Content marketing is not slowing down any time soon. In fact, 66% of marketers plan to increase their budgets in 2022.
If your company is jumping aboard the content train, you might be at a loss about which strategies to use, how to plan content and run an efficient team, or how to distribute content effectively.
In this article, we’ll share 31 key resources to get you started. If you’re already running a content team, the blog posts, ebooks, templates, webinars, and other recommendations we share will help improve your team’s productivity and boost conversion rates for your company.
31 Vital Content Marketing Resources for Running Successful Campaigns
We’ve gathered a wide range of materials to help you at specific points in your content marketing workflow, including strategy, planning, content creation, and distribution. The best part is that most of these tools and resources are free to use.
Strategy
Content marketing bears the most fruit when it is backed by solid strategy. But creating a content marketing strategy can be intimidating—both for beginners and professionals. Here are our top resources to make the process easier.
This blog post shares a 12-step process for creating a strategy that works—from audience research to content performance analysis. It also includes expert recommendations to guide you through the process.
Our 60-page guide is chock-full of tips for owning your content, which content ownership models to explore, and how to pitch them to your clients or stakeholders. This comprehensive guide includes everything you need to know about establishing and maintaining consistently high content quality.
CXL is a well-known industry leader, and this post about how to measure content marketing return on investment (ROI) is a must-read for content leads. It explores four practical ways to measure the impact of your content—which is essential to building a strategy.
Still need more hands-on brainstorming help to develop a strategy? Try our Content Strategy Roadmap. This collaborative three-in-one guide, template, and checklist walks you through evaluating your current position, creating a guiding content policy, and building a detailed strategy.
A look at how much “content marketing” has been trending in the past year
Google Trends is a nifty tool for keeping your pulse on what’s trending in Google searches. It also provides information on locations with a rise in search terms and related searched phrases. This is useful for seeing what your target audience is interested in and which topics are worth creating content around.
Here’s another blog post to tie together everything you’ve learned about content strategy. It features insights from several industry experts with tips on branding and choosing the right marketing channels and types of content for your target audience.
Ahrefs is a popular keyword research tool for harnessing search engine optimization (SEO) in your content marketing. While SEO is not the only marketing channel, it’s a highly effective one. Research from BrightEdge shows that organic search is the largest digital channel, responsible for 53.3% of web traffic.
Tools like Ahrefs help marketing teams discover relevant keywords and increase their chances of ranking highly on search engines, which raises their conversion rates.
Content Operations and Planning
Once you have a strategy in place, the next step is content planning and setting up a smooth operations procedure. Here are our top resources and content marketing tools for successful content operations and planning.
Before you roll out any content marketing plans, you’ll need to clear the budget with department heads and stakeholders. Our content cost calculator is a fuss-free spreadsheet template that helps you calculate the time and financial cost of your content creation process. It also helps you calculate how much time you can save by using GatherContent for certain parts of your workflow.
If you still haven’t wrapped your head around how to plan and produce content consistently, you’ll benefit from this 40-page ultimate guide to content production planning. It details the must-have stages in your content workflow, how to work with subject matter experts to enrich your content, and how to execute your content production seamlessly.
Sometimes, the most frustrating pieces of the puzzle are those finer details—like who owns what part of the content brewing process. This spreadsheet takes most of the workload off your shoulders. We’ve outlined a detailed chart template to help you assign responsibilities and avoid annoying mix ups that can slow your process.
Finding the right people to run your content marketing processes can be challenging. If you want to build a team with the right fit and deliver content on time, this ebook on content delivery is your perfect guide. Besides information about building a team, it also includes tips for productive collaboration and prioritizing your content.
Content project briefs keep everyone from in-house team members to freelance contractors and editors on the same page. This free template includes more detail than a basic content brief and is best for projects of a broader scope. You can include information about your budget, timelines, key performance metrics, and more.
Like a brief, a style guide helps your team maintain editorial consistency. Building one requires lots of forethought about your brand, audience, and messaging. This checklist takes the guesswork out and aids you in creating the best style guide for your team.
Make your content marketing workflow more efficient by developing repeatable processes for your team. Using insights from GatherContent customers, this webinar highlights best content operation practices to help you scale your content efforts.
Get even more structure and organization by including an editorial calendar in your content marketing arsenal. This spreadsheet template helps you build a reliable content production schedule (as far as 18 months ahead), so you’re never left wondering what to work on next.
Got the content calendar, but no content ideas to enter? Try Hubspot’s Blog Ideas Generator. Just type in some keywords and watch the tool generate multiple engaging content ideas for your next five blog posts!
Content Creation
This is the real labor of content marketing—writing, editing, and publishing actionable content for your audience. These are some of our top tools for optimizing the process.
Our first recommendation is this webinar on speeding up your content creation without compromising the quality. While the webinar is geared toward creating legal content, the principles for improving content production and measuring performance are universal for content marketers.
Whether you’re drafting blog posts or landing pages, headlines are often the first portion of your content that readers see. You can either win leads or lose them with the quality of your headlines. CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer helps examine your suggested titles for power words and other characteristics of irresistible headlines to ensure you’re putting your best foot forward.
Still struggling with headlines? Try Copybloggers’ free ebook on writing magnetic headlines. This book includes tips for writing headlines, not just for content, but also as an important part of copywriting.
If creating content to rank on search engines is part of your content marketing strategy, you’ll need to optimize your posts accordingly. This on-page SEO checklist helps you use keywords, meta descriptions, internal links, and readability to create effective content.
Even if you have an in-house editor, it doesn’t hurt to have some AI technology proofread your content to catch last-minute typos and unclear phrasing. Grammarly is one popular choice, but there are a variety of alternatives to meet your needs.
Higher education institutions have unique content needs because they produce a range of materials from course descriptions to website content and help documentation. This checklist will serve as a thorough guide for managing workflows, compliance, and communications.
The Hemingway Editor is another AI writing tool focused on improving the quality and readability of your written content. It provides tips for simplifying words, phrases, and sentences while removing errors like passive sentences and adverb overuse.
Case studies are a critical part of bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) content and can be instrumental in convincing site visitors to try your product or service. This post on writing convincing case studies also includes 12 case study examples you can learn from.
Distribution
Content distribution is pivotal to successful content marketing. It’s simple: if people can’t see your content, they can’t engage with it. Use these resources to improve your content distribution chops.
Bookmark this post as your introduction to content distribution best practices. It covers different distribution channels and a replicable 3-step process for doing it right.
Repurposing a piece of content extends its lifecycle and broadens its audience. This blog post breaks down practical ways to repurpose content and highlights nine examples of brands getting it right.
Ross Simmonds's presentation at Moz Con 2019 about content distribution breaks down the benefits of proper content distribution and explores how to go beyond the popular content distribution tactics like social media and SEO.
General Tips and Inspiration
Besides the tools and resources we’ve shared in the categories above, we have a few additional suggestions and materials.
Try Marketing Podcasts
Podcasts are growing in popularity; 62% of the US population has listened to a podcast at least once. Unsurprisingly, more marketing podcasts are springing up in the marketing industry. One insightful one is Omniscient Digital’s The Long Game Podcast. Each week, the show features a marketing expert to discuss everything from building an audience to content distribution.
Create Appealing Images
A picture is worth a thousand words—and especially in digital marketing. Research by Buzzsumo shows that articles with a greater ratio of text to images got twice as many shares. Tools like Canva make it easy to create appealing visual content like infographics for your articles. You can even make screen recordings with applications like Nimbus and EZgif.
Use High-Quality Research
Finding high-quality, current research for content marketing articles can be a pain. Instead of relying solely on roundups with ancient data, consider using databases like Statista to add credibility to your content.
Build an Unbeatable Content Marketing Workflow with GatherContent
We believe in the power of great content marketing, but we also know that there can be many roadblocks to producing top-class content. GatherContent can help with some of these. Our content marketing platform is designed for seamless content creation and collaboration. You can strategize, plan, write, edit, and publish—all in one hub!
Ready to take your content production to the next level? Start your GatherContent trial now.
Content marketing is not slowing down any time soon. In fact, 66% of marketers plan to increase their budgets in 2022.
If your company is jumping aboard the content train, you might be at a loss about which strategies to use, how to plan content and run an efficient team, or how to distribute content effectively.
In this article, we’ll share 31 key resources to get you started. If you’re already running a content team, the blog posts, ebooks, templates, webinars, and other recommendations we share will help improve your team’s productivity and boost conversion rates for your company.
31 Vital Content Marketing Resources for Running Successful Campaigns
We’ve gathered a wide range of materials to help you at specific points in your content marketing workflow, including strategy, planning, content creation, and distribution. The best part is that most of these tools and resources are free to use.
Strategy
Content marketing bears the most fruit when it is backed by solid strategy. But creating a content marketing strategy can be intimidating—both for beginners and professionals. Here are our top resources to make the process easier.
This blog post shares a 12-step process for creating a strategy that works—from audience research to content performance analysis. It also includes expert recommendations to guide you through the process.
Our 60-page guide is chock-full of tips for owning your content, which content ownership models to explore, and how to pitch them to your clients or stakeholders. This comprehensive guide includes everything you need to know about establishing and maintaining consistently high content quality.
CXL is a well-known industry leader, and this post about how to measure content marketing return on investment (ROI) is a must-read for content leads. It explores four practical ways to measure the impact of your content—which is essential to building a strategy.
Still need more hands-on brainstorming help to develop a strategy? Try our Content Strategy Roadmap. This collaborative three-in-one guide, template, and checklist walks you through evaluating your current position, creating a guiding content policy, and building a detailed strategy.
A look at how much “content marketing” has been trending in the past year
Google Trends is a nifty tool for keeping your pulse on what’s trending in Google searches. It also provides information on locations with a rise in search terms and related searched phrases. This is useful for seeing what your target audience is interested in and which topics are worth creating content around.
Here’s another blog post to tie together everything you’ve learned about content strategy. It features insights from several industry experts with tips on branding and choosing the right marketing channels and types of content for your target audience.
Ahrefs is a popular keyword research tool for harnessing search engine optimization (SEO) in your content marketing. While SEO is not the only marketing channel, it’s a highly effective one. Research from BrightEdge shows that organic search is the largest digital channel, responsible for 53.3% of web traffic.
Tools like Ahrefs help marketing teams discover relevant keywords and increase their chances of ranking highly on search engines, which raises their conversion rates.
Content Operations and Planning
Once you have a strategy in place, the next step is content planning and setting up a smooth operations procedure. Here are our top resources and content marketing tools for successful content operations and planning.
Before you roll out any content marketing plans, you’ll need to clear the budget with department heads and stakeholders. Our content cost calculator is a fuss-free spreadsheet template that helps you calculate the time and financial cost of your content creation process. It also helps you calculate how much time you can save by using GatherContent for certain parts of your workflow.
If you still haven’t wrapped your head around how to plan and produce content consistently, you’ll benefit from this 40-page ultimate guide to content production planning. It details the must-have stages in your content workflow, how to work with subject matter experts to enrich your content, and how to execute your content production seamlessly.
Sometimes, the most frustrating pieces of the puzzle are those finer details—like who owns what part of the content brewing process. This spreadsheet takes most of the workload off your shoulders. We’ve outlined a detailed chart template to help you assign responsibilities and avoid annoying mix ups that can slow your process.
Finding the right people to run your content marketing processes can be challenging. If you want to build a team with the right fit and deliver content on time, this ebook on content delivery is your perfect guide. Besides information about building a team, it also includes tips for productive collaboration and prioritizing your content.
Content project briefs keep everyone from in-house team members to freelance contractors and editors on the same page. This free template includes more detail than a basic content brief and is best for projects of a broader scope. You can include information about your budget, timelines, key performance metrics, and more.
Like a brief, a style guide helps your team maintain editorial consistency. Building one requires lots of forethought about your brand, audience, and messaging. This checklist takes the guesswork out and aids you in creating the best style guide for your team.
Make your content marketing workflow more efficient by developing repeatable processes for your team. Using insights from GatherContent customers, this webinar highlights best content operation practices to help you scale your content efforts.
Get even more structure and organization by including an editorial calendar in your content marketing arsenal. This spreadsheet template helps you build a reliable content production schedule (as far as 18 months ahead), so you’re never left wondering what to work on next.
Got the content calendar, but no content ideas to enter? Try Hubspot’s Blog Ideas Generator. Just type in some keywords and watch the tool generate multiple engaging content ideas for your next five blog posts!
Content Creation
This is the real labor of content marketing—writing, editing, and publishing actionable content for your audience. These are some of our top tools for optimizing the process.
Our first recommendation is this webinar on speeding up your content creation without compromising the quality. While the webinar is geared toward creating legal content, the principles for improving content production and measuring performance are universal for content marketers.
Whether you’re drafting blog posts or landing pages, headlines are often the first portion of your content that readers see. You can either win leads or lose them with the quality of your headlines. CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer helps examine your suggested titles for power words and other characteristics of irresistible headlines to ensure you’re putting your best foot forward.
Still struggling with headlines? Try Copybloggers’ free ebook on writing magnetic headlines. This book includes tips for writing headlines, not just for content, but also as an important part of copywriting.
If creating content to rank on search engines is part of your content marketing strategy, you’ll need to optimize your posts accordingly. This on-page SEO checklist helps you use keywords, meta descriptions, internal links, and readability to create effective content.
Even if you have an in-house editor, it doesn’t hurt to have some AI technology proofread your content to catch last-minute typos and unclear phrasing. Grammarly is one popular choice, but there are a variety of alternatives to meet your needs.
Higher education institutions have unique content needs because they produce a range of materials from course descriptions to website content and help documentation. This checklist will serve as a thorough guide for managing workflows, compliance, and communications.
The Hemingway Editor is another AI writing tool focused on improving the quality and readability of your written content. It provides tips for simplifying words, phrases, and sentences while removing errors like passive sentences and adverb overuse.
Case studies are a critical part of bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) content and can be instrumental in convincing site visitors to try your product or service. This post on writing convincing case studies also includes 12 case study examples you can learn from.
Distribution
Content distribution is pivotal to successful content marketing. It’s simple: if people can’t see your content, they can’t engage with it. Use these resources to improve your content distribution chops.
Bookmark this post as your introduction to content distribution best practices. It covers different distribution channels and a replicable 3-step process for doing it right.
Repurposing a piece of content extends its lifecycle and broadens its audience. This blog post breaks down practical ways to repurpose content and highlights nine examples of brands getting it right.
Ross Simmonds's presentation at Moz Con 2019 about content distribution breaks down the benefits of proper content distribution and explores how to go beyond the popular content distribution tactics like social media and SEO.
General Tips and Inspiration
Besides the tools and resources we’ve shared in the categories above, we have a few additional suggestions and materials.
Try Marketing Podcasts
Podcasts are growing in popularity; 62% of the US population has listened to a podcast at least once. Unsurprisingly, more marketing podcasts are springing up in the marketing industry. One insightful one is Omniscient Digital’s The Long Game Podcast. Each week, the show features a marketing expert to discuss everything from building an audience to content distribution.
Create Appealing Images
A picture is worth a thousand words—and especially in digital marketing. Research by Buzzsumo shows that articles with a greater ratio of text to images got twice as many shares. Tools like Canva make it easy to create appealing visual content like infographics for your articles. You can even make screen recordings with applications like Nimbus and EZgif.
Use High-Quality Research
Finding high-quality, current research for content marketing articles can be a pain. Instead of relying solely on roundups with ancient data, consider using databases like Statista to add credibility to your content.
Build an Unbeatable Content Marketing Workflow with GatherContent
We believe in the power of great content marketing, but we also know that there can be many roadblocks to producing top-class content. GatherContent can help with some of these. Our content marketing platform is designed for seamless content creation and collaboration. You can strategize, plan, write, edit, and publish—all in one hub!
Ready to take your content production to the next level? Start your GatherContent trial now.
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