Introduction
The good thing about content marketing is that once you have the right person (or people) on your team to do it, you’ve got just about everything you need, save some of the basic tools and technology you need to publish content.
I personally prefer things simple, so I think of content marketing technology solutions in terms of “need it” or “nice to have.” Nice-to-have technologies are things like competitive intelligence tools, market research tools, or software that clues you in to real-time trends. Experiment with these on a rolling basis — most will offer a free trial so you can validate it. But first, make sure you’re set up with the core technologies every content marketing team needs.
CMS
At HubSpot, we use … well, we use HubSpot at HubSpot. It comes with a CMS called the Content Optimization System, which allows you to create and publish content quickly in a format that’s web-friendly. Whether you use HubSpot or another CMS, you need some CMS so your content marketing team can easily set up a blog, add blog posts, and add website pages without having to get help from IT or developers.
Analytics
You’ll need some analytics for your website and blog so you can measure your content marketing performance against your goals. Some content marketing teams rely on Google Analytics, others rely on more robust closed-loop solutions that make it easy to tie content marketing activities at the top of the funnel to revenue. I recommend the latter if you want to use metrics to prove the success of your content marketing program so you can secure more budget and grow the team. If you’re looking for an easy way to share numbers across your organization, look into DataHero. This tool integrates with the HubSpot software and allows you to track, visualize, and share your analytics through customized dashboards and charts.
Project Management Software
With the pace of social media and the frequency of blogging, not to mention that many of your content assets will be used across multiple campaigns and teams, a lightweight project management tool is critical. I recommend using a free software called Trello, which helps you organize your content, set deadlines, attach files, and collaborate with multiple teammates. Another great tool for keeping content projects organized from planning to publishing is Zerys — a content marketing tool with a built-in marketplace of professional writers.
Design Software
Visual content plays a big role in the success of a content marketing strategy. We’ve found that The Adobe Creative Suite will set content marketers up with everything they need to lay out ebooks, design infographics, create social images, etc. The team will find themselves in InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat pretty frequently. For a free alternative, try Canva. This lightweight software makes it easy for designers of all levels to create quality visual content — things like presentations, cover photos, ads etc.
As I mentioned earlier, these are simply the core technologies you should look for when you’re just getting started. As you scale, there are a lot of other tools and software that might be worth investment.