B2B Marketers' Top Content Marketing Software Tools [Videos]

In April this year, Struto was awarded a HubSpot Agency Partner Client Impact Award in the Graphic Design Category. We also received an honourable mention for our entry into the Inbound Growth Story category. The Impact Awards celebrate agencies’ inbound marketing success, and in this round, Struto was the only UK-based agency to make the cut.

Today I’d like to introduce you to the team who contributed to the award-winning projects by presenting you with their favourite content marketing tools for making the B2B marketing magic.

[Ps. HubSpot has created an eBook comprising all the 2017 Round 1 winners, and you can download your own copy of the eBook here to learn about the work Struto and other award winning agencies are doing for their clients.]

Content Marketing Software Tools: Struto’s Marketing Team Speak Their Minds

Lauren Inggs - Digital Marketer and Content Writer

Grammarly “for correcting and enhancing your English language writing”

Lauren names Grammarly as her favourite (non-HubSpot) content marketing tool. Here’s why:

“I love the way Grammarly pushes you to improve the quality of your work. I simply upload my drafts to the tool, and within seconds I’ve got an in-depth editorial report with comments and suggestions for correcting and improving my work. From grammatical errors, sentences that run too long, repetitive words, and sentence structure: Grammarly does it all!”

“One of the most useful features is the plagiarism checker that compares your text to online sources, then highlighting non-unique phrases. When you use a great many different sources to research a topic, it becomes difficult to keep track of them all. The plagiarism checker lets you ensure that you’ve attributed sources correctly, used quotation marks where necessary, and have used our own tone of voice when paraphrasing.”

HubSpot WYSIWYG blog editor

Lauren’s favourite HubSpot tool is the WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) blog editor. She explains:

“While HubSpot allows you various ways for uploading and optimising your blog posts, their WYSIWYG (‘Inline Mode’) blog editor is my tool of choice. It lets me write, format, edit and publish – all in one place. The most important aspect is that I get to see the product as it’s taking shape. This allows me to adjust and tailor the visual layout of my blogs to ensure that the content comes to its right.

Kurt Buttress – Digital Marketer and Content Writer

Hootsuite

Kurt is the newest member of Struto’s marketing team. He bases his choice of Hootsuite’s social media management tool on his experience as one-man marketing team in his previous position as well as his weekend job as deejay:

“When you’re the face of a business, you have to create a strong personal brand. Establishing yourself as an industry leader, whether it’s in music or the b2b software sector, takes up enough of your day. Promoting your carefully created content on social media shouldn’t have to occupy much more of your time. Hootsuite cuts down on the time you spend on social media management by letting you publish, manage, and monitor your pages and profiles – all in one place.”

HubSpot’s Social Media Tool

As a new user of HubSpot’s all-in-one marketing software, the range of features available on the HubSpot social media management tool has blown Kurt away. Kurt gushes:

“I wish I had access to HubSpot’s software since the beginning of my career. The tool makes it a hundred times easier to manage multiple accounts – this is essential where a business has several representatives on social media. At this point I’ve only dabbled in the tool’s features. My next steps will be to dive into the reporting feature that gives you a quick overview of your results and the stream monitoring feature that lets you ‘listen in’ on industry-relevant social media chatter.”

Marcel Le Sueur – SEO Specialist

Moz Keyword Explorer and SERP Analysis Tool

As our in-house SEO specialist and Moz evangelist, it wasn’t difficult to guess Marcel’s most preferred external content marketing tool. More specifically, he highlights Moz’s new keyword exploration and SERP analysis tool:

“Moz launched this tool only a couple of months ago. They seem to have made a shift from trying to cover everything related to digital to honing down on SEO.”

“The Moz keyword explorer has supercharged my keyword research by giving me access to granular data and organising it in one comprehensive overview. Not only does it tell you the monthly volumes, difficulty and opportunity for a particular keyword, but it calculates a priority score for each item on your list. The SERP analysis tool gives you insight into the pages that are currently ranking at the top, helping you to keep tabs on your competitors and easy wins. Keyword suggestions can be filtered by a variety of conditions, from those phrased as questions to exact search terms. Discover a new keyword or topic to target? You just select the ones you like and add it to a new bucket.”

HubSpot’s Content Strategy Tool

When it comes to his favourite HubSpot tool, I don’t even have to ask. Marcel has been an evangelist of HubSpot’s brand new content strategy tool ever since Struto got to test the beta version earlier this year. Marcel gives me the low down on what the tool means for SEO specialists like him:

“Topic clusters are the next evolution of SEO and best practice in terms of site architecture. The topic cluster methodology guides you to select topics that are best aligned with your business’s focus areas and then to organise the related content that is favoured by search engines. Instead of scattering content across your website and blog pages and hoping it will communicate effectively, your website gets established on pillars (‘topic clusters’) that are neatly organised on your pages. Related content (‘satellite topics’) are linked back to each of these pillars, to create a neat internal linking structure. Planning and organising your content in this way communicates well with users and benefits your search engine rankings. HubSpot’s content strategy tool lets you whip together a topic cluster from scratch in five minutes flat!”

Estee Schroeder – Digital Marketing Strategist

Pocket for keeping up with industry content and client/team communications

Multi-tasking is the very nature of Estee’s position, which is why she chose Pocket as her favourite external content marketing tool.

“It’s more than just a content curation tool,” she explains. “Pocket lets me keep a tab on content sources and communications that I need to read or respond to. Here’s how it works: the tool syncs the articles, emails, and web pages I’ve placed in my Pocket to all my devices while I’m in the office. The content then becomes available for me to read offline while I’m commuting. What’s more is that there’s an iOS app with a text-to-speech feature that will read the content to you as you work out at the gym.”

HubSpot’s Workflows for marketing automation

“Marketing automation fascinates and challenges me at the same time,” Estee sighs wistfully when she tells me about HubSpot’s workflow – the one that’s made it to the top of her list.

“There’s no limit to the goals you can accomplish with the workflow tool by tailoring the conditions to trigger specific events. At its most basic, the tool lets you automate the sending of a series of emails according to a set timeline. But it does so much more than that! I’ve used the workflow tool to manage and cleanse our database, to send internal notifications, and for onboarding employees. The feature I love most is the live reporting. Seeing results as they come means it’s easy to A/B test, optimise, and adjust while a campaign is still in motion.”

Lizette Louw – Digital Marketer and Content Writer

To wrap up, here are my own favourite content marketing tools.

Blast – Google AdWords expanded text ad preview tool

Before discovering Blast, ad copy assignments filled me with more than a bit of trepidation. Writing ad copy is one of a very few tasks where the format of the finished product looks completely different from what it looks like on my word processor. How can I be sure that I’ve used my limited characters optimally? The solution: Blast’s preview tool! Not only does it take the guesswork out of what the finished product will look like, but it lets me play around until the phrasing is crystal clear.

HubSpot Academy

I have a confession: the thing I love most about my position as marketer and content writer is that I get to research and learn about new topics every day. This then is why my favourite content strategy tool is the HubSpot Academy. Certification courses that are open to everyone include the Inbound Marketing Certification, Inbound Sales Certification, and Email Marketing Certification. As a HubSpot customer, Struto and our clients get free access to all of the Academy’s courses and resources.

HubSpot’s All-In-One Marketing Tool

If you’ve been intrigued by what you’ve read, you can learn more about HubSpot’s all-in-one marketing and sales software on our website. As a HubSpot partner agency, we can guide you to find the best combination of software and support for your business. Get in touch with us to get started on your journey to better marketing.