Today I want to talk about the top 10 marketing platforms and tools you need to know about in content marketing going into 2020. Remember, content is part of the client buying process. You're moving your prospective clients from awareness stage to consideration to decision to post-decision and purchase stage. You can click on the client buying process blog for more info.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, "Content marketing's purpose is to attract and retain customers by consistently creating, curating relevant and valuable content with the intention of changing or enhancing a consumer's behavior. Remember that it's an ongoing process that's best integrated into your overall marketing strategy, and it focuses on owning media, not renting it."
Now here are the top 10 marketing platforms and tools I'd like you to know about.
Table of Contents
HubSpot
Moz
Buzzsumo
Ubersuggest
Answer the Public
CoSchedule's Headline Analyzer
Portent's Content Idea Generator
Grammarly
YouTube
Vidyard
HubSpot
HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing and sales platform for B2B and technical service businesses. They have a content management system that includes a blogging platform and personalized website content and landing pages personalized to each persona in your customer journey. HubSpot also has a social media scheduling tool. They turn strangers into prospects into customers into promoters using their famous flywheel analogy: the attract-engage-delight model.
Moz
Moz brings a powerful SEO tool set. It does technical site audits, rank tracking of traffic-driving keywords, backlink analyzing, and keyword research. It's an all-in-one SEO tool that we use. 
There's also a great tool I want to highlight called the MozBar. It's a free Chrome extension and it lets you see page in a 40 and the all important domain of 40 and on page elements. We use it every time to write a blog posts. We see what's ranking, what the keywords are, what the search volume is so we can serve better client content to you, our prospective clients and clients.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is great at finding content that's popular on social media. You can research billions of data points to find what's the highest performing piece in a particular niche. And that'll help you hone in your content strategy for your social media and what's the best content to share. You can also find the top influencers using the platform. And another great feature is that you can create alerts for your brand so that you can respond first. I would say it's a step above Google Alerts.
Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is a poor man's tool for doing keyword research. Ubersuggest helps you find long-tail keywords for content marketing strategy and production. It's part of Neil Patel's website. It aggregates data from Google Suggest to give you the best long-tail keywords.
Answer the Public
I like Answer the Public because it's a data visualization tool. It visualizes the questions that your input keyword generates. For example, I could put in "content marketing" and then it will come up with a circle of different questions. So it visualizes questions, prepositions and comparisons. It also gives alphabetical results at the end.
This tool gives you a good overview of what your audience could be asking when they're looking at your solutions. This is a great tool for coming up with your content marketing strategy and calendar.
CoSchedule Headline Analyzer
After you're done writing your blog post or white paper, you can go to the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer webpage to see how effective your headline is. It's a free way to see how good your headline could be. So did you know that an effective blogging tactic is to have 20-plus headlines drafted per article? That's according to Orbit Media. So CoSchedule makes it easier to find the best headline from all those options.
Portent's Content Idea Generator
The Portent Content Idea Generator gives you ideas about blog title topics. If you're short on ideas after researching Moz, BuzzSumo and Answer the Public and you want an answer, go to the Portent Content Idea Generator. You can type in a subject and then it'll automatically spit out a blog title for you to use. The content idea generator is a shortcut to finding the right content to write about in record time.
Grammarly
Now after writing your content, you'll need to proofread and edit it. Grammarly has free and paid versions that helps your writing become clear, compelling, and, most importantly, mistake-free and error-free. I like Grammarly for its price and ease-of-use. I'm putting all my writing on Grammarly as they have a version for Chrome, an online editor, a version for windows, and one for Microsoft Office as well.
YouTube
I like putting videos on YouTube. It's part of our content strategy for getting clients to buy eventually. YouTube is great for awareness stage content. For example, videos that go with this blog post is awareness stage and possibly consideration stage content. There's also the "more videos" feature that you can see at the end of YouTube videos, which is why I recommend that you put more critical content such as your decision stage and post-purchase stage content on other platforms instead.
Vidyard
We recommend Vidyard to put your decision and post-purchase content because there are no extra videos at the end of Vidyard. For example, if you want to schedule a meeting with us at the end of the video, we can put in a link to do that. We recommend putting case studies, about-the-company videos, and white paper videos on Viydard.
Now you can host your about-the-company videos too on YouTube. But remember, there's always the "more videos" feature at the end of YouTube videos, which may cause your audience to lose you at the end of the video because it'll hook on to another video, and it might be a competitor's videos. So these are the top 10 content marketing platforms and tools to use and to look at in 2020.
