Affordable Content Marketing Tools
  • March 28, 2023

20 Affordable Content Marketing Tools to Boost Your Business in 2023

The success of marketing lies in the art of persuasion. And that, in turn, depends on the quality and quantity of your content. No wonder 90% of digital marketers use content to convince their customers.

But this isn’t a cakewalk! Producing content every day without fail is stressful.

That’s when content creation and content curation tools enter the scene, so you never run out of quality posts and continue nurturing better customer relationships.

What are content marketing tools?

As we know, content marketing is when you create and share relevant content to attract, engage, and retain your audience. This content can be in the form of articles, podcasts, videos, and other media.These tools help accomplish a variety of purposes, such as content ideation, production, optimization, and promotion.

Now, we know that businesses that succeed at content marketing stay on top of their audiences’ minds and feeds. They establish themselves as thought leaders of their respective industries and win unanimous trust.

So here we are to help you choose the best content marketing toolkit that will amplify your brand voice and double your efficiency streak. Look at this list of incredible content marketing tools that give you the most value for your money.

Content Marketing Tools

Social Media Marketing: SocialPilot

SocialPilot

SocialPilot stands out as a must-have social media management platform for its compelling set of features and affordability for small businesses.

You can schedule and publish social media posts on popular social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Vk, Tumblr, Google My Business, and Pinterest. Shorten links with popular URL shorteners without switching to another browser tab.

If you’re a social media marketer managing numerous clients, you can use SocialPilot’s bulk scheduling feature to schedule a bunch of posts in advance across time zones. Upload a CSV file containing your posts, URLs, dates and times when the posts must be published, and social media account IDs the posts need to go live on, and you are set.

Launching a new product or reminding people of an upcoming event on social media is a tried and tested way to create buzz and encourage rigorous sales or event registrations. That’s why SocialPilot allows you to repeat an important post across all social channels up to 10 times a day for many days in a row.

The content curation feature is a savior during times of content crunch. You can add the topic of interest and automatically get a list of relevant articles. You can also add a website or blog feed and set the number of new posts you want to send out.

The entry-level plan starts at a reasonable price of $30/month, dropping to $25.50/month on a yearly billing. It lets you set up the tool for 10 social media accounts for 1 user and includes the vital content scheduling and publishing features.

Social Media Scheduling Tools

Hire Freelance Writers: Narrato.io

Narrato is a great platform to hire quality freelance writers at affordable rates. Narrato’s workflow is set up for maximum efficiency. Content gets delivered quickly, and you only pay if you like it.

Narrato uses smart algorithms to match your requirements with writers’ skills. This eliminates the time-draining process of picking good freelance writers through proposals.

Be rest assured of original content as each work goes through an automatic plagiarism check before the final delivery. To top it all, Narrato also offers a free tool to search copyright-free images to add a much-needed visual appeal to your content.

You can use its trial offer to decide if the platform fulfills your needs. Ordering on the platform is quick and straightforward. Add credit and place multiple orders or pay as you go.

Its learning process is refined and finds you better writers each time you place a content order. Overall, Narrato is a very handy platform to get quality content quickly.


Planable

Planable is the tool to use for creating, planning, and collaborating on Pinterest. You can use it to plan your content ahead of time and automate a big part of your Pinterest campaigns. Whether you’re building your social media presense or trying new marketing channels, it’s essential to have tools that do the work without you breaking the bank.

With Planable, you can plan all your campaigns in the calendar view: with a single drag and drop, you can move posts from drafts to scheduled, add labels, and use filter & sort to navigate through the content easily. Also, collaborating with your team on pins is easily done in Planable. Just create the pin, add the details, then tag your teammates to get feedback, all in real-time.

You can also collaborate and plan content in Planable for Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, GMB, YouTube, and TikTok as it supports all of these major social platforms.

Test Planable features with a Free Plan that’s limited to 50 posts. A basic plan starts at $11/user.


Plagiarism Checker: DupliChecker

To boost your content marketing strategy, you need to come up with fresh and relevant content on a regular basis to capture the audience’s attention. No matter what platform you’re using for content marketing, you need to publish content that is original and not copied from another source to stand out from the competition.

To check whether your text is copied or genuine, you can access DupliChecker and use its plagiarism checker feature over it. This tool will be of great help to detect the instances of plagiarism existing in your text.

You can prevent your content marketing strategy from facing charges of plagiarism by using this plagiarism tool before updating any content. This utility can be accessed and used for free as many times as you desire.

If you want to unlock the advanced features of this online plagiarism checker, you can switch to the pro version by purchasing one of its premium plans. The basic plan is for $20 that you can use for deep searching and features, and check up to 10,000 words per search with it.


Graphics Creator: Canva

Canva is one of the best content marketing tools. Creating eye-pleasing visuals doesn’t require editing skills. Make logos, invitation cards, photo collages, social media banners, posts, certificates, and more in a few minutes.

Canva can be used for making informative infographics, the third most used type of content marketing. Canva’s predefined templates let you break down information and present them in a digestible format.

It is a user-friendly tool that lets you tweak any design in just a few clicks. Canva also enables you to share your content with team members for final edits and approvals. Once done, you can even share your posts from the tool itself. Canva also offers tutorials to help you get started.

On the free plan, you get 250,000+ free templates and 100+ design types. You can even upgrade it to a Pro plan at $12.99 or an Enterprise plan at $36.


Stock Images: iStock by Getty Image

It is difficult to imagine content marketing without images. Even email marketing campaigns that include images have a higher click-through rate than those without.

iStock gives you access to fantastic stock photo galleries that you can use in your blogs, social media posts, and more to hook your audience to your brand. iStock by Getty Images offers 88 million royalty-free photos, vectors, illustrations, videos, and exclusive images.

Images and particularly illustrations on iStock win you over with their technical and creative quality. Look for high-quality stock videos for your website or social media using their AI-powered search.

iStock offers two payment methodologies. You pay for images with credits, and each image file costs a certain number of credits, starting at $12 for one credit. You can also buy a subscription plan instead of credit to download 10 images a month for $40.


Pop Creation Tool: Picreel

Picreel is a simple popup tool that lets you target your website visitors with personalized popups at the perfect moment. The tool provides 100+ templates to help you build a variety of popups, including exit-intent, capture forms, nano bars, sign-up offers, and many more.

You can closely track visitors’ digital footprints and click behavior to present them with the most relevant content that strikes the right chords. For example, when people show signs of leaving, you can pull them back with irresistible offers and convince them to complete a purchase, share their contact details, or subscribe to your newsletter.

The tool’s A/B testing functionality lets you test the water before going full throttle with your campaign. It helps you identify which designs, fonts, text, colors, and CTAs will work best for your campaign.

You also get built-in reports that provide comprehensive insights into your top and poor-performing campaigns. These insights can be used to measure your visits, impressions, and conversions..

iStock offers two payment methodologies. You pay for images with credits, and each image file costs a certain number of credits, starting at $12 for one credit. You can also buy a subscription plan instead of credit to download 10 images a month for $40.


CRM with Email Marketing: BIGContacts

BIGContacts is a powerful CRM and email marketing solution that helps you automate the delivery of emails to leads and customers, thereby saving you a considerable amount of time. It eliminates the need to manually share emails and intelligently modifies campaigns based on where a prospect clicks in the email or what stage of the sales cycle they are currently in.

By letting you set up recurring emails and automated reminders, BIGContacts ensures that no critical follow-up opportunity is missed. You can also craft highly personalized emails using the contact management capabilities of this CRM solution. It also lets you store and use templates to scale your marketing efforts.

The tool lets you design drip campaigns to nurture your leads effectively. BIGContacts also offers a suite of reporting and analytics tools to help you stay updated with the performance of your email marketing campaigns.

All your previous interactions and associated contact information can be found in one place, so you never lose context. This marketing automation tool also lets you define custom actions for triggering your marketing campaigns.

BIGContacts is highly affordable, with plans starting from $5/user/month.


Content Discovery: Feedly

If your way of discovering awesome content is to browse the internet or bookmark your favorite blogs, you’re missing out.

There’s a far more efficient and rewarding way of staying on top of new and interesting content in your industry. And that’s a feed aggregator named Feedly.

Feedly curates content aligned to your topic keywords that you can organize into feeds. Preview a source to determine if it publishes articles related to your industry or not.

Save your favorite articles to boards or share them across Twitter and Google news feeds, LinkedIn, Evernote, or an SMM tool (currently supports Hootsuite and Buffer).

As your one-stop RSS feeder, Feedly has over a hundred sites feeding content by the hour for a steady read. Feedly’s AI research assistant Leo further helps in meaningful board curation. Set priority topics and trends for tracking and get recommendations. It beats the efforts of sifting through a sea of information.

Feedly’s Pro package starts at $6/month when billed annually for 1000 sources and without AI assistance. For your own Leo, upgrade to Pro+ at $12 to access 2500 sources.


Website Feedback Software: Qualaroo

Well-written website content optimized to search engines and people is crucial to the success of any online business. It is extremely helpful if the users of your business website can tell you what it’s missing and where it shines.

While you can send out surveys via email, the response rate of email surveys is low, preventing you from getting the full picture of how visitors perceive your website.

Qualaroo takes a different approach to customer and website user surveys by engaging them. The tool offers different templates for page-level customer feedback and lead generation. In the context of content marketing, you can gauge the usefulness of your content by choosing predefined questions for your survey, like ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’ and ‘What encouraged you to visit our site?’.

There are 10 question types, including checkboxes, dropdown, and text-based. You can target the questions to specific audiences. As the tool offers several targeting options, you can be sure that the right people view your forms and aren’t turned off by surveys irrelevant to them.

The survey responses shed light on the aspects of your website that can be improved and reveal what topics customers and users would want to read on your website. Consistently improving your website’s content will help you drive more conversions and deepen your understanding of customer intent.

As far as user-friendliness is concerned, Qualaroo gets a full score. It has a knowledge center that helps you get started with the tool.

Used by eBay, Shopify, and Udemy, Qualaroo is an excellent addition to your content marketing toolkit. The Essential plan is available at $100/month for 100K pageview tracking. You can leverage features like survey customization, advanced reporting, and audience targeting of Premium plan at $200/month.


SEO Audit: Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO research and analysis tool, which would be a great addition to your content marketing toolset. You can use Ahrefs for checking backlinks, conducting keyword research, and monitoring your competitors.

Along with these basic tasks, the Ahrefs tool can be used to identify technical SEO issues, monitor the internet for unlinked mentions, monitor backlinks, check URL rankings, prepare audit reports, and find guest posting opportunities.

The tool uses SEO metrics to provide quantitative data for every website analyzed. If you are new to this tool, try out the various core functions and side features.

You can start a 7-day trial for $7 and choose any of the plans as per your team size and needs.


Email Marketing: SendGrid

As your business picks up momentum, automating your email saves time on repetitive email writing and sending to leads and customers. With the email marketing solution SendGrid, you can set up recurring newsletters to customers or a drip campaign to guide prospects down the sales funnel.

As a free SendGrid user, you can send 100 emails a day as long as you use the platform. You can also opt for its Essential plan at $14.95/month and send 100,000+ emails each month.

Creating an email is super easy. Use modules to add the building blocks of your images with drag and drop or upload them directly.

Similarly, create a signup form and select the contact list to add new signups. This way, you can stay in the loop about who has opted-in to your email newsletter or advertising.

Setting up automation is also a breeze. Choose pre-built automation or define your custom automation. SendGrid offers built-in spam testing and link validation, so only regulatory-compliant mail goes out.

There’s also a ton of useful analytics to help you monitor email campaign performance, like the number of emails sent, opened, bounced, link clicks, and unsubscribers. Get statistics by the email client, device, browser, and geography.

Opt for Expert Insights to your plan for monthly reports on your campaign along with recommendations on improving results.


Graphic and Video Creator: Placeit

This content marketing tool is very helpful for marketing teams, business owners, or startups because it does everything for you!

Placeit is a powerful design tool that will help you accomplish any design task as per your needs. Create logo, business card, and social media campaign designs with ease.

Save time by choosing a design template and filling in your information. Placeit also has an unlimited library of mockups, from mugs, apparel to responsive devices.

  • Choose your template, mockup, or video
  • Fill in your information
  • Customize colors, fonts, and images
  • Download

With Placeit, you can also make videos in seconds. Choose your favorite video template and customize it. You can add up to 10 slides, access their original soundtracks, and preview your video as you create it. Try their free templates to see the magic for yourself.


Project Management Tool: Trello

Trello is another content marketing tool that you must use to streamline your content efforts. With so many responsibilities and deliverables, it is easy to lose track of the status of each one. Trello is a simple project collaboration tool that sums up your project status in a dashboard.

Add projects, teams, tasks, and stages. Your team just needs to drag and drop deliverable cards at relevant stages. It’s easy to visualize your task progress with the intuitive features of Trello.

The tool is so easy to use that you need no demo. Even beginners can pick it up and use it hassle-free. Trello also offers automation triggers to eliminate repetitive tasks.

Trello also supports several integrations like Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, and Slack for file sharing. You can even use it from its mobile app, which is equally efficient.

Trello provides a free plan, but you can only add up to 10 boards. You can upgrade it to Business Class or Enterprise for just $12.5/month and $17.50/month respectively.


Popup Builder Tool: Poptin

Poptin is a free popup builder that lets you create high converting popups and contact forms in minutes, with no coding required. You can set up your popup campaigns to their maximum potential by equipping them with the right conversion optimization features.

It helps marketers and digital agencies to generate traffic and convert it into leads and customers. Track users’ behavior using Poptin and present them with content that interests them.

With over 40+ customizable templates, you can create mobile-responsive designs with ease, such as lightboxes, slide-ins, bars, overlays, gamified popups (spin the wheel, scratch card, pick a gift), countdown popups, video popups, mobile popups, social popups, widgets, email forms, and more.

To make sure you convert the right people at the right time, choose from a wide variety of smart triggers and targeting rules. Such options can help you improve sales conversions, reduce cart abandonment, drive more email subscribers, and boost engagement.

Poptin is free to use forever. You may also opt to subscribe to any of its paid plans to get access to more advanced features and tools.


GIF Editing Tool: Motionbox

Need to cut out the monotonous text block? GIFs will do the trick. It’s a fun way to represent your mood, make an online jest, or add some engaging trappings to your digital design. GIFs, however, come with some exciting text or subtitles.

Editing such images may be a daunting task for many, but if you ever need to add text to your GIF, you can count on the Gif Editor tool from Motionbox. This tool comes with a simple drag-and-drop editor that lets you seamlessly add text to any GIF image.

It also lets you add elements that will further turn your content into a visually engaging piece. You can include shapes, background images, and audio. There’s also a set of extensive templates that speeds up the entire process of creating videos as well.

That’s not all. If you run a podcast and want some of your episodes in video formats to share them with your social media folks, Motionbox will help you do that in a blink too.


Website Security: UpGuard

UpGuard is a powerful cybersecurity product that helps your online business stay secure. You can use UpGuard’s free website security scanner to analyze your website, email, network, and domain security risks and improve your security score.

For content marketing teams, it’s essential to maintain your website’s security as it’s a critical trust signal for website visitors. Factors such as strong HTTPS encryption also help improve your SEO performance, as search engines consider this a ranking signal.

Besides basic website security, UpGuard analyzes 70+ potential attack vectors that could lead to a data breach and helps you remediate these risks.

It’s easy to get started with the free version. You can also start a 7-day trial for free and choose any plan that suits your needs.


Project Management Software: Indy

You can streamline and manage your content marketing projects with Indy, an all-in-one project management software that helps you take control of your freelance business from beginning to end. Generate new leads with easy-to-use proposals, contracts, and form templates that let you create, customize, and send off in minutes.

Indy has task management, automatic time tracking, file storage, and an intuitive calendar app to keep multiple content marketing projects flowing smoothly so you never miss a deadline. And when you’ve wrapped up a project, you can quickly generate an invoice and send it off to clients in seconds. You can even set up recurring invoices to automate the process.

Then use the calendar app as a command center for monitoring all tasks, invoices, proposals, and contracts. Indy Calendar supports 2-way sync with Google Calendar to keep your entire content schedule together in one place.

But the real magic is how some of Indy’s tools integrate to streamline your workflow. Create to-do’s right in the calendar app with task management integration. Then you can track your hours by turning any calendar event into a time track. And when you’ve wrapped up a project, turn those time tracked hours into an invoice with just a couple clicks.

Indy has a free forever plan that gives you limited access to all of Indy’s premium tools, including proposals, contracts, forms, invoices, and time tracking. You’ll also have full access to task management, a calendar app, chats, and 1 GB of file storage. For unlimited access to all of Indy’s premium tools plus 500 GB of storage, you can join Indy’s Pro Bundle for just $9/month.


Content Writing: Attrock’s Headline Analyzer

Headlines form an important part of SEO. After all, they compel a searcher to click on them to land on your page. That makes it critical for you to ensure that your headlines are well optimized so they click with your audience.

This is where Attrock’s Headline Analyzer comes in. This tool analyzes your headlines and gives them a score out of 100. It also suggests various changes that you should consider making to them to increase their score and effectiveness.

From identifying positive and negative sentiment through words, it also helps you correct the sentiment around your headline.

The best part here is that the tool is completely free and it’s pretty easy to use as well. All you have to do is add a headline in the box and the tool will do its work.


Content Optimization: Paraphraser

The most important part of any content marketing campaign is ultimately the content itself. The quality of the write-up and the ease with which it can be read are important aspects of writing. They determine whether the audience will engage with that content or not.

Normally, this sort of thing is done during editing, as the writer is more focused on getting their thoughts out in the first draft. However, this process can be quite time-consuming and tiresome. With Paraphraser, you can do all of this with ease. It is an AI-powered paraphrasing tool that rephrases your text while retaining its actual meaning.

Simply put, you just upload or paste your problematic content into the tool and select one of the paraphrasing modes. Each mode does a different sort of rephrase, i.e., some make the content more formal, others make it more readable, and some just replace difficult words with simple ones.

With this tool, you can deal with all of these issues without even batting an eye, and ensure that your content has the best writing quality. This will improve the engagement rate and dwell time of the content and improve its SERP ranking. And the best thing is that you can do this for free since the tool is freemium.


Zonka Feedback

Zonka Feedback can be a valuable addition to your content marketing toolkit. You can gather insights on your audience’s preferences, pain points, and needs. This information helps you create content that is more relevant and engaging to your target audience.

Zonka Feedback can measure the success of your content marketing campaigns by asking your audience to rate the relevance and usefulness of your content. Thus you can adjust your strategy accordingly.

Surveys can also be used to generate new content ideas by asking your audience what topics they would like to see covered or what questions they have. So you can create content that is more aligned with their interests and needs.

Zonka Feedback offers two pricing categories for its services to cater to the varying needs and budgets of individuals and businesses alike. The first category is Personal Plans, which includes a basic free plan, an Essential plan priced at $24 per month, and a Starter plan priced at $44 per month.

The second category is Business Plans, which includes the Professional plan priced at $79 per month, the Growth plan priced at $169 per month, and the Enterprise plan priced at $429 per month. Additionally, there are Custom plans available for businesses that require personalized solutions. The pricing structure aims


Ready to roll?

Whether you’re getting started with or are planning to level up your content marketing, the right tools can help you get more work done in less time.

Save time to focus on higher-value marketing tasks with new content marketing strategies. Share eye-catching visual content at the best time in one go. Automate repetitive email marketing and content discovery tasks. Lastly, never miss out on any opportunity to engage with your audience.

You can start with SocialPilot and take its free trial. Don’t wait anymore and leverage it to elevate your branding to begin with.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the types of content marketing?

Content marketing includes the following types:

  • Blogs
  • Videos
  • Ebooks
  • Case Study
  • White papers
  • Infographics
  • Emails
  • Podcasts
  • Social media posts
  • Lead magnets
  • Presentations
  • Reports

What is the value of content marketing?

Content marketing is valuable for engaging your audience in the long term. It is generally used to spread awareness about your business where your target audience actively participates in your promotion by reacting to your content in likes, shares, comments, and more.

What is the role of content?

Content plays a vital role in authenticating your brand. It also establishes you as a thought leader in your niche. The quality of your content can also make or break your prospects’ trust in you. Content marketing acknowledges the audience of your presence and lures them into believing that you are the best fit for their needs.

What kind of businesses can take help of these content marketing tools?

Businesses from every industry will benefit from using these content marketing tools to improve their overall marketing strategy. Big consumer brands, retail sectors, IT companies, service-based businesses, and more can use content marketing.

Content marketing provides excellent results for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) companies. Although the strategies used by B2B and B2C companies vary, both can benefit from the help of content marketing tools, which will help them reach out to their target audience effectively.

When can I see the results from using these content marketing tools?

A content marketing strategy is meant to work long-term, but it provides phenomenal results even when used for a short while. When you first begin using these content marketing tools to aid your strategy, you will see an increase in social media shares and witness the emergence of new leads. The only rule here would be to remain consistent in your content marketing efforts. Good content is timeless, and it works as an asset to build brand loyalty and improve sales for a long time to come.

In what ways are these content marketing tools advantageous?

By using these content marketing tools, you will allow your content marketing strategy to mature effectively. Over time, you will see an improvement in brand awareness, lead generation, engagement, customer retention, return on investment, search visibility, and authority within the industry.

Which platform is the best for ecommerce content marketing?

Here are some of the best ecommerce content marketing platforms:

  • Contently
  • HubSpot
  • Joomag
  • Ceros
  • Percolate
  • Mintent
  • DivvyHQ
  • ContentStudio
  • Stackla
  • Zerys

What are the Pillars of Content Marketing?

The five pillars of content marketing success are:

  1. Know your audience well.
  2. Plan content that caters to the needs of your potential customers at each stage of the sales cycle (awareness, consideration, and decision).
  3. Create those content types that decision-makers want to read. For instance, a B2B buyer can value research reports and studies over other content types.
  4. Promote your content through social media campaigns and email marketing campaigns.
  5. Measure the performance of your content. Also, analyze its progress.

What are the 7 steps of content marketing?

Here’s are the 7 simple steps of content marketing you should definitely follow to get the ball rolling:

  1. Plan content based on certain parameters such as what kind of audience you are targeting, the topics you will cover, the social media channels you will use, and so on.
  2. Create content that is high-quality and engaging. It should also offer readability.
  3. Develop content assets such as blog posts, articles, infographics, and videos.
  4. Ensure you create shareable content and then promote it through viral marketing. This kind of marketing involves the use of UGC (user-generated content), email marketing tactics, and social media sharing.
  5. Promote content via word-of-marketing, social media, and email marketing.
  6. Repurpose content i.e. use the existing content to promote your offerings.
  7. Lastly, always measure your success with content marketing.

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