This article first appeared on Mention.
A recent study shows that 86 percent of all B2B marketers use content marketing strategies to gain exposure and ultimately generate revenue, but only 38 percent believe they are effective at it. Testing a few different tools and strategies allows you to figure out what works best for your organization.
I’ve been lucky enough to try a lot of different tools. Below are some of my favorite content promotion tools and resources that can help get you off on the right foot.
5 best content promotion tools
There are a number of tools you can use to promote your content and connect with more audiences. Here are five of my favorites:
Tool #1: Buzzsumo
The <3 of EU tech
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
This platform allows you to track your content’s performance online, as well as your competitors’. You can use the dashboard to track specific URLs and how their content performs over time. Buzzsumo also allows users to set alerts for specific keyboards, authors, or URLs. The platform is easy to use and fairly straightforward, which makes it a good platform for any marketer or writer.
Cost: Free version with limited uses. Premium versions from $99 for a single account to $499+ for an enterprise account.
Tool #2: CoSchedule
This tool integrates with your WordPress blog and allows you to see your calendar for social media and blogging content, all in one place. CoSchedule also lets you communicate with your team, set tasks and guidelines, and make editorial planning as easy as possible. Having this is all in one place can help make your promotional strategy more effective.
Cost: $10 per month, per blog. Unlimited users and social media accounts.
Tool #3: Mention
Mention allows you to monitor what others are saying about you online. It tracks mentions across 42 languages and multiple platforms, including social media, forums, websites, and more. You can also generate analytics reports of the mentions, which make it extremely effective for sharing with clients or among colleagues. Knowing what gets talked about most online can help you craft future content.
Cost: From $29 for three users, three alerts, and 3,000 mentions to $299+ for a company account.
Tool #4: Open Site Explorer
This tool allows you to see who has been linking to your content. It also allows you to view that information for any URL. According to Neil Patel of KISSmetrics, this SEO tool is genius for promoting your content. You can look at who is sharing content from popular blogs and target them with your content. Share your content with them on social media; reach out for an interview for your site; and comment on their own content in order to get to know them.
Cost: Free to use for a few number of searches per day; $99-$599 monthly for various levels that also include access to the entire Moz Pro toolset.
Tool #5: Zemanta
Zemeta is a content distribution network that focuses on the premise that content is more engaging than banner or text ads. They work with content sharing networks such as Outbrain, AOL, and Yahoo! to share your content across external platforms that may have much higher audiences and networks to increase your content’s visibility.
Cost: Varies depending on your budget.
5 best content promotion resources to study
There are also a lot of great articles and resources that can help you become a content promotion master. Here are five of my favorites:
Resource #1: How To Promote Your Content Marketing Like A Public Relations Genius
If you tackle your content marketing promotion from a PR point of view, using a multi-pronged approach (syndication, paid and owned channels, etc.) can help your content become its own best PR agent. This post works well because it allows you to view content promotion in a new way, which may be all you need to be successful.
Author: Garrett Moon, CoSchedule’s Blog
Resource #2: 17 Advanced Methods for Promoting Your New Piece of Content
This post lists several unique and clever ways to promote content that you may have not thought of before. Ideas include: emailing people when you quote them in a recent blog post; mentioning them on Twitter when you share your post; and asking experts for their advice on a topic for a blog post, which they will then likely share with their own networks.
Author: Neil Patel, KISSmetrics’ blog
Resource #3: 13 Steps to Take Your Content Promotion to the Next Level
This post asks that you focus on not only the quality of your content, but also the quality of the relationships that you build within your own network and industry. The article correctly surmises that the more people you get to know and have better relationships with, the more likely they will share your content and increase its visibility.
Author: Jimmy Daly, Vero’s blog
Resource #4: How to Promote Your Blog Content: 40+ Experts Share Marketing Tips
This post crowdsourced answers from experts in several different categories, from social media to business, asking them how bloggers and content marketers can improve their promoting effectiveness. The mix of different perspectives and insight is a great round-up of tips that can help you, no matter the industry or strategy.
Author: Brian Lang, Small Business Ideas blog
Resource #5: Promoting Your Content To Increase Traffic, Engagement, and Sales
This chapter of Neil’s online e-book about content marketing gives a timeline of how to best promote your content, from the time you hit publish to days and months into the future. Going step-by-step makes content promotion less intimidating and more feasible, no matter your amount of time and resources.
Author: Neil Patel, Quick Sprout blog
Conclusion
This is just a small selection of content marketing tools and resources that can help get you started. No matter where you are in your content strategy plan and timeline, it’s worthwhile continuing to experiment until you perfect your process.
Do you have any resources or tools to add to this this?
Read Next: 5 ways to keep customers engaged before they slip away
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.