Semrush takes the complexity out of content marketing with its intuitive, all-in-one toolkit, best known for its SEO functionalities. Beyond that, it also features solid tools for social media management and YouTube keyword research and analytics.
Turn to Canva for eye-catching graphics that draw people to your content, and convey your message clearly.
Google Analytics provides the stats you need to monitor visitor behavior on your site. And helps you identify which pieces of content deliver the highest return on investment.
For your other needs, such as project management, video editing, and email marketing, read our curated list below.
What Are the Best Content Marketing Tools?
- Semrush: Best for overall content marketing functionality
- Canva: Best for graphic design
- Google Analytics: Best for data analytics
- Trello: Best for project management
- Grammarly: Best for improving writing quality
- Mouseflow: Best for understanding user behavior
- Google Workspace: Best for team collaboration automation
- Mailchimp: Best for email marketing automation
- ChatGPT: Best for content ideation and brainstorming
- Google Search Console: Best for tracking organic search performance
- Frase: Best for content optimization
- CapCut: Best for video editing
- Buffer: Best for social media management
#1 Semrush
Best for overall content marketing functionality
Price: Starts at $129.95/month with a 7-day trial
Semrush, founded in 2008, is an all-in-one digital and content marketing platform. It features various tools to boost your brand’s visibility and drive traffic to your website.
The Best Part
Offers a wide range of tools for everything from keyword research and site audits to social media strategy.
The Worst Part
Can be costly for new businesses and overwhelming for SEO beginners
Top Features
- Topic and keyword research: Find keyword opportunities, check how hard they are to rank for, spot content gaps, and choose keywords most likely to get you a high ranking in the SERPs.
- Content optimization: Improve your blog posts with targeted tips on improving titles, meta descriptions, and overall content quality. Optimize pre- and post-publication for SEO, readability, and uniqueness.
- Backlink analysis: Analyze your site’s backlink profile and monitor new and lost links. Also, review competitors’ backlinks to identify new linking opportunities.
- Social media management: Plan and publish content across various channels and keep tabs on engagement metrics. Track competitors’ accounts to gain insights into their content strategy and engagement levels.
- Site audit: Fix technical SEO issues, such as broken links, missing meta tags, and slow page load times.
- Content performance tracking: Monitor your SERP rankings for targeted keywords to measure how well your SEO strategy is working. And where to improve.
- Competitive analysis and market insight: Study competitor websites and identify their top content and keywords to spot opportunities for your own strategy.
- YouTube keyword discovery: Enter your keyword and assess its competitiveness in YouTube search. Also discover trends and see which videos are popular.
Pricing
Semrush offers three pricing plans:
- Free: For one project and tracking 10 keywords max
- Pro: $129.95/month for 5 projects, with SEO, PPC, and research tools
- Guru: $249.95/month for 15 projects, includes a content marketing toolkit
- Business: $499.95/month for 40 projects, offers API access and expanded limits
- Choose yearly billing and get 17% off
#2 Canva
Best for graphic design
Price: Starts at $11.99/month and also offers a limited free option
Founded in 2013 in Perth, Australia, Canva is a web-based graphic design tool for creating visuals for both web and print.
The Best Part
Easy to use drag-and-drop interface with millions of templates to choose from
The Worst Part
Limited features for advanced designers used to specialized graphic features
Top Features
- Beginner-friendly: Use professionally-made templates to create stunning graphics for your blogs, YouTube thumbnails, and social media.
- Extensive library of assets: Access millions of high-quality stock photos and videos, fonts, and icons for your designs, with no need for attribution.
- Brand consistency: Use the brand kit to store your brand’s logos, color schemes, and fonts so that every piece of graphic you create aligns with your brand identity.
- Video editing tools: Create and edit videos for social media, video sites, or your blog. Add text overlays, trim clips, and apply filters to create engaging content.
- Infographic maker: Make complex ideas easier to understand for your readers with charts and icons.
- Mobile editing: Design, publish, and share your design creations from anywhere
Pricing
Canva offers four pricing plans:
- Canva Free: Access to basic design tools, some premium features restricted. Ideal for individuals or small projects.
- Canva Pro: $14.99/month/person. Includes more templates, features, and AI tools and is best for bigger projects or small businesses.
- Canva for Teams: $11.99/month/person, minimum 2 people. Great for team collaboration and brand consistency. Suitable for small to medium teams.
- Canva for Enterprise: Price not listed, 100 people minimum.
- Choose yearly billing and get 16% off
#3 Google Analytics
Best for data analytics
Price: Free
Google Analytics is a web analytics platform Google provides for free to help businesses optimize their marketing campaigns.
The Best Part
It’s free, with an advanced and comprehensive set of features for tracking website and app performance.
The Worst Part
There’s a steep learning curve, especially if you’re used to the session-based analytics model.
Top Features
- Track website engagement: Monitor visitor actions such as buttons clicked, scroll-depth, downloads, and video plays to track how visitors engage with your content.
- Highly customizable dashboards: Display only relevant dimensions and metrics. Add customized widgets, charts, and graphs to organize data for easier interpretation.
- Cross-platform and cross-device tracking: Get a holistic view of the customer journey as you track interactions across devices and platforms. Understand the influence of each touchpoint on conversions.
- Privacy-compliant: Give users control of their data through the consent mode feature. And meet the requirements of data privacy laws and regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.
- AI and machine learning: Predict future customer behavior based on historical data to help you gauge potential content revenue and trending topics.
- Advanced data analytics: Build reports that are not available in the default dashboard. Visualize your data’s trends, correlations, and patterns at a granular level.
- Easily integrate data with Google Search Console: Gain immediate insights into how your site’s ranking in Google’s SERPs. Correlate this data with various Google Analytics metrics to determine the quality of your website traffic.
Pricing
Google Analytics is a free analytics tool. There is a paid version called GA 360 for enterprise companies who want more extensive features and customizations.
#4 Trello
Best for project management
Price: Starts at $6/user/month, free account available with limited features and boards
Trello, founded in 2011 by Fog Creek Software, and later acquired by Atlassian in 2017, is a customizable Kanban board for managing projects and organizing tasks.
The Best Part
Trello is easy to set up and very straightforward to use. With its boards, cards, and lists structure, you can use it right out of the gate.
The Worst Part
As projects become more extensive, Trello boards can become overwhelming to manage.
Top Features
- Content planning: Ideate and schedule projects using the visual organization system. Brainstorm content ideas, organize editorial calendars, and track publication and content distribution.
- Multi-project management: Easily track different projects such as social media, YouTube, or website content on one platform.
- Content project execution: Gain a macro-level perspective of content projects. Create custom workflows to visually plan and track each step.
- Workflow automation: Streamline routine tasks with Trello’s Butler to automate actions such as moving cards between lists, updating due dates, and managing notifications.
- Mobile and email integration: Stay connected to projects even when on the go by syncing your phone and laptop.
Pricing
Trello offers four pricing options:
- Free: Limited to 10 boards/workspace and limited features
- Standard: $5/user/month with unlimited boards
- Premium: $10/user/month with unlimited automation commands
- Enterprise: $17.50/user/month with organization-wide controls and permissions
- Quoted prices are for yearly payments. Monthly payments are higher.
#5 Grammarly
Best for improving writing quality
Price: Starts at €12/month billed annually, with a free limited version
Founded in 2009, Grammarly is a writing assistant that helps with grammar, writing clarity, and style. It also features a plagiarism detector tool.
The Best Part
Quickly catch and correct grammar and spelling errors in your writing.
The Worst Part
Limited capability in capturing your voice. And struggles with conversational writing styles.
Top Features
- Edit content: Fix grammar and spelling mistakes and improve the quality of your content.
- Improve sentence structure: Refine your sentences for better flow and clarity. Replace weak words with more impactful ones to add depth.
- Plagiarism detection: Check if your text closely resembles existing online content, so you can cite sources correctly.
- Integration with Writing Tools: Use a browser extension to edit content across web browsers, word processors, emails, and social media.
Pricing
Grammarly offers 3 pricing plans.
- Free: Edit grammar and spelling mistakes
- Premium: €12/month, billed annually, includes tone adjustment and plagiarism detector
- Business: $15/member/month billed annually, includes style guide and tone detector
- Prices listed are for annual billing. Monthly billing options come at a premium.
#6 Mouseflow
Best for understanding user behavior
Price: Starts at $31/month, with a free option offering a limited number of recordings
Founded in 2010 in Copenhagen, Denmark, Mouseflow is a behavior analytics tool that helps you understand how visitors interact with your site.
The Best Part
Session replays are user-friendly, making it easy for beginners to spot usability issues.
The Worst Part
Interpreting some of the data requires expertise. Observing what users do is one thing. Using that information to effectively optimize your site calls for deeper understanding.
Top Features
- Heatmaps: Discover which parts of your pages attract the most attention and which are ignored—so you can strategically place content on the page and design your layout for better engagement.
- Session recordings: Watch replays of how visitors interact with your site to see what they read or skip—so you know what to adjust or remove.
- Real-time user sessions: Monitor live user interactions to quickly fix UX issues or errors, especially useful during product launches or major updates.
- Mouse tracking: Analyze mouse movements and clicks to learn how visitors navigate your site and identify areas of high interest or confusion.
- Funnels: Track how visitors move through your site to pinpoint drop-off points so you’ll know where to focus your conversion optimization efforts.
- Form analytics: Study how visitors fill out forms—like which field takes the longest to answer—so you can streamline the process and increase form completion rates.
Pricing
Mouseflow offers six pricing plans:
- Free: Free for 500 recordings per month
- Starter: $31/month for 5,000 recordings
- Growth: $109/month for 15,000 recordings
- Business: $219/month for 50,000 recordings
- Pro: $399/month for 150,000 recordings
- Enterprise: Price not listed for 200,000+ recordings
- Quoted prices are for yearly payments. Monthly payments are higher.
#7 Google Workspace Apps
Best for team collaboration
Price: Starting at $6/user/month. Free version available for personal use.
Google Workspace, launched in 2006, includes tools like Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Meet, Google Keep, and Google Drive.
The Best Part
A free version is available, perfect if you’re just starting out
The Worst Part
Integrating Google products with third-party apps can be tricky
Top Features
- File storage: Store all your content marketing assets, including text, documents, videos, and spreadsheets, in one place.
- Team collaboration: Write, edit, and comment in real-time.
- Content planning and tracking: Organize your content calendar in Google Sheets to plan and monitor your marketing efforts.
- Surveys and form creation: Create surveys with Google Forms to gather feedback, or conduct market research.
- Note-taking and brainstorming: Jot down ideas, create content production checklists, and save web content for inspiration in Google Keep.
Pricing
Google Workspace offers four pricing plans:
- Business starter: $6/user/month includes 30GB pooled storage
- Business standard: $12/user/month includes 2TB pooled storage
- Business plus: $18/user/month includes 5 TB pooled storage per user
- Enterprise: Custom pricing includes 5 TB pooled storage per user, with options to add more.
- The free version offers limited features, making it a good test drive for personal use or small teams.
#8 Mailchimp
Best for email marketing automation
Price: Starts at $13/month for 500 contacts with a free option available
Founded in 2001 and acquired by Intuit in 2021, Mailchimp is an automation marketing platform known primarily for its email marketing capabilities.
The Best Part
The freemium model is perfect if you’re a small to medium business starting out.
The Worst Part
Costs rise significantly as your contact list and automations grow.
Top Features
- Mailing list management: Collect email addresses via sign-up forms on your website and other online platforms to simplify lead generation.
- Newsletters: Keep your audience engaged by regularly sending out email newsletters. Mailchimp provides comprehensive tools for designing, scheduling, and sending your messages.
- Email marketing automation: Streamline your email marketing with automated sequences. From welcoming new subscribers to sending abandoned cart reminders, nurture leads at every step of their journey.
- Campaign performance analysis: Test your emails with A/B testing and monitor metrics like click-through rates to identify your most successful campaigns.
- Customizable templates: Choose from a wide selection of email templates that you can easily customize with the drag-and-drop editor.
- Landing page creation: Create targeted landing pages for your marketing campaigns to improve conversion rates.
- CRM functionality: Manage and segment your contacts based on various criteria so you can send highly personalized emails.
- Integration: Integrate with tools like WordPress and Shopify to streamline your email marketing efforts.
Pricing
Mailchimp offers four pricing plans:
- Free: Basic email marketing
- Essentials: Starts at $13/month, with a one-month free trial
- Standard: Starts at $20/month, with a one-month free trial
- Premium: Starts at $350/month
- Prices are for accounts with up to 500 contacts, with costs increasing as your subscriber list grows.
#9 ChatGPT
Best for content ideation and brainstorming
Price: Starts at $20 per user per month, with a free option for access to version 3.5 only
ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI and launched in 2022, is a large language model used for various purposes, including content creation.
The Best Part
Highly flexible for a variety of content marketing tasks, from generating blog post ideas to audience research.
The Worst Part
The technology is still relatively new. Without proper guidance, you might miss out on other powerful functionalities for content marketing.
Top Features
- Content ideation and brainstorming: Generate fresh content ideas using your specified keywords or topics and find new angles for blogs, videos, and emails.
- Content personalization: Write personalized emails or social media messages tailored to a segment of your audience by integrating ChatGPT with your CRM.
- Interactive content creation: Create chatbots, quizzes, polls, or interactive stories to provide interactive content on your blog.
- Content repurposing: Convert your blog content into different formats and create video scripts and social media snippets based on the same content.
- Social media posts: Create post ideas, hashtags, and CTAs tailored to your target audience, industry trends, or campaign objectives.
- Audience profiling: Develop detailed audience personas and gather customer insights on demographic data, interests, pain points, and behavior patterns.
ChatGPT offers four pricing plans:
- Free: Unlimited use of GPT-3.5 model
- Plus: $20/per user per month. Access to GPT-4 with some limits
- Team: $20/per user per month, billed annually. For more GPT-4 messages
- Enterprise: Tailored pricing for unlimited high-speed GPT-4 access
#10 Google Search Console
Best for tracking organic search performance
Price: Free
Google Search Console (GSC), formerly Google Webmasters, helps you monitor and optimize your website’s visibility on Google.
The Best Part
You get insights into your website’s performance on Google directly from the source.
The Worst Part
If you’re not familiar with SEO jargon, it may be challenging to navigate and use effectively.
Top Features
- Improve site discoverability: Submit your XML sitemap to help Google find and index all of your site’s pages.
- Site performance monitoring: Analyze impressions, click-through rates, and search position data to identify SEO priorities.
- Site error alerts: Fix website errors as soon as GSC detects them to mitigate negative impacts on your site ranking and user experience.
- Backlinks reporting: Monitor which sites link back to your site and which pages are most linked to identify which content resonates with readers.
- Improve mobile usability: Address mobile usability issues flagged by GSC to maintain your site’s visibility in search results. Fix common UX problems like closely spaced links or small font sizes.
- Security alerts: React quickly to any hacking or malware to protect your site.
- GA4 Integration: Identify which keywords drive engagement so you can focus your content marketing on high-performing topics.
- Request URL indexing: Ensure new or recently updated URLs are indexed by requesting indexing.
- URL Inspection: Inspect the technical health of any of your site’s URLs to support technical SEO efforts.
Pricing
GSC is a free tool by Google.
#11 Frase
Best for content optimization
Price: Starts at $14.99/month with a 5-day trial for $1
Founded in 2016, Frase.io is an AI-powered content creation and optimization tool. It helps you write SEO-optimized content based on top-ranking pages in the SERPs.
The Best Part
You don’t have to guess how to structure your content for SEO—as you will get recommendations tailored to your specific target keywords.
The Worst Part
Your content might become too similar to what’s already online, lacking a unique perspective.
Top Features
- Content brief creation: Generate content briefs using data from top-ranking pages and identify sections that match reader intent.
- Competitor analysis: Analyze how your content compares to the top 21 sites in the SERPs with heatmaps. Evaluate word count, headings, images, and backlinks.
- Content research: Research top sites quickly for content ideas, including topic depth, and related keywords. Generate outlines based on this research.
- SEO-optimized content: Optimize your on-page SEO from the start mirroring the structure of top-ranking sites’ key keywords, word count, and topics covered.
Pricing
Frase offers three pricing plans:
- Solo: $14.99/month for 4 articles/month
- Basic: $44.99/month for 30 articles/month
- Team: $114.99/month for unlimited articles
#12 CapCut
Best for video editing
Price: Free with a Pro version
CapCut, a subsidiary of TikTok and first released to the public in 2020, is a video editing app suitable for all types of video content.
The Best Part
The free version has a lot of features that allow you to instantly create professional-looking videos.
The Worst Part
If you’re an advanced video editor who wants more sophisticated features and capabilities, you might find that some tasks can not be done.
Top Features
- Editing flexibility across devices: Edit your videos on mobile and desktop, online or offline.
- Edit for every platform: Tailor your video’s aspect ratio to fit any social media platform, like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
- Easy editing: Trim, cut, merge, speed up, or slow down clips to tell your story your way.
- Advanced effects and filters: Throw in cool effects, filters, and animations like transitions and motion graphics.
- Customizable text and titles: Add text overlays with fonts that align with your message or brand.
- Library of music and sound: Choose from a vast library of music and sound effects or upload your own.
- Seamless voiceovers: Add narration with a text-to-speech feature.
- Auto captions: Automatically generate captions, with the option to proof and edit for accuracy.
- Clear Audio: Improve audio quality by cutting out filler sounds like “ums” and “ahs.” Reduce background noise for clarity and stabilize videos for smoother playback.
- Easy export and sharing: Export high quality videos and share directly to any social media platform. Or save them to your device.
Pricing
CapCut Pro offers two pricing plans:
- Monthly: $9.99
- Yearly: $89.99
CapCut is free. CapCut Pro gives you access to premium features such as professional color grading, skin retouching, and image noise reduction.
#13 Buffer
Best for social media management
Price: Starts at $6/month/for 1 channel, with a free option available
Buffer, developed in San Francisco in 2010, is a social media management and analytics platform.
The Best Part
The interface is user-friendly. You can quickly register, schedule, and publish posts with minimal learning required.
The Worst Part
It lacks the ability to schedule recurring posts or manage bulk uploads.
Top Features
- Multi-channel scheduling: Manage and schedule social media posts across nine channels from one dashboard.
- Handles different posts: Plan and schedule various content types such as text, images, and videos.
- Optimal scheduling: Schedule your posts for when your audience is most active online to increase the visibility and engagement of your content.
- Team collaboration: Work together with team members on social media campaigns. You can jointly create, review, and schedule content for a seamless social media strategy and execution.
- Social media analytics: Monitor and analyze your social media performance to identify the most engaging posts in terms of reach, clicks, and conversions.
- Organize posts: Tag posts by themes, topics, or campaigns for easier trend analysis and content strategy optimization.
- Content Planning and Brainstorming: Store all content ideas in one place, so switching between tools is unnecessary.
Pricing
Buffer offers four pricing plans:
- Free: Plan and publish posts on up to 3 channels.
- Essentials: $6/month, includes engagement and analytics for 1 channel
- Team: $12/month, unlimited team members for 1 channel
- Agency: $120/month provides custom access for 1 channel
- Pay yearly and save 2 months
Pick the Best Content Marketing Tools for Smoother Marketing Campaigns
For an effective content marketing setup, start with our top three tool recommendations. Semrush, Canva, and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) form the perfect trio to kickstart your efforts, each bringing distinct capabilities to boost your digital marketing strategy.
- Semrush: Use Semrush’s comprehensive toolkit to find and refine keywords that draw in your target audience and improve your content’s effectiveness. This can lead to better engagement, alignment with your audience’s needs, and, ultimately, maximizing your return on investment (ROI).
- Canva: Create visuals that capture the attention of your ideal website visitors and clarify your blog content. Canva’s user-friendly design tools make creating graphics for all your content needs simple.
- Google Analytics 4 (GA4): Understanding visitor behavior on your site can help you fine-tune your website for even better performance.
Are you interested in learning more about how Semrush boosts your website’s visibility? Read our in-depth Semrush review for all the details.