100 Content Marketing Tools for PRs: From Content Marketing Software to Content Curation

Smart marketing professionals recognize traditional marketing lost its effectiveness a long time ago. Consumers no longer interact with media and entertainment, in the same way, they used to. Traditional radio broadcasts and cable ads no longer boast the same following they did ten or even five years ago. After bombarding customers with ads on their phones, TVs, billboards, and buses, customers become desensitized, rendering traditional marketing virtually useless.

Content marketing revolutionizes advertising by forcing companies to own their content. Companies must create content to engage customers, rather than run traditional ads between feature presentations. Content marketing solves this issue by subtly introducing the product while fostering a relationship. Since traditional media no longer draws the crowd it used to, the high competition in this area forces companies toward innovative content created for specific platforms.

Thankfully, many social media platforms cater to a diverse group of people. Companies should carefully select social media platforms they are most likely to find their target customers. Building a social media portfolio reflecting this and devising a content strategy to engage with their customers.

Below are one hundred tools for turning you and your company into a content marketing guru of the dynamic 2015 market. The list provides you with platforms to scope new customers, as well as tools to track trends and analyze market data.

B2B Content Inspiration and Ideas; Research; Creation and Content Curation; Publishing and More

1.    BuzzSumo: BuzzSumo helps identify which content performs well in a particular industry and who the major influencers are. It provides content marketers with the necessary information to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
2.    Soovle: If you type a keyword into Soovle, it automatically searches for the most popular terms across many different search engines.
3.   LinkedIn: Most people use LinkedIn for professional networking, but with the creation of company profiles, companies can use this platform to advertise their business and build relationships. LinkedIn provides a professional tool for highlighting your business’ best assets and attracting not just customers and clients, but strategic partnerships.
4.    Pearltrees: Pearltrees delivers a visual and collaborative curation tool allowing users to collect, organize and share online content from anywhere. It also allows users to upload personal photos and notes.
5.    Newsle: This web application keeps you in the know. It allows users to find and follow real news about their Facebook friends, LinkedIn contacts, and public figures.
6.    Content Marketing Institute: CMI wants to advance the practice of content marketing, by offering education in the field. The company achieves this through online media options, print, and in-person events.
7.    Quora: Quora created a platform for people to ask and answer questions on a variety of topics. In the past, users mostly did this for fun as a hobby. Recently, companies and their representatives use Quora to showcase their expertise in different areas and build trust in their brands.
8.    Uberflip: Uberflip provides a streamlined content management system. Use this app to amp up lead generation and marketing effectiveness.
9.    Grammarly: Many of us know how to create engaging content, but struggle to translate that into something well written. Use Grammarly to brush up on your grammar and syntax, ensuring your words match what you mean to say. If you have no problems with English grammar, use it anyway to catch typos. We all make them.
10. Prismatic: This app keeps you in the know and recommends social content for viewing and posting.
11. HubSpot Academy: The website provides resources helping content marketers improve. It aims to educate and provide certifications in the field, creating professionals with a better understanding of the theoretical and practical aspects of content marketing.
12. YouTube: Consumers spend hours per day watching videos the company strategically punctuates with ads. This tool makes it easier to run ads, visually showcase your company’s expertise, and get a feel for what is trending.
13. Twitter Counter’s Top 100 Page: This page identifies the top 100 tweeters. Most are celebrities and popular on the merit of their reputation and fans. However, many companies also made the list. Check out their tweets to see what kind of content they use to engage followers.
14. Atomic Alley: Atomic Alley delivers a scoring tool to customize content for specific groups.
15. Storify: Storify assists with finding, storing and sharing trending topics on the web. Many companies use this tool to leverage social media.
16. Meet Edgar: Meet Edgar created a social media queue that never runs out. The platform makes posts on your page, whether you personally remember to or not. Use it to schedule posts in one go, so you can cut down daily hours spent on curating.
17. KISSmetrics: KISSmetrics uses analytics to optimize your content for discovery and engagement. This tool identifies your customers, what they do, and how to reach them.
18. Slideshare: Slideshare hosts one of the world’s largest communities for sharing documents. Monthly visitors average a million, and page views average 130 million in that time span. Post case studies and information about your company so students and other interested parties discover it.
19. Leadfeeder: Leadfeeder created a sales lead generation tool. It shows you which companies visit your website and what they do there.
20. Trapit: Trapit combines your content with trending topics to increase traffic to your website. It also provides analytic tools showing you how consumers interact with your content so you can improve.
21. Zerys: Zerys produced a project management tool created specifically for content projects. The site also features a built-in market for hiring professional content writers.
22. Content Rules: Content Rules helps companies improve global content marketing, by devising effective strategies and executing them according to plan. Their clients include Google, Paypal, and Cisco.
23. Open Marketing: Open Marketing specializes in content marketing and inbound marketing. The platform helps companies with their communication needs.
24. Listly: Lists – like this one – attract a lot of consumer traffic. Consumers want to know what are the top ten, twenty or one hundred of a number of things. Use Listly to make a social list on their site or your own.
25. Content Marketing World: Networking opportunities abound at this annual event. Content Marketing World also gives attendees resources to transform their content marketing strategies and implement new plans that work.
26. Inbound Writer: This tool predicts the amount of traffic you will get for a post before you even write it. It suggests topics Inbound expects to trend; thus giving you the opportunity to write about topics that receive more traffic.
27. Help a Reporter Out (HARO): HARO offers companies a useful source of upcoming stories and daily opportunities expected to attract valuable media coverage. Companies can weigh in on these issues to remain relevant and show they are in the know.
28. Feedly: Feedly helps you find, organize and share trending stories. It allows you to follow lists in categories relevant to you and updates you on developments and hot topics in that area.
29. Contently: Contently provides a cost-effective way for companies to source professional writers. These writers produce high-quality content for the companies’ blogs, advertisements, and other mediums.
30. Flockler: Flockler delivers a platform for users to publish their own magazine. It offers a great tool for publishing and sharing content created with the intention of engaging customers.
31. SEM Rush: SEM Rush provides all you need to create SEO optimized articles surfacing first when users do searches online.
32. Canva: In content marketing words alone cannot attract customers. Use Canva to create impressive designs for websites, blog posts and print materials.
33. Recorded Future: Cyber attacks threaten brand image and damage consumers’ trust in your brand. Recorded Future protects your company from cyber attacks by letting you know what threats are taking place in your industry. It encourages companies to be proactive about information security.
34. Yahoo Answers: Sometimes filled with spam, silly questions. and comic answers, but Yahoo still provides a great source for content ideas. Browse by categories and select the most popular to see the trending topics.
35. Google Plus: While not as popular as older brothers’, Facebook and Twitter, this platform does a good job of recommending popular topics in the news and the community. If your customer base primarily consists of techies and intellectuals, Google Plus provides a better place to connect with them than Twitter or Facebook.
36. Evernote: The creative process often ends up a messy one. Use Evernote to organize ideas at your desk and on the go. Inspiration comes at unexpected of times. Don’t lose the opportunity to document it, before you forget.
37. ARC Engagement Platform: ARC helps create richer content broadening your reach and deepening your engagement with consumers. The tool achieves this through the heavy use of SEO content.
38. Oktopost: This social media management software helps users to publish social messages, talk with prospective customers, and generate sales.
39. Everything PR: This website informs you of the latest developments and trends in public relations so you can apply it to your organization.
40. Zeeik: Use this platform to curate videos for your website on numerous topics. Many users call this the video Wikipedia.
41. PitchEngine: Design to impress. Use PitchEngine to make beautiful and engaging stories about your brand in minutes.
42. InnoBlog: Innoblogs allows organizations to use blogging across all departments to attract and convert customers through the use of highly optimized SEO content.
43. CoSchedule: Use this platform to plan your marketing strategies and save time.
44. Scribe: Scribe delivers the same content marketing process that helped Copyblogger grow from a mere blog to a software company. If you use WordPress, check out Scribe for WordPress to increase traffic to your blog.
45. Unseenideas: If you need creative ideas to revolutionize your content creation, check out this resource. The platform provides a search engine for unpublished concepts and campaigns to help you be first to market.
46. Scoop.it: Scoop.it reminds clients they are the content they publish. They help clients discover, curate, and publish content to get visibility online.
47. Skyword: This software-as-a-service company helps organizations reach customers and interact with them by creating quality SEO content. Skyword optimizes the post increasing traffic from customers.
48. DashThis: Use DashThis to create a dashboard for content marketers and executives. This tool helps show if your content marketing strategies work and illustrates this through reports executives and clients can understand.
49. Piktochart: All words and no pictures often make consumers dull boys and girls. Spice things up with Piktochart creating high-quality infographics, reports and presentations with minimal effort.
50. Divvhq: Divvhq simplifies your workflow process so you can improve planning and communication across departments. The company created this tool to help marketers and content producers stay organized during the creative process.
51. Buffer: Sometimes sharing good content is as effective as creating it from scratch, if the content relates to your industry or company. Use Buffer to share links, pictures, and videos of interest.
52. Over Mobile App: Over Mobile App lets you add beautiful text to artwork. Use this for branding photos or creating viral memes.
53. Conferize: Join the world’s biggest platform for events. Conferize helps you to make your events a success by growing your community and helps sell tickets and increase your turnout.
54. OneSpot: Onespot transforms your content into powerful content ads. The company also provides tools to create, share, retarget, and measure your content ads.
55. ShowHows: Remind your customers of your product’s usefulness by creating DIYs including them. Use ShowHows to make DIYs into infographics.
56. Consumer Barometer: Consumer Barometer tracks consumer behavior and purchasing history. It provides an insight into how people use the internet all over the world, and how best to capitalize on that.
57. Linkdex: Linkdex assists companies with maximizing traffic to their website by using SEO content.
58. PRWeb: This company helps smaller businesses create buzz, gain visibility, and attract customers. PRWeb optimizes your content for search engines. Connecting you with their network of more than 30,000 journalists. Additionally, they ensure your organization gets a feature on major local and national news sites.
59. Writer Access: Writer Access hosts a marketplace for hiring freelance writers to create quality content.
60. B2B Content Engine: B2B provides social media software for entrepreneurs and start-ups. The company’s software streamlines content management, content distribution, and content discovery. This makes social content marketing sustainable and effective for their clients.
61. Cliché Finder: This tool identifies clichés in your text so you can find more innovative alternatives helping content stand out.
62. Flipboard: Flipboard offers a great way to present content in a creative magazine format. Not everyone likes to read, but everyone loves to look at pictures. Engage both kinds of users by combining both mediums.
63. Compendium: This cloud-based content marketing provider helps companies plan, produce and share engaging content across a multitude of platforms.
64. BagtheWeb: Create “bags” containing recommended links on your selected topics. A “bag” is a media container used to organize links you find into one cohesive unit.
65. Hemingway Editor: Hemingway Editor makes your writing bold, clear and error free. It highlights complicated sentences and grades your work to let you know how it ranks on the reading level scale.
66. ShareAsImage: This app lets you add text to any image. This allegedly doubles your social engagement. Give it a try and see what it can do for you.
67. Stipso: Stipso enables content marketers to easily mix social polling and real-time data visualization creating infographics.
68. NewsCred: Many of the world’s leading brands trust NewsCred. The platform offers a content marketing tool allowing efficient collaboration, the creation of valuable content, and the management of brand consistency.
69. Visual.ly: Visual.ly creates visual content for clients to set their brand apart. The company promises talent, a quick turnaround, and reasonable pricing.
70. Shareist: Shareist provides tools for finding and reusing content, and scheduling updates. You must pay for this service.
71. iReach: Give your message the most visibility for your money with iReach. This platform distributes press releases to more than 1,400 websites in their network.
72. Resonance Content Marketing: Resonance works with organizations to build relationships and prospects through content marketing. Mediums include blogs, newsletters, social media, white papers, eBooks, video, and webinars.
73. Jing: Jing captures content on your screen in the form of pictures or videos. Use this tool to demonstrate skills in artistry, promote in-play scenes from video games, or document procedures for replication and training.
74. Word Swag: Create customized text layouts with Word Swag at the blink of an eye.
75. Percussion Software: Percussion helps content marketers scale their content marketing strategy. Update your website content without any technical skills and go live faster than ever. Percussion takes care of the technicalities for you.
76. Snip.ly: Snip.ly created a great tool for adding text to links you share without making changes to the page itself. Use this tool to share publications featuring you or your brand, and to engage with your followers.
77. Keyword.io: Rank better in searches by using keywords relevant to your content. Keyword.io provides the service for free.
78. Viraltag: Grow your brand by leveraging the power of visual content to foster relationships with consumers
79. Gather Content: Gather Content facilitates content planning, production, and workflow for agencies and in-house teams. It works with users to create engaging content for websites.
80. Curation Station: This platform offers a sleek, though expensive, solution to the flood of information online. It organizes the information so you can find the relevant and important facts benefiting your content and business.
81. PageOneCurator: This curation software and training enables you to create and curate authority sites attracting high traffic.
82. Qzzr: Create and embed quizzes in your content with Qzzr. The answers can help you improve, and learn more about your consumers and what they want from you.
83. Scripted: Create content easily with Scripted’s curated network of freelance writers. Order content such as blog posts, white papers, and product descriptions.
84. Storyful: Storyful filters through the noise of trending topics to bring you the most inspiring and authentic stories. Share or weigh in on these stories to increase traffic to your website, blog or social media platform.
85. Betakit: This Canadian start-up provides original, real-time reporting and analysis of new technology and global innovation.
86. ZenPen: If you do not own a copy of a word processor, or you choose not to use them, then ZenPen supplies a good alternative. It encourages freedom in writing and only corrects necessary grammatical problems. This minimalist approach opens up the creative juices in writers who need to create innovative content for marketing purposes.
87. Unsuck-it: When you write content for authoritative blogs, it’s difficult to avoid certain jargons. This platform helps find as many alternatives as possible throughout your text.
88. Smart Marketing Page: The Smart Marketing Page showcases your company’s products and services on an interactive web page where customers connect with your brand.
89. Zemanta: Zemanta helps companies create contents ads that are SEO optimized to increase their reach and effectiveness. The platform also provides campaign analytics so you can track the performance of your ads.
90. Scrivener: If you prefer to use Mac for editing, this application works best for writing and editing long documents.
91. Yahoo! News: Yahoo posts news on headlines from all over the world. Use this tool to see what issues currently gain the most media attention and what topics are trending.
92. Google News: Google News offers a less popular but equally effective alternative to Yahoo. As the company uses amazing analytical tools for all its apps, extensions, and products, you can bet they display the most recently trending topic generating the most online traffic at the time.
93. Trello: Trello provides a revolutionized approach to project management. Trello allows you to visually organize anything with anyone from anywhere. The platform allows you to see everything about your project in one look, so you can properly oversee the creative process and your team’s progress on assigned tasks.
94. Silk: Silk helps content managers publish content that looks as good as it sounds. The platform also provides information on trending topics in the news around the world.
95. Unsplash: Avoid a takedown notice from Shutterstock or other platforms selling images by using copyright free images from Unsplash.
96. Videolicious: This application facilitates the creation of business-quality videos with minimal effort promptly. This proves useful when something phenomenal happens in front of you, and you want to be the first to share it.
97. Pitching Notes: This free website gives PR professionals the opportunity to share experiences and tips on how to pitch specific journalists, by reviewing the ones they have worked with.
98. YouZign: Use Youzign to add visual creations to your content in a variety of mediums. These include posters, flyers, banners, infographics and business cards
99. Portent’s Content Idea Generator: Portent gets those creative juices going when you’ve lost inspiration or have writer’s block.
100. Readability Test Tool: Readability grades the ease of understanding your writing. Most blogs aim for a readability of 8 or 9, but authoritative blogs usually do not attempt to adhere to a specific grade. It is often beneficial in this instance to write a grade or two above middle school understanding.

Of course, there are other resources that could amp up your content marketing efforts and turn you into a guru in the field. However, we only did a list of one hundred, and unfortunately even that cannot include everything. As content marketing approaches a new year of innovations and ideas, expect new content marketing tools to emerge possibly even outdoing what we know in 2015.

If you have any suggestions we might have missed, feel free to share in the comments so that content marketers can capitalize on additional opportunities we could not include in 100 Tools for the Content Marketing & Curation Guru.

There are many other sources that could assist your develop content marketing strategies that work – we barely scratched the surface. We also expect to see many other content-related startups, as content marketing becomes more than a trend: a necessity. Feel free to drop your suggestions in the comments below, or, if you mention a startup, shoot me an email to be included in our startups to watch series.