Exploring free online tools and apps that make Digital Content Marketing much easier for blog, video, and webinar marketing.
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Blogging Tools
Blogging as a form of digital content marketing is a tried and tested strategy, allowing for seamless keyword integration and generating entertaining and informative stories around your service or product. The following are some free tools that can help to make your online blog shine.
Grammarly
The first tool in my personal marketing toolbox is Grammarly. While I am confident in my own copywriting abilities, Grammarly ensures that my writing is the correct tone, is easily readable, and has proper grammar and syntax – all very important factors when optimising your content for search engine ranking – and all available with the free version.
I personally use the Grammarly extension for Firefox, which seamlessly nestles itself within the browser, offering suggestions in real-time with a small, subtle circle in the right-hand corner of the browser – a far cry from the days of the endearingly obnoxious Clippy in Microsoft Word! Its analysis of how copy reads tone-wise is very reassuring for me as someone who regularly has to fight the urge to end her sentences with smiley faces 🙂
I’ve also recently installed Grammarly for my mother-in-law, who is currently taking an Access to Nursing course and has definitely benefitted from the extension’s suggestions (and has also meant fewer proofreading trips for me!)
Hemingway
I came across Hemingway while on a Content Marketing and Brand Design training course, and it has already been a godsend for me as a creative writer. The browser-based app allows you to write directly on the webpage, providing real-time feedback on both the reading level, and the legibility, of your copy. Alternatively, you can paste something you made earlier. Hemingway offers another level of analysis for copy that Grammarly has already picked apart. Hemingway’s analysis of the required reading age has been nothing short of miraculous for me, as a creator hoping to publish stories for children!
Unfortunately, unlike Grammarly, the suggestions offered are few, if present at all – so it does need some trial-and-error editing.
Instapaper
I would describe Instapaper as ‘Pinterest for bookworms’. Instead of bookmarking and saving images, Instapaper allows you to bookmark papers and reports – allowing you to close all those tabs you have open on your browser, and shortening your poor overworked bookmarks toolbar! It also syncs your bookmarks across devices (as long as you’re on the same account), so the content is available wherever you are – even offline.
Another great feature is the ability to easily highlight and annotate particular phrases or sentiments that pique your interest – like writing notes in your favourite books, but much less heartbreaking and destructive. If you’re referring to a variety of sources and research in your blogs (fab!), Instapaper is invaluable.
Google Trends
Before you even begin writing a blog post, Google Trends allows you to check what keywords and phrases people are searching for, allowing you to use these key analytics to inform your content marketing strategy. By typing in a particular topic or search term in the search bar, such as ‘content marketing’ or ‘blog’, you can see at a glance what people are looking to find online – and you can segment this further via region or by city. This is a great way to make sure you’re including trending keywords in your content marketing!
Answer The Public
Content marketing bridges the gap between the consumer’s problem and the consumer’s solution. Keeping this in mind, a great way to find out what consumers’ problems actually are is a site called ‘Answer The Public‘. By entering a couple of keywords related to your chosen topic or niche, such as ‘digital painting’, ATP will provide you with the relevant top questions being asked. All you need to do is find a question you can answer, such as “where learn digital painting”, script up said answer, and you’re away!
monday.com content calendar
A great app to combine with your research on Google Trends and Answer The Public is monday.com’s content calendar template. For example, if there’s an annual awareness day coming up in the next couple of months that you’d like to create content for, you could search that awareness topic on Google Trends with the sample timescale set to the year prior – using that information to inform your keywords and topics this year around.
Another literally priceless tool, you only need a monday.com account to start taking advantage of their calendar. Their easy-to-use UI allows you to plan content with little to no hassle, and anyone familiar with their mum’s kitchen calendar will recognise the layout. When you select a date, you can add as many or as few details as required, then you can select a category which colour-codes your campaigns – so you can see at a glance what stages your various campaigns are at, whether they’re drafts or ready-to-go.
You’re also able to easily share your calendar with colleagues, so if you’re part of a team you can sync your plans and ensure that everyone is on the right page (or month).
SEOQuake
Now your content is planned, researched, written, checked for correct grammar, and proofed – now it’s time to make sure you’ve got your chosen keywords (or relevant alternatives) properly sprinkled throughout your blog. To do this, I installed SEOQuake’s free Firefox extension, which provides analysis of the necessities of SEO in blogging. By clicking ‘summary report’ on the extension’s toolbar (which can be moved to a different position or removed from certain domains entirely), I’m provided with information regarding keyword density within my copy, along with analysis of my metadata, titles, headings, images, and many other factors that are essential for Search Engine Optimisation. Using the keyword density feedback, I can easily see whether or not the keywords or keyphrases that I’m targeting are being noticed by Google’s algorithms.
Video Content Marketing Tools
Video marketing could be considered one of the most successful forms of content marketing in 2023, with a variety of social media platforms adjusting their algorithms to prefer video-based content. The following tools are priceless for making easy, quick video content to impress – sometimes just from your phone.
Splice
I picked up Splice when I used to stream video games on the streaming platform Twitch, after the app was recommended to me by another content creator via TikTok. At the time, it was perfect for editing my stream clips, transforming them into short-form video content, and ensuring that the videos were the correct resolution for a variety of social media platforms. I’ve since hung up my cat-ear headphones (mostly), but Splice has remained very valuable whenever I’ve needed to edit video content on the go.
While Splice does offer a premium version, the free features are more than suitable for most video editing tasks. To begin with, the app asks you to select the required resolution, providing presets for the best video resolutions for social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Once you’ve selected your preferred resolution, you can import your footage and begin cropping, trimming, and splitting. The app even offers a decent variety of royalty-free audio and sound effects for you to enhance your footage even further. To anyone even vaguely familiar with any video-editing software, the UI is effortless – and to anyone else, the app offers helpful tutorials if you need a helping hand anywhere. Oh, and the only ad you’ll notice is the one asking you if you’d like to upgrade to Premium when you first boot up the app, and Splice doesn’t put any of those horrible watermarks on the videos you export.
TubeBuddy
TubeBuddy is another relic from my Youtube content creation days, but should I ever decide to return this app will be prominent on my toolbelt. With a huge variety of features tailored to Youtube, such as a keyword explorer, A/B testing, ‘canned responses’ (comment templates), and much more – all on a free license – this app is a must-have for anyone creating and posting video content on Youtube.
In addition to the features mentioned above, TubeBuddy allows you to add videos and Youtube content you’ve posted to the ‘Launch Pad’, which provides feedback on upload checklists, while premium users can view ‘best practices’, and ‘growth opportunities’ to help videos reach their highest potential. Bulk processes such as ‘Thumbnail Overlay’ allow you to update multiple videos at once and easily create a sense of branding and unity, and features such as ‘best time to publish’ are added automatically and in line with Youtube’s established analytics tools.
While this tool is valuable as the free version, if you’re making enough income from your Youtube content, an investment into the premium version of TubeBuddy is definitely worthwhile.
Wisecut
As an artist, I’m very wary of using AI instead of paying human beings to create or edit things for me. That said, when it comes to video editing, I neither have the budget for paying an editor nor the time to edit myself, so I explored a few options for automatic video editing tools – mainly focusing on silence removal. Wisecut was by far the most promising – but I will be keeping an eye out for better tools since Wisecut only allows you to edit 30 minutes of footage per month on a free plan… in the meantime, here’s what I found.
Wisecut is a browser-based AI editing tool that automatically edits your video for you. While the editing provided isn’t perfect, and for more intensive videos you would likely need to then process the edited video in your software of choice, Wisecut cuts out a lot of time you would have spent on trimming out silences and generating subtitles. It also has the option of adding suitable music to your video – a feature I tested on an old stream VOD file and found myself impressed by!
Of course, as with most free software, there are limits. The maximum upload for a single file is 1GB, the max. upload duration for a single video/audio is 34 minutes, and as a free user, you can only export 30 minutes of footage per month. So, in the meantime, it looks like paying human beings is the best way to have your footage edited to use for content marketing.
Webinar Tools for Content Marketing
When we think of digital content marketing, a webinar isn’t usually a format that springs to mind. But if you’re knowledgeable about a topic and have public speaking skills (which are both pretty much required for careers in content marketing anyway!), webinars offer a fresh way to reach new customers and build relationships – especially for B2B marketing. Here are some tools that make providing webinars easier and less daunting.
Answer The Public
Yes, this has been mentioned before, and no, you’re not seeing double. Also no, I’m not sponsored by this site or any other (currently. Hit me up if you’re interested though 😉 )
Not only is Answer The Public useful for planning content for blogs, but it’s also useful for finding topics that the public wants answers to. And if those answers are something you can provide face-to-face, over Teams or Zoom or any other screen-sharing platforms… bingo! There’s an idea for a webinar. Fab. On to the next tool.
Loom
Webinars don’t have to be live – you can also offer webinar content by way of video tutorials. For this, Loom is perfect.
Loom is a free-to-use program that allows you to record your screen, webcam, and microphone – allowing for ‘show-and-tell’-style video tutorials. It can also be downloaded as a Chrome extension or a mobile app (both iOS and android) – so you can record the screen of most devices.
Some other features include:
- Add customizable ‘Call To Action’s to videos, to add links for resources or signups, for example
- Engagement analytics – who watched your video, for how long, and how your CTAs performed
- Drawing Tools – add annotations and emphasise mouse clicks while you record
- Customisable video player – add your logo and edit the colour scheme of the player
Georgia Goddard - Artist 
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