15 Content Tools We Still Use | Part 2

Which content marketing tools are the best? The ones you use every day. In this two-part article series, I will therefore present the tools that have become established in content production at Crispy Content® over the years and that we use every day. In the first part, I have devoted myself to the tools for content discovery and content planning. Today, I will focus on the production tools and the distribution tools. Have fun reading!

Content Production

Google Docs

Whether for Crispy Content® or in customer projects: We produce literally everything in Google Docs.  Not only is it collaborative and has rights management so we, our customers and our freelance authors can work together on a document. Google Docs integrates perfectly with all our other tools, such as the Airtable mentioned in the first part, because every document has an individual URL and can be accessed this way and through any browser.

In addition, Google Docs integrates important tools for us via add-on, such as the Semrush Writing Assistant (a killer feature for content optimization, which Ahrefs unfortunately does not have) or the ProWritingAid Grammar Checker And Writing Coach, which we will come to shortly.

The price? Google Docs are unbeatably free of charge.

Iphone, Apple Notes und Airdrop

The desk is not necessarily the place that is most conducive to creativity. The best ideas always come to me when you don't need them - on the road.

It's good if you can capture these ideas quickly, easily and safely. The iPhone has proven to be a real blessing in this respect, as it functions as a creative ecosystem:

• Manuscripts are recorded with one click in the very robust Apple Notes and are already transcribed quite cleanly by the dictation function.
• Thanks to the excellent camera, pictures are captured in a quality that is at least sufficient for normal web content production.
• Back at the home desk, all documents are sent to the Mac via AirDrop. There the editing is done first.

Surely Apple Notes is not the first choice for all other purposes, but it is for spontaneous notes. Unlike Google Docs, new documents can be created locally without an Internet connection. It also has a distraction-free interface, doesn't demand much order and structure (the wrong time when the muse is kissing you) and runs quick and stable.

Costs for an Iphone SE 2020? 399 USD.

Semrush Writing Assistant

Every text should be optimized in some way to the needs of the search engine and the reader, the Semrush Writing Assistant helps to do this. The tool analyzes the content of our competitors and provides ideas on how to write successful search engine friendly content. Semrush Writing Assistant is an addon for Google Docs and WordPress, which uses the interface to the above-mentioned Semrush. Either the SEO templates are created in Semrush itself and pushed into the addon, or they are created ad hoc during the writing process. During the writing process we also show you how high the quality of our content is.

Unlike tools like Rankmath or Yoast, Semrush has a database of hundreds of millions of crawls, a real killer feature.

However, there is one limitation: non-English language texts can only partially enjoy the functions that analyze "readability", "originality" and "tone of voice".

The plugin is available for free with your Semrush account.

Deepl

Crispy Content® addresses with its offer not only companies from Germany, but from all over the world. Therefore, every German text must also be translated into English.

For this purpose we use DeepL. The free application translates text content via machine learning and neural networks. English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Japanese and Chinese are supported.

The translations are certainly not perfect. While the translation of English content into German does not always work well, especially in the marketing area (but fortunately can be corrected by us), it works quite well in the other direction.

DeepL is free and complements the following product perfectly.

ProWriting Aid

ProWritingAid is an editing program. It contains a comprehensive toolbox which can correct and optimize English language content. It checks spelling, grammar, style, expression, sentence structures and much more. The tools can be used directly in the browser or as an add-on in Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Scrivener or Google Chrome. The tool does an exceptionally outstanding job and saves us a lot of money.

Unfortunately, the tools of ProWritingAid are only offered for the English language. In our case, the tool acts as a correction level for the automatically translated English texts from DeepL.

ProWritingAid costs us 79 EUR in the annual license.

Multimedia Tools

Every content must be visually enriched. But to include visual editors in this article would go beyond the scope of this article. The tools we use for image and moving image production we list here:

• Affinity (image editing)
• Davinci Resolve (video editing)
• Design Wizard (video editing)
• Invideo (video creation)
• Tiny PNG (image compression)
• Unsplash (image database)

A recent addition is Visme, a visual editor that allows even creatively less talented content marketers (in our experience, those who have to manage their own campaigns and are therefore the spreadsheet guys) to create appealing infographics. Here they explain how it works.

The market is driven by the pace in social networks, constantly in motion - every day a new software. It's worthwhile to look at the AppSumo platform from time to time, because it publishes favorable software deals in image and video creation according to the coupon model.

Content Distribution

Content Studio

Any content that is produced must also be distributed. Considering the fact that at Crispy Content® we not only serve our blog in English and German but also the Twitter and LinkedIn feeds and Medium and LinkedIn for the syndication of our blog posts, it's easy to lose track.

We keep the overview through Content Studio. Again, the description of the various functions the software provides us with would go beyond this article. I can reveal only this much:

• The tool has a discovery module that simplifies the identification of relevant and "resonating" content (as in Ahrefs), so we always have material for curating.
• As in Feedly, we can include RSS feeds from our preferred publishers.
• Using the planner module, we can organize for publication the curated content, but also our own content.
• The content is organized in queues, so that even during the holiday season the social media communication ends.

Content Studio has relieved us of the pressure of publishing in social networks at a stroke .

Content Studio costs 99 Euro USD per month in the version we use. However, in an AppSumo deal two years ago we bought a lifetime license for a onetime 49 USD. This is enough for years ;)

HubSpot

While we use Content Studio for distribution in the Top of Funnel, we use HubSpot for the Middle of Funnel.

To present HubSpot in detail would go beyond this article. Basically, it is a software ecosystem that meets all the needs of marketing, sales and customer support in the broadest sense.

From our point of view, the software shows its strengths, especially in the Middle of Funnel, when a lead is to convert from the anonymous website visitor.

Although our website and blog are hosted in WordPress, we already integrate the call-to-actions from HubSpot. One click and the user lands on a landing page, which is hosted per sub-domain no longer on the WordPress server, but in HubSpot. Shown forms also originate from HubSpot and the data that the user submits to us ends up in the contact database of the software. The remaining qualification processes up to individual sales talk also take place in HubSpot.

HubSpot costs us, although we are partners, in the current expansion stage about 800 EUR per month. However, for most companies the start is much cheaper. Just contact us if you have questions about the software.

The Summary

We have reached the end of the second part.

In the first part, we have dealt with the tools for content discovery and content planning. Click here for the article.

In summary, I can say it that none of the tools mentioned has all the features in specialization necessary in such a diverse work process as the production of creative and performance-oriented content. Therefore, the review of the technical vehicle fleet only makes sense when considering the use cases production process.

It has taken us years to reach this conclusion. I hope that I could spare you a little of this arduous journey.