Spicing up your content and optimizing it for your business’s marketing strategy is a good thing to do if you’re hoping to keep your readers interested. Internet users are constantly inundated with information from myriad sources, and to be heard in a crowd can be tough.

Here are 5 free tools your business can use to enhance your content marketing strategy, and the way that you present information.

1. Buzzsumo

This platform was created for people to identify what content is reverberating through social channels all across the web. With a simple keyword search, you can quickly discover what content is most popular for a particular industry or vertical, as well as who the biggest influencers are.

This information is valuable for a couple reasons. One, you gain insights into the types of content users want to read about, digest, and share online so that you can craft similar (yet unique) content for that industry. Two, you can identify the individuals who can best amplify your content and get it in front of relevant crowds in various social media channels.

You won’t be sorry that you started using this free tool, and I’d suggest checking it out as early as five minutes ago.

2. Haiku Deck

Storytelling is the truly the essence of good content, and Haiku Deck helps you tell your story in a visually compelling way. This great tool helps you develop relatively simple, but beautifully designed slides that can add the unique factor to the information you’re already distributing to your potential and existing clientele.

You definitely shouldn’t hesitate on putting this tool to good use for your next blog post, speaking engagement, or product pitch.

3. Tagxedo

This is a really cool tool for turning your blog content or press releases into word clouds. Why use a word cloud? Because word clouds add clarity to the content you’re presenting. It allows readers to quickly access the major trends and patterns of the information presented that could possibly be difficult to discern. Word clouds highlight key text in a way that makes it easy to digest and analyze.

Tagxedo lets you submit a URL, submit content, change the color and/or the font of the text, and change the shape to highlight your business information.

4. Storify

Plain and simple, Storify is a great tool for pulling content from your social feeds and embedding them onto your website, in your blog posts, etc.

If you engage social media users regularly, Storify can help you deliver a compelling story to blog readers in the form of a case study for example. You’ll definitely want to get familiar with this one.

5. Canva

If you’re not a graphic designer, and you don’t know how to leverage the full power of Adobe’s creative suite, then Canva is the tool for you. Canva allows you to turn business ideas into beautifully designed images that you can optimize for your blog posts, Facebook ads, flyers, and more. It uses a widgetized platform to help you drag images and icons onto visually appealing backdrops.

Have fun playing around with these new free tools! And definitely consider integrating their capabilities into your content marketing strategy.

Much success,

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• Is Posting Content Frequently Really the Sign of Good Content Marketing?
• Content Marketing: How to Separate Yourself from the Crowd
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