The 10 Best Content Marketing Tools to Use in 2023

Building a sustainable content marketing program is a lot like climbing a mountain. Without the right tools, you’re setting yourself up for failure. 

A solid toolkit can help you streamline your processes from ideation to publishing, automate backend workflows, and maximize productivity. Bonus, you can save time and focus on tasks with a greater business value. 

But with so many content marketing tools in the market, choosing the best ones for your needs can get tricky. 

So, we compiled this list of the 10 best content marketing tools for different use cases. You'll find every tool's key features and user reviews to make an informed choice. 

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a subset of marketing that uses content to engage and educate your target audience for building brand reputation, winning sales, and improving your bottom line.

Content marketing covers several channels and tactics, including but not limited to social media, creating evergreen content, SEO, outbound email strategies, PR, and more. When used effectively, content marketing can help organizations create a

The 10 Best Content Marketing Tools To Use in 2023

You want to build a content engine to produce high-quality and engaging content consistently. But your publishing cadence remains sluggish because you don’t have enough time and bandwidth to hit your goals. 

This is where a good tool stack can turn the tables in your favor. Let's break down our top 10 content marketing tools to fuel your content engine and achieve your goals.

1. WordPress

Best for: Website development and content management

‍Pricing: Free, Personal at $4/month, Premium at $8/month, Business at $25/month, eCommerce at $45/month

WordPress is an open-source website builder with an integrated content management system. It's one of the oldest and most widely used tools in the content space, powering nearly 40% of all online websites. This is a reliable addition to your toolkit for publishing articles, tracking website visitors, and more. 

Key features

• End-to-end solution for designing a website complete with hosting and domain name 
• Large template library to start with a ready-made template and customize the design
• Flexible and scalable development options with plugins available for every need

What users say

"You can't find another website builder that integrates with other programs or plugins as well as WordPress. It may be more complex and intricate with its details than most other platforms, but when you know how to use it and work with code. It is the best in the market."

– Quynh V.

2. Ahrefs

‍

Best for: All things SEO, analytics, and competitor research

Pricing: Free, Lite at $99, Standard at $199, Advanced at $399 

Ahrefs is an industry-leading SEO platform trusted by many in-house content teams and freelancers, and a majority of SEO professionals. It comes with a suite of tools catering to different needs, like Keywords Explorer, Site Audit, Rank Tracker, Content Explorer, and can be critical for businesses that want to build a growth marketing strategy.

Key features

• A powerful suite of SEO tools that you can use to track content performance
• Massive library of content marketing resources, educational guides, and thought leadership content available
• The keyword database is regularly updated

What users say

“The dashboard is well-designed. The data it gives is phenomenal. Their index is amazing, competing with the computing power and crawling ability of Bing and Yahoo. They are the second most active crawler after Google, outperforming Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Baidu, and everyone in between.”

– Matt R.

3. Semrush

Best for: Multi-channel content marketing campaigns

Pricing: Free, Pro at $119.95/month, Guru at $229.95/month, Business at $449.95/month

Semrush is an all-inclusive content marketing solution covering multiple channels, like SEO, social media, PPC ads, and more. You can use Semrush as a centralized hub to run your content marketing campaigns from start to finish. It can handle market research, competitor analysis, content creation and distribution, optimization, and several other parts of the process.

Key features

• A broader set of features for creating, executing, and monitoring SEO campaigns than other tools
• Content production powerhouse with a built-in content marketplace to get premium writing services
• Assesses your performance against a vast dataset of 24 billion keywords available across 130 countries

What users say

“SEMrush is a game-changer for website optimization! Their tools offer an abundance of in-depth insights, making the site audit tool a must-have for any SEO enthusiast. The ability to quickly identify and diagnose problems is incredibly valuable. On top of that, their social media team is top-notch, creating visually stunning infographics and fostering an engaged community.”

– David D.

4.HubSpot Marketing Hub

Best for: Integrating sales and marketing efforts

Pricing: Free, Starter at $50/month, Professional at $800/month, Enterprise at $3600/month

HubSpot's Marketing Hub gives you multiple tools to align your marketing campaigns with your sales goals. With tools for building landing pages, email marketing flows, exit intent forms, and more, the platform helps you design conversion-centric campaigns based on granular audience insights.

Key features

• Level up your content marketing efforts by connecting your CRM and email marketing data
• Segment your audience and personalize their experience and interaction with your brand
• Manage your social media calendar, ads, pop-ups, and emails from a single platform

What users say

"HubSpot Marketing Hub is one of the best platforms I know for managing all marketing email campaigns, landing pages, Good Ads, reporting and scheduling, and analyzing social media posts & campaigns. It's highly valuable for me to create trackable URLs, manage the marketing team and connect the website and blog to the systems to track everything better."

– Maria B.

5. Yoast SEO

Best for: Optimizing your content and website for search

Pricing: Premium at $99/year 

Yoast SEO is one of the go-to tools for creating search-focused content. This WordPress plugin can supplement your SEO strategy, helping you reach the highest benchmarks for both content and technical aspects. On top of indicating the right keywords for optimizing your site, the tool also offers recommendations on the quality of content and backlinks. 

Key features

• Create search-optimized content with in-depth suggestions for what you can improve (available in multiple languages)
• Conduct routine SEO workouts to keep your website healthy and fix any problems affecting search rankings
• Enrich your search performance with automatically added structured data 

What users say

“Makes optimizing my website simple and effective. The real-time keywords suggestion feature is just awesome. Besides, there are plenty of cool features such as generating an automatic sitemap for your entire site, and many more.”

– Min G.

6. BuzzSumo

Best for: Competitor research for better ideation

Pricing: Basic at $119/month, PR & Comms at $249/month, Content Creation at $249/month, Suite at $399/month

BuzzSumo is a media monitoring tool that lets you spy on your competitors and see what they're doing. If you want to one-up the competition and position yourself as a better solution, your content should speak to the audience's pain points. That's exactly what BuzzSumo helps you discover by analyzing which content performs for a keyword and how different brands approach it. 

Key features

• Get in-depth analysis for any term or phrase to fuel your content ideation process
• Get the best direction to outrank your competitors with data-driven research insights
• Stay on top of your search performance by tracking brand mentions and keyword analysis

What users say

"With this platform, it is easy to stay on top of trending topics, and it is also a tool for understanding social media sites and sharing their content. It is also a great tool for finding influencers on various social media platforms. I also love the possibility of seeing and downloading everything that has been shared on my site."

– Mary B.

7. ClickUp

Best for: Managing all the moving parts in content operations

Pricing: Free, Unlimited at $5/month, Business at $12/month, Business Plus at $19/month

ClickUp is an advanced project management tool supporting several use cases. You can customize your boards, automate actions, use templates, and add integrations to make it the control room for all your processes. What’s more, ClickUp goes beyond project management to manage your documentation goals too. 

Key features

• Configure the platform according to your needs with complete customization options
• Track different tasks and manage time more effectively to boost your team’s productivity
• Create a collaborative workspace with individuals boards for every campaign to map its entire lifecycle 

What users say

“ClickUp has allowed us to condense project and product management into one platform. We're also finding ways to document and standardize our internal processes, onboard customers and partners, manage our content marketing, track job candidates, and so much more.”

– Christina V.

8. Loom

‍

Best for: Internal communication and content repurposing 

Pricing: Free, Business at $8/month 

Loom is a video recording tool that encourages smoother collaboration and clearer communication. It can equip content teams or professionals to work seamlessly with other teams, like product, sales, and customer support. It's also a good solution for repurposing content into short-form videos.

Key features

• A lightweight tool for managing communication in cross-functional teams
• Enjoy the ease of creating, sharing, and embedding the video on any platform 
• Advanced viewing experience with features like comments, replies, reactions, transcriptions, and custom branding

What users say

“Loom is ideal for customer service or marketing teams to submit consumers with specific guidelines and illustrations. It covers a lot of digital work since it helps me, rather than trying to write everything in a letter, to tell my audience what I want to say in a video.”

– Milly W.

9. Google Analytics

Best for: Measuring content performance on Google

Pricing: Free

Google Analytics is one of the few essentials in every content marketer’s toolkit. It analyzes your website health and performance on Google, sourcing real-time insights about your organic content campaigns. Monitor your visitors’ activity on the website and create a customized dashboard with the most relevant metrics for you.

Key features

• Measure your website and content performance in terms of traffic, lead generation, attribution, search rankings, and more
• Understand user behavior like never before with personalized dashboards collecting data about your audience
• Integrate with Google Ads Manager to stay on top of the success of your paid ad campaigns 

What users say

“Google Analytics is excellent for measuring website traffic, lead generation, conversions, and more for data to use internally or share with stakeholders and individuals outside our company.”

– Katherine M.

10. Hotjar

Best for: Understanding user behavior

Pricing: Free, Plus at €32/month, Business at €80/month, Scale at €171/month

Hotjar is a product experience insights platform that analyzes users' behavior to help you identify what matters the most to your audience. Content teams can use the tool to understand people's behavior on landing pages, ads, and key pages on the website, like pricing. It highlights which parts are more appealing to the users and which don't capture their attention.

Key features

• Identify areas of friction or user pain points by visualizing and studying their actions within a page
• Optimize every content piece for conversions based on Hotjar's assessment of where users drop off or lose attention
• Get real-time insights into your content performance with session recordings and heatmaps and find new opportunities for improvement

What users say

"Hotjar was a really useful tool for us in the product and content marketing team. We used to it see how leads were behaving on our blogs, LPs, and product pages. Using that info, we were able to make adjustments to our pages to make them more optimized for consumption. We also did see a drop in bounce rate which meant our optimization was useful in the end."

– Anandapadmanabh S.

Start Building Your Content Marketing Strategy Today

You need to play the long game to win at content marketing. Without the right tools, you might fall behind or fall out of the race altogether. So, bookmark our guide on the 10 best content marketing tools to start building your stack.  

Remember: a good toolkit empowers you to achieve higher ROI with laser-focused insights, streamlined workflows, and reduced workload for you. 

If you want the expertise of a seasoned growth marketer to make magic with these tools, Divisional has the perfect match for you.

Contact us to find your next growth hire and take your growth strategy to the next level.