Content marketing has finally hit its stride. It’s taken a while for us to adapt and find our footing, but what was once an ill-understood new practice has become the industry norm.
The latest B2B content marketing benchmarks show that 28% of us are in the sophisticated or mature phase of content marketing maturity, and 62% are more successful than we were just one year ago. We’ve come a long way in a very short time.
That’s not to say we have overcome every challenge to success, though. Among those who didn’t say their level of success has improved, 52% struggle to find enough time for content marketing. Forty-nine percent say developing and adjusting their strategy is still a challenge. And 28% of all respondents still do not measure the ROI of their content marketing.
To keep improving, we need to develop content marketing tools that can make creation more strategic, amplification more effective, and measurement more precise.
These challenges are just as real for our team as they are for yours. We have been busy both developing in-house tools and seeking out the best third-party solutions to help us get better results.
We’re on a mission to help marketers succeed. So when we create or discover a valuable tool, we want to share it with you.
In our latest resource, The Content Marketing Toolkit, we put together a veritable Swiss Army knife of content marketing tools your team can use for every aspect of content marketing, from strategy to SEO to proving ROI. These resources are designed to be easy to use, but customizable enough that you can use them over and over again.
Here are the seven tools we created for The Content Marketing Toolkit:
- Content Calendar Template: Use this spreadsheet to plan your own Big Rock content. You can use it to create a timeline, coordinate content creation, and keep track of your promotion and amplification tactics.
- Social Media Distribution Plan: Coordinate your social media sharing across all the major platforms with this spreadsheet. It’s designed to help you keep track of paid and organic posts, and to make sure the creative for each post fits each platform’s guidelines.
- Content Audit Template: This spreadsheet will help you make the most of the content assets you already have. Categorize content by type and purpose, track performance, and use that information to suggest how content might be repurposed.
- Content Gap Analysis: This slide deck is a companion to the content audit template. It can help you determine how much new content needs to be created by identifying holes in your existing content as compared to your marketing objectives.
- SEO Checklist: Use these two checklists to make sure every piece of content is optimized for organic search. One list is devoted to on-page optimization, the other for optimizing meta information. A quick pass through both before you publish could drastically improve your content’s performance.
- Content Marketing Strategy for FY17 Template: A documented content marketing strategy is a major factor in the success of your efforts. This slide deck will help you develop a plan and present it to stakeholders.
- Metrics and Analytics Dashboard: This slide deck is designed to help you present your content strategy and its results to the C-suite. With customizable slides and comprehensive instructions, it can help you show that your content is meeting the needs of your business.
These tools can help any content marketing team become more organized, more strategic, and ultimately more successful. And we’ve also included links to some of our favorite third-party tools for research, design, collaboration, and more.
As the survey says, we have gotten much better at content marketing in just one year. But it’s not in a marketer’s nature to settle for “better.” We have to constantly analyze, optimize, and improve. Let these tools help you accelerate your journey to content marketing maturity.
Download The Content Marketing Toolkit today to get started.
