I’m often asked about my preferred mix of tools for content marketing, and which platforms I personally use? There’s no shortage of them to consider, either - in fact, there are almost 7,000 marketing tools, as featured on the chiefmartec.com blog.

Over the years I’ve been exposed to hundreds of variations of such apps and options, but I always find myself going back to the below.

These are the key tools that I use to maximize my content efforts.

Content Intelligence Tools

Ceralytics

Ceralyitics uses AI to analyze your content, and that of your online competitors, in order to give you deep insight into what topics you should focus on.

Hawkeye AI

Hawkeye.AI is a very similar tool which identifies trending topics by reverse engineering top performing content on the web.

Marketing Automation Tools

Hubspot

HubSpot's marketing automation suite includes email, social tools, CMS, personalization, a landing page builder and much more.

Pardot

What I like most about Pardot is its seamless integration with Salesforce CRM. Just like Hubspot, it has all of the goodies we’ve grown to expect in an effective marketing automation tool.

Content Amplification Tools

inPowered

Having trouble getting your content seen, and generating engagement? inPowered amplifies content on over 35 native and social platforms, and only charges marketers if that content is actually engaged with.

Social Media Tools

Social Report

Not only does Social Report facilitate social posting, listening and analytics, but it also has the most integrations of any social management platform I’ve seen. From Xing and Reddit to Google Analytics and Instagram, you won’t be disappointed with this tool.

Analytics Tools

DemandJump

This isn’t last decade’s analytics tool. Built on an AI platform, DemandJump not only looks at your website’s performance, but also at the performance of the websites linked to yours, and the performance of websites linked to those. In essence, it creates a three-dimensional map of your digital sphere of influence.

Influencer Tools

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is very similar in some ways to the above content intelligence tools, however what I like most about it is its influencer feature. BuzzSumo tracks each individual author’s content across many different websites, which enables you to explore all of the content created by an influencer in one place.

SEO Tools

SEMRush

It’s hard to believe, but I’ve been using SEMrush since last decade - and it’s come a long way since then, too. SEMRush has every feature you would expect in an enterprise SEO suite, and even some features that may surprise you.

PR Tools

Cision

While it's primarily marketed to PR professionals, Cision provides a lot of value to content marketers, too. It has robust lists of journalists and influencers, a distribution functionality, multi-channel online and offline monitoring capability and analytics.

ABM Tools

Sigstr

The easiest way to explain Sigstr is that it enables the marketing department to control and customize everyone’s email signature line on outgoing emails. Seems simple, however, it can also feature more personalized content to target featured brands or people. That’s why it’s also an ABM tool.

I personally use each one of these tools, and would confidently recommend them to anyone. The alternative is to drudge through the nearly 7,000 marketing technology vendors until you find the ones you like. No need to do that anymore.