50+ Resources to Level Up Your Content Marketing Skills

If you are your company’s content marketing point person, you’re busy. Swamped might even be a better word. Relax! The DivvyHQ team has your back. Our content marketing gurus want to simplify your life with their favorite resources to hone your team’s content marketing skills. Buckle up and let’s get into it!

Have the Right Strategy

It all starts with the right strategy. Look at these resources to find ideas for a killer content strategy, no matter where you are on your journey.

• Learn about content marketing: If your enterprise has always relied on mostly ads to get your brand in front of more eyes, consider the benefits of content marketing for your company. The Content Marketing Institute has an excellent guide to steer you in the right direction.
• Get back on the right track: When you get frustrated about the results of your previous efforts at content marketing, get back to basics with some helpful suggestions, again, from the Content Marketing Institute.
• Drive results with a detailed plan: Once you have an overall strategy, it’s time to fill in the details. Even if you’ve had a plan in place for years, it’s a good idea to review it at least yearly. Use this detailed guide to help.
• Sell it to the C-suite: Content marketing, whether through social, email, or blog posts, collectively produces more ROI than other marketing strategies. However, you still have to convince the suits upstairs. Use this resource to learn how.

Schedule the Right Content at the Right Time

To reach your target customers when and where they’re in a receptive mood, you need tools. The kind of tools to learn who they are, find where and when they hang out online, and learn what they need. Then, you need a way to pencil in topics that will appeal to them, who’s going to create that content, and when you’re going to publish it. Here are some resources that can help:

• Facebook Analytics: Your target customers just can’t resist the latest cat video, Karen meme, or the scoop on why the police came to the neighbors’ house two nights ago. And while they’re there catching up, Facebook lures them in with sponsored posts that offer solutions to their needs, collecting data with every click. Therefore, Facebook Analytics is one of the best sources for deep insights into your audience’s demographics, likes, and pain points.
• Instagram Insights: For enterprises whose wares have visual appeal, Instagram is a must-have. Instagram Insights lets you look at various trends among your followers, such as location, age, and time on the app, as well as what content people have liked, commented on, saved, and shared.
• Snapchat Insights: If your brand wants to reach out to a Gen Z demographic, Snapchat is the place to do it, according to Business Insider. With data on more than 100 different categories of lifestyle preferences, as well as the regions where your audience lives, this is a must-have to grab your share of the youth market.
• YouTube Analytics: Who doesn’t turn to YouTube for how-tos, to listen to your favorite playlists, or for insights from industry thought leaders? Use YouTube’s powerful tool to learn when your audience is on, their age, gender, and language, and other videos they watched besides your channel.
• Buyer personas: After you learn all you can about your target customers, put a human face on them by creating – or updating – your buyer personas.
• Content calendar: Once you have your strategy in place and know your target customers like the back of your hand, a content calendar can keep you and your team on the same page about what to publish, where to publish it, and when to distribute it.

Plan Your Content Around Your Customers’ Needs

What keywords or natural language queries would your target customers use to find your products and services? Use those phrases to jumpstart topic generation. Here are some tools to help you in your content planning:

• Google Keyword Planner: Simply plug in your products and services, and you’ll see a list of common search phrases related to them.
• Ahrefs: One of the finest tools on the market for keyword research, Ahrefs also lists your competitors’ backlinks, which can be a rich source of content ideas.
• KWFinder: This resource allows you to find “long-tail” keywords with little competition, allowing you to rank higher in searches for your products and services. Long-tail keywords differentiate your products and services from generics. Think “clothing” (generic) versus “high-end men’s suits in NYC” (long-tail).
• Answer the Public: Your target customers’ questions are some of the most fruitful sources of blog post topics. This tool is free and oh-so-easy to use.
• Alexa and her AI cousins: With its “featured snippets” and other updates, Google has prioritized natural language searches in their ranking algorithm. Learn how to optimize for Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri to put your content at the top of searches for your products.
• SemRush: Comparing your content to your competitors’ allows you to see which keywords you might be missing to capture even more of your target customer segment. With SemRush, it’s a breeze.
• DivvyHQ’s Content Planning Tool: After you decide which keywords you want to base your content on, you need to select the right teams for each project. For a post on how best to use your latest widget to cut production costs, you might want to consult your engineering team. Your junior copywriter, though, could probably handle a post on how your widget helped a customer solve a problem by himself. With Divvy HQ’s content planning tool, you can lay out who does what task so that the process goes smoothly from conception to publication.

Collaborate with Your Teams and External Stakeholders

Meetings and back-and-forth emails among colleagues and clients, are some of the biggest time wasters in the marketing profession. Streamline your time with our favorite collaboration resources.

DivvyHQ’s content collaboration suite

With six different content collaboration tools to help your team stay on the same page, you’ll find that work goes faster, you’ll have less duplication, and you’ll enjoy greater productivity.

• Central idea repository: In addition to your chosen keywords, encourage your team (and external teams in your company) to suggest content ideas. You can leverage the full extent of your enterprise’s talent, when everyone shares.
• Shared content calendar: Make sure that everyone on your content team (and subject matter experts that participate) knows when an item is due. With everyone sharing the same calendar, you’ll have everything you need to stay current.
• Real-time notifications: Instead of having to email everyone with a “Cc,” enable real-time notifications so that your whole team can know when something changes or the person before them in the workflow finishes his or her task.
• Content asset search: In a large enterprise, you’ll build up a content inventory quickly. With this tool, you can find what you need immediately.
• Real-time commenting: As users review content assets, they can add comments right alongside the content so your team can get to a final, approved asset faster.
• Project management tools: Whether you’re using Divvy’s automated workflows or just assigning individual tasks to other team members, Divvy’s project management functions help to keep your team efficient, accountable and collaborating until all tasks are done.

Other collaborative tools

• Slack shared channels: Slack allows you and your team to collaborate with clients or other third-party stakeholders in real-time, via their shared channel feature. Send documents, videos, and other files – or use the chat feature to elicit immediate feedback or get critical information.
• Zoom: Made wildly popular, thanks to COVID, Zoom is an excellent alternative to meeting with clients or your team in person. Video chat is about as close to an in-person meeting as you can get. Buh-bye, lavish expense accounts a la Mad Men. No more trips to sunny Cali to lounge around with that client you’ve been trying to woo.
• Skype: The legacy tool of the video meeting genre, Skype still is a vital ingredient in many enterprises’ communication toolboxes. It’s free to use, but it allows users to delete messages. In case you want a documented record of everything you and those with whom you communicate share, Google Hangouts might be a better choice.
• Google Hangouts: If your enterprise uses Google’s G Suite, Google Hangouts is integrated into the system, making it convenient for video and instant messaging. Like Skype, it’s free, but it accommodates only 25 people.

Create Compelling Content

Creating content today is so much more than sitting down to write a blog post. With the growing popularity of video content, podcasts, imagery, and infographics, there are a lot of tools content creators should keep handy. Here are some of our favorite ones.

Photos and other images

• Pixabay: If your CEO has given your content marketing program a slim budget, this stock photo source has a wealth of free, quality photos and vector images in a variety of themes.
• iStock Photo: Top-quality photos and other images give your blog posts and content pages a pop of personality. Pricing is fair and becomes cheaper per credit the more credits you buy, making it an excellent choice for established enterprise teams.

Infographics

• Venngage: Create a dazzling array of infographics for only $49 per month with Venngage’s wide selection of customizable templates.
• Canva: Fantastic infographics with fonts and designs customized for your brand and the ability for your teams to collaborate on each design, makes this tool one of the best for enterprise applications.
• Fiverr: If your design team is strapped for time, outsource infographic creation to talented freelancers from across the world, usually for less than you’d pay in overtime for an in-house team.

Writing

• Portent Idea Generator: If you get stuck on title ideas, this handy tool can get your brain out of neutral.
• Venture Harbour: Writing SEO-optimized headlines and titles is both an art and a science. This resource spells out the basics of creating headlines that will grab your target customers’ attention.
• NPR’s guide to writing headlines: Designed to train new reporters, National Public Radio’s five-point checklist provides valuable tips that can help new writers and reboot experienced content writers’ creative energies.
• A guide to the hero’s journey: Stories are 22 times more likely to convert than flat, boring content. Make your customers the hero in your brand story when you use this tried-and-true content format.
• Your followers’ and target customers’ social media and blog post comments: Your followers’ and readers’ questions, feedback, and comments are a fruitful source of content topics. Use Quora to track your target customers’ questions. Keep your digital ears open and collect all these comments in a single place so your content team can access them quickly.
• Twitter: Twitter is more than a resource for followers’ comments and quick posts. It’s a rich source of trending topics both in the news and in your industry. Type in a hashtag and then your industry (with no spaces between the hashtag and the word), and you’ll see a wealth of content ideas.
• Grammarly: Nothing spoils a great blog post like a typo or a glaring grammatical error. Grammarly red-flags every boo-boo and even suggests replacements. Add it to your editorial team’s toolbox for flawless communications.
• Capitalization guides: Over-capitalization can make a serious, well-written blog post look like an ad for a used car company. We recommend either Towson University’s capitalization guide or Purdue’s. It only takes a few seconds to check. Take the time to do so.
• Marketing Insider Group: If you need more content than your internal teams can produce, outsource your content production to this agency’s world-class team of blog writers. With top-of-the-line content published consistently, you can increase your blog production to the “sweet spot” that produces more engagement, conversion, and ROI.

Video

• 90 Seconds: Video is a must-have in content marketing. If you prefer to outsource video production to a professional team, the experienced video professionals at 90 Seconds are the go-to option for some of the nation’s finest brands.
• Entrepreneur’s video creation checklist: Is your internal content team responsible for video content? If so, this quick infographic from MicroCreatives serves as a valuable checklist for them as they plan, produce, and film their production.

Image Source

Content Automation

• DivvyHQ content automation tool: We’re a little partial to our own content automation features. From automated workflows and notifications, to automated data syncing via various integrations, we’re trying to take a lot of the process minutiae off of your plates.
• Email automation tools: Your blog serves to reel in subscribers. Let them know when you’ve just published a post that will interest them. With an email automation tool, you can segment your audience and time your outreach to happen at the optimum moment in their corner of the world. Our picks include ActiveCampaign, Keap (aka InfusionSoft), MailChimp, Moosend, Omnisend, Sendinblue, and Emfluence.

Content Analytics

• DivvyHQ Content Analytics tool: With all your favorite third-party analytics sources on a single platform, you never have to spend time clicking back and forth among all the analytics programs you use.

Having a comprehensive content marketing platform that can pull all these resources together will give your team an edge against your competitors. After all, more time on your hands means that you can spend that time in content production, not routine tasks. If you’d like to take a test drive on such a platform, set up your 14-day free DivvyHQ trial today.