Content Marketing Strategy sounds like a big fancy word.

In actuality, it’s not! In simple terms, a content marketing strategy is all the content that your brand or business produces to increase brand visibility, awareness, or sales/conversions. This can be:

• Videos
• Paid advertising on social media
• Blog posts
• Newsletters
• Email funnels
• Etc.

There are a lot of content marketers and strategists out there, but over here at The Quirky Pineapple Studio headquarters, we specifically focus on organic brand visibility and awareness. We’re here to make sure your target audience and ideal clients find you, love you, and ultimately remember who you are when they need something that you offer!

If you’ve been DIY-ing your content strategy up until now, we want to help you upgrade your strategy with 5 content marketing tools we use! We use these tools in our own marketing strategy and with our clients, to keep track of analytics, data, and ideas.

The Content Planner

We got our hands on The Content Planner this year and we are SO happy to have one! The Content Planner is a physical notebook to keep track of social media and blog posts all in one space. It’s large enough to see everything at a glance but is broken down in “bite-sized” chunks to make planning super easy! The planner also has social media stickers to make sure we can keep track of where we’re posting and on what platform. It is laid out with a monthly view and includes a goal-setting section at the beginning of each month.

We’ve been using our Content Planner as one of our content marketing tools to keep track of social media posts for our clients, who require social media management. It’s been a great tool so that we don’t need to mix our personal editorial calendar with client work!

The Quirky Pineapple Studio Editorial Calendar

In our own content strategy, we use The Quirky Pineapple Studio’s Editorial Calendar template. In this template, we keep all of our usernames, affiliate links, cornerstone content, and new ideas in one place. The way we approach a content strategy is by creating cornerstone content and then repurposing pieces of it for different channels and platforms that we are active on.

In our editorial calendar template, we keep track of our blog posts and how we can repurpose each blog post into different pieces of content on social media. We like keeping this template for ourselves and using The Content Planner for our clients. It makes it easier to separate the two, without clutter and disorganization combining them both! Using the editorial calendar keeps us on track to plan out our content quarterly and make sure everything is scheduled and automated beforehand so we can focus on other tasks!

Using social media is another great way to upgrade your content marketing strategy! Learn how to create content for social media in our course, here!

Google Analytics

If you aren’t using Google Analytics as one of your content marketing tools – get on it! Reading through Google Analytics to understand where the majority of your traffic is coming from, which pages they land on, and what countries your audience belongs to can significantly help the type of content that you create. We use our Google Analytics to understand:

• How long a person stays on our website
• What pages they land on
• Which posts they resonate with most
• Where our traffic comes from

Most of our website traffic is organic, which helps us understand that we’re doing something right with our SEO! We also keep a close look on the posts that are the most popular. For example, one of our posts about 5 Ways to Define Your Brand Personality, is one that brings in a lot of traffic. From there, we can create posts that are similar, for our marketing strategy.

Does Google Analytics scare you? We break it down in our course ‘How to use SEO & Content to Rank on Google and Reach More Clients’! This course will teach you how to understand Google Analytics & SEO strategies to create amazing content directly for your ideal audience.

Asana

Asana is our backend project management tool! This is the perfect way to share systems and processes for content creation, content marketing, and strategy with your team. In Asana, we document the standard operating procedures (SOPs) for our content brainstorming, creation, and sharing. In each of our SOPs, we’ve written down step-by-step how our content strategy process is for TQP Studio and for our clients.

For us, it’s important to document all processes so that when we expand, team members can easily access these files and create content that is in our standardized “TQP Studio” voice and style. For each of our clients, we also recommend that they create their own SOPs for content brainstorming, creation, and sharing in a Google Drive folder (or on Asana) to keep in their records. This tool helps us and our clients think long-term and scaling their business!

“Ideas Journal”

We love all things digital and paperless, but nothing beats a pen and paper when inspiration strikes! We use our Content Planner and TQP Studio editorial calendar to keep track of ideas and new content strategies, but an “Ideas Journal” is a small notebook we carry around during meetings and coffee dates, to jot down collaborated ideas or inspiration on the go.

We then transfer some of those ideas into our editorial calendar template or the Content Planner for our clients. We also use our “Ideas Journal” to write down feedback from our content, events, or from potential clients on what resonated really well with them and where we can improve. One detail to keep in mind with an “ideas journal”, not everything needs to be implemented into your content strategy from this notebook. This notebook is mainly used for brainstorming, writing down inspiration, and jotting down feedback and improvements that can then be implemented in the other tools listed above!

These are the 5 biggest content marketing tools we use to keep track of our own strategy and our clients’ strategies. We believe in simplicity and not over-complicating something that could be a daunting task for people, already! Each of these tools has a specific purpose, and if you don’t use them and decide to find other tools to implement, we recommend setting an intention and purpose for each platform first!

What tools do you use for your content strategy (if any)? Drop us a line in the comments below!

*Want to work together on your content strategy? We’d love to help, schedule a strategy call with us here, to talk more!

Enjoyed this post? You might like these, too:
How to Incorporate Video Content in your Brand Strategy
How to Increase Engagement Organically
How to Create Consistent Content Quickly
How to Draw Content Inspiration from Everyday Life

Want more content goodness? DOWNLOAD your very own Content Generating Machine to help you go from idea, to content, to community, and clients!