plates for var­i­ous pro­mo­tion­al mate­r­i­al: e‑books, pre­sen­ta­tions, white papers, resumes – you name it!
I rec­om­mend you to cre­ate your own account and invite your cowork­ers, friends, and oth­er like-mind­ed indi­vid­u­als to share your designs and col­lab­o­rate with one another.
Anoth­er cool fea­ture a lot of peo­ple don’t know exists is an option of adding your own brand iden­ti­ty kit, where you can set up your col­or schemes, as well as upload your logos and fonts.

2. Vengagge

Ven­gagge pro­vides free graph­ic design soft­ware, and is sim­i­lar to Canva
Except here, info­graph­ics are the main focus.
So if you’re on a shoe­string bud­get and want to bright­en your mar­ket­ing plan with some­thing more visu­al­ly appeal­ing, then Ven­gagge is the right tool for you.
Remem­ber the ? Well, turns out that accord­ing to that Ven­gagge sur­vey I men­tioned ear­li­er in this post, 41.5 per­cent of online mar­keters believe info­graph­ics are the most engag­ing type of visual.
Plus, info­graph­ics attract lots of links and shares.
So con­sid­er craft­ing a info­graph­ic using Vengagge.

3. Raw Shorts

Want to demon­strate the core func­tions and ser­vices of your busi­ness through explain­er videos – for free?
Raw­Shorts has you covered.
If you’ve been strug­gling to hire a video pro­duc­er, this soft­ware can seri­ous­ly save you all that effort.
Over­all, videos impact audience’s reach and engage­ment greatly.
Online users spend on aver­age 2.6x more time on pages with video than with­out, and 4x as many cus­tomers would rather watch a video about a prod­uct than read about it.
A lot of brands switched to using video con­tent because it’s a big­ger pri­or­i­ty for Face­book com­pared to reg­u­lar sta­t­ic con­tent. In fact, peo­ple watch 100 mil­lion hours of video on Face­book every day.
Tools to Help Your Out­reach Strategy
If you haven’t planned out an out­reach strat­e­gy in great detail, chances are high that your con­tent won’t get enough social impres­sions and links.
Luck­i­ly, many mar­ket­ing tools can facil­i­tate the research of influ­encers and their con­tact details.
Some are great for cre­at­ing lists of experts for your future com­mu­ni­ca­tion with them, and some help you with oth­er impor­tant parts of an out­reach strategy.

4. Buzzsumo

Buz­zsumo is must-have tool for orga­niz­ing your out­reach strat­e­gy and mak­ing it much smoother.
This tool is most famous for find­ing out what con­tent is pop­u­lar by top­ic or on any website.
Buz­zsumo also has a report that allows you to see who shared sim­i­lar con­tent. That’s how you can find peo­ple for your out­reach list.
Anoth­er great report in Buz­zsumo pro­vides you with the list of influ­encers with­in the top­ic of your con­tent piece.
What you need to do is to sim­ply type in a your key­words (e.g. “con­tent mar­ket­ing”), and the search but­ton will get you a list of those influencers.

5. Hunter.io

Want to reach out to an expert via email but don’t have their email address?
Hunter.io will help you find it.
This tool will let you imme­di­ate­ly locate the email address­es behind the web­site you’re browsing.
When you click on Hunter’s icon (Chrome exten­sion), you get a list of peo­ple with their names, work email address­es, social net­works, job titles, and the pub­lic sources where this data has been collected.
François Grante, a founder at Hunter, says that all the email address­es are returned with a qual­i­ty score that eval­u­ates the con­fi­dence that they are accurate.

6. BuzzStream

In a world of con­tin­u­ous con­tent cre­ation, Buz­zStream helps mar­keters build the rela­tion­ships with influ­encers, mak­ing your out­reach process more orga­nized, espe­cial­ly when it comes to ana­lyz­ing open and response rates.
Buz­zStream makes the time-con­sum­ing job of email out­reach and link build­ing less stressful.
With Buz­zStream, you can eas­i­ly man­age your prospect list, add con­tacts to your cam­paign, and auto­mat­i­cal­ly assem­ble web­site and social metrics.
To add influ­encers to your list and pull up their con­tact infor­ma­tion, you can either upload a list of URLs from CSV, or you can use their Buzzmak­er tool to mark web­sites from your browser.
The tool will show you what­ev­er con­tact infor­ma­tion it can find, and lists the names with their domain author­i­ty, social media fol­low­ing, and oth­er met­rics so that you can eas­i­ly orga­nize the influ­encers in your list.
You can use this tool to keep track of link devel­op­ment projects and check the sta­tus of every cur­rent campaign.
Buz­zStream also lets you fol­low up, track cam­paign progress, and share tasks with your team members.

7. Ninja Outreach

Even though peo­ple often call this “anoth­er blog­ger out­reach tool”, Nin­ja Out­reach stands out from the crowd by pro­vid­ing a plat­form for regard­less of geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion or language.
I like this tool for its per­son­al­iza­tion of tem­plates and email track­ing statistics.
You can search for influ­encers with the use of key­words, and then seg­ment your list using fil­ter tags such as blog­gers, influ­encers, and companies
What’s more, they have an influ­encer data­base from Insta­gram and Twit­ter that you can search through. The tool will pull up con­tact infor­ma­tion for all results you get.

Tools to Improve Paid Content Promotion

Paid pro­mo­tion is a great addi­tion to your organ­ic mar­ket­ing efforts, espe­cial­ly if you know how to cre­ate the right kind of ads and select rel­e­vant audi­ences. It plays an essen­tial role on social media platforms.
Twit­ter, for exam­ple, requires you to cre­ate laser-tar­get­ed audiences.
If you don’t con­sid­er cre­at­ing cus­tom user lists, then pro­mot­ing your con­tent on Twit­ter is a waste of your time and money.
Why?
Because your con­tent will be viewed and shared by thou­sands of bots, rather than actu­al people.
That’s why you have to spend some time man­u­al­ly putting togeth­er a list for Twitter.
Unfor­tu­nate­ly, you can’t do the same trick on Face­book. How­ev­er, there are a cou­ple of tools that will assist you in set­ting up and fine-tun­ing your adver­tis­ing campaigns.

8. FollowerWonk

This tool allows you to cre­ate a cus­tom audi­ence that you can use to boost the per­for­mance of your Twit­ter posts.
The first big advan­tage of Fol­low­er­wonk is that you can export fol­low­ers of any Twit­ter account into a sep­a­rate file and fil­ter out bots.
All of that is pos­si­ble thanks to the fol­low­ing Fol­low­er­Wonk metrics:
Infor­ma­tion about account registration

The num­ber of tweets a spe­cif­ic account has­The per­cent­age of retweets of a cer­tain account (bots don’t post orig­i­nal tweets, they retweet)
Influ­encer score­An­oth­er great fea­ture is the ‘Search bios’ tab. This enables you to select the Twit­ter users who are most like­ly to engage with you and con­tent you share.
Engag­ing with active and influ­en­tial Twit­ter users relat­ed to your indus­try can sig­nif­i­cant­ly improve your con­tent performance.

9. Listpedia

List­pe­dia is a cura­tion tool. It helps you find oth­er peo­ple and accounts on social media on a cer­tain top­ic, in a cer­tain region, men­tion­ing a spe­cif­ic skill.
Here’s how it works: you can cre­ate what­ev­er lists you wish, they become avail­able to any­one to sub­scribe to these lists on Twit­ter or to fol­low those accounts directly.
You can also “Watch” the lists to get noti­fied of new­ly added accounts, upvote a list, export into an Excel file, or, update it and cre­ate your own ver­sion of it.
This solu­tion will lit­er­al­ly export any list you’d like.
Actu­al­ly, if you know any com­pa­ny that has lists of experts or influ­encers with­in your indus­try, then this will save tons of time and effort.
You can sim­ply import those lists with the help of List­pe­dia and then upload them direct­ly to Twit­ter. Voila!

10. CompanionLabs

Set­ting up a Face­book ad cam­paign isn’t child’s play. If you want to be sure that your bid­ding strat­e­gy is strong with­out the need to con­stant­ly tweak things here and there.
That’s where Com­pan­ion­Labs can help you.
This tool focus­es on man­u­al bid­ding opti­miza­tion on Face­book. If this is a ser­vice you’re seek­ing, Com­pan­ion­Labs is def­i­nite­ly a good choice.
The set­up process only takes three min­utes. You just need to plug-in the tool so that it can ana­lyze all your run­ning ads and begin mak­ing improve­ment recommendations.
Com­pan­ion­Labs can also help you with Face­book bid­ding optimization.
If you seek an all-in-one tool that will show you how to start adver­tis­ing smarter on LinkedIn or Twit­ter, then Com­pan­ion­Labs won’t be a good match for you.

11. AdEspresso

If work­ing with Face­book Ads doesn’t excite you much (because of its poor UX), then maybe AdE­spres­so can turn things around for you.
It is yet anoth­er mar­ket­ing tool for a com­pre­hen­sive Face­book adver­tis­ing. But it has an awe­some fea­ture that allows you to check out the most pop­u­lar ads in a cer­tain industry.
This gives you a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn what type of con­tent works best and what kind of pic­ture gets more impressions.

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