Creating high-quality content marketing doesn’t require significant investments in various services or software licenses. There are several free alternatives available in the market, such as those for writing, graphic design, and task organization. Our curated content marketing toolkit is designed to assist you in producing professional content effortlessly.
Recommended Tools for Marketers by Smoothly
Content Calendar
A content calendar aids in planning content and maintaining a desired publishing schedule. However, you don’t need anything more complex than an Excel sheet to create a content calendar! Excel is versatile, allowing you to construct a marketing timeline or a content calendar template. You can customize it to suit your needs. Pre-made content calendar templates can also be downloaded for free. These templates serve as a foundation for planning and publishing content.
Writing
Content creation is often the most intensive phase of marketing, so all available tools for text production should be considered.
Traditional office tools like Word suffice, especially for getting started. Office tools also include spell-check and formatting utilities. The market also offers more advanced text generation tools that utilize machine learning and AI, such as Jasper.ai and Grammarly.
Even the best writers can become blind to their own work, so proofreading is advisable before publishing. With the free Oikofix tool, you can proofread text in both Finnish and English. Oikofix checks for spelling and punctuation errors and provides suggestions for corrections. Grammarly operates similarly to Oikofix but is specifically tailored to English content. This tool not only identifies writing errors but also assesses text clarity and engagement.
Image and Video Banks
It’s recommended to invest in your company’s own image bank, where you can gather images of logos, staff, and products. Not every purpose will have a suitable image available, and that’s where online image banks come in.
Images from these banks are free to use and modify. They can be used, for instance, to illustrate digital services or specific atmospheres. Free image banks include Canva, Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay, with the latter two also offering videos. If your need for images and videos is greater, consider paid options like Shutterstock.
Image Editing and Graphic Design
It’s crucial that published images align with your company’s brand. Sometimes, the right color scheme needs to be created through editing to establish a suitable brand theme. The free version of Canva is well-suited for image processing. Canva enables you to scale content images for various publishing platforms, perform light editing, and add text, graphics, or animations to images.
Additionally, Canva allows you to design mobile videos optimized for platforms like Instagram Reels, Stories, and TikTok. Other great editing programs include Snapseed and Adobe Lightroom.
Scheduled Publishing
Marketing content should be planned well in advance to avoid last-minute rushes during publication. Being organized also supports maintaining a consistent publishing schedule. With Facebook’s Meta tool, you can schedule posts for Facebook and Instagram. For scheduling on LinkedIn, Twitter, and TikTok, you’ll need a separate tool like Brandwatch, Hootsuite, Later, or Planoly.
Task Organization
Organizing marketing tasks simplifies their execution. Platforms like Asana, Todoist, and Trello allow you to create projects, make task lists, delegate tasks, and schedule task deadlines, ensuring that all tasks remain orderly.
Did you know that Smoothly has been developing writing technologies and tools for quite some time, enabling our content creators to produce high-quality content without the hassle of figuring out tools?
- Explore our services. Here, you can read examples of tasks and content you can delegate to Smoothly’s content creators.
- Frequently Asked Questions. Here, you’ll find comprehensive answers to common questions or can directly get in touch with us.
Hundreds of marketers are already benefiting from Smoothly’s digital service platform for marketing support. Try flexible content creation and delegation of marketing routines now, a 3-month trial period – without additional commitments.