6 Content Marketing Tools Your Brand Should Be Using
As more brands recognize the power of content marketing, we’re seeing some awesome new ways to create, curate, discover and share content across the Web. Let’s take a look at six ways your brand can implement some of the hottest content marketing tools now.
Curate Content from the Web – LookBookHQ
LookBookHQ is a way for brands to assemble all types of content from around the Web into “LookBooks” that are embeddable, shareable and viewable practically anywhere. Smart marketers will combine both original and curated content to engage their audiences. As the Internet evolves toward less text and more visuals, LookBookHQ is aligned nicely with the future of the Web.
LookBookHQ offers some pretty exciting features:
Annotations
Marketing Automation Platforms (MAPs)
Analytics
Lead capturing
Collaboration tools
LookBook
Who’s Using it Successfully: Idea Workshop is using LookBookHQ to create digital press releases for their clients.
Tell Your Brand’s Story – Storify
Storify is another content curation tool that allows users to pull together content from all over the Web using hashtags, keywords, URLs and anything else you can search for. The app really shines when there’s a hashtag associated with your brand or a campaign you’re running. Add your audience’s social media posts and content featuring your hashtag to really drive engagement.
To help users make sense of their stories, Storify allows headlines and other text to be inserted anywhere in the story. Storify stories can be embedded almost anywhere online.
Who’s Using it Successfully: Self Magazine ran their #UpNOut campaign in January 2013. The magazine used Storify to include tweets from their followers who were participating in their getting fit campaign for the New Year.
Make Your Images Interactive – ThingLink
ThingLink is a content creation tool that follows the trend of visual content in a unique way. This app overlays a given image to make it interactive, which you can then share and embed anywhere. The image overlay allows you to make any part of the image clickable, signaled by icons.
Some features of ThingLink include:
Real-time Analytics
Customization
Social Network Interactivity
Who’s Using it Successfully: Bishop TD Jakes’ ministry used ThingLink to create interactive images for his Date Night campaign series. The image’s interactive spots link to TD Jakes’ books, related articles, notes, etc.
Create a Content Hub – ÜberFlip
For brands that really want to engage their audiences by going beyond selling, ÜberFlip is a great choice. You can create a content stream that compiles related content from across the Web. For instance, a fashion brand might create an ÜberFlip hub that features blog posts, videos, photos and other content about a particular collection. That hub can now be embedded directly on the brand’s website, or it can be shared on social networks to be viewed on multiple devices.
Like other content curation tools, ÜberFlip includes lead generation and analytics features as well.
Who’s Using it Successfully: Coastdale Parks is using the app to create an entire multimedia experience for their audience, including digital brochures, videos, etc.
Find Content from Real Influencers – Little Bird
The Internet is flooded with everyone striving to be an expert and an influencer. Everyone wants to be heard, and as a blogger, marketing professional or anyone searching for solid information, it’s quite a bit of work sorting through all the information available online. That’s where Little Bird comes in. Using social graph analysis, Little Bird finds the most relevant content by the most connected and influential people in your field.
Little Bird makes it easier to find top rated content from peer-approved influencers. Use Little Bird to build influencer lists or to discover sub-communities and new topics to explore.
Who’s Using it Successfully: Little Bird boasts Comcast, Iron Mountain, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Heinz Marketing as users of their web app.
Make Your Own Infographic – Piktochart
Infographics, though not a new concept at all, have all but taken over the Internet in recent years. Bad infographics are annoying and pointless, but good ones are a creative way to produce content and share information online and in print. You may have thought constructing a good infographic would be out of reach if you don’t have access to a graphic designer, but Piktochart solves that problem.
Piktochart offers users free and premium templates to easily create quality infographics with custom fonts, text and colors.
Who’s Using it Successfully: Clarity Way Rehab produces infographics often. How do they do it? By using Piktochart and similar tools to make putting together infogrpahics easy.
Use these suggestions and tools to start creating, curating and engaging your way into the visual content world. If you know about any content marketing tools we didn’t mention here, please share them below in the comments.
[image error]
