28+ must-have content marketing tools

Want to step up your content marketing? Then our guide has all the tools you need to help with everything from generating content ideas and competitor analysis through to content creation, promotion and analysis.

All Tools

WordPress: The free, open-source CMS

Overview

WordPress is the world’s most popular content management system (CMS) platform with the company estimating 43% of the entire web uses its platform. It’s easy to take tools like WordPress for granted now but before CMS tools went mainstream, publishers had to format every page and piece of content in HTML and use other code like CSS to control styles.
With WordPress, you can simply create a new page at the push of a button, write your content – as you would in a word processor – and change some settings to apply styles. The platform was never designed as a website builder but the open infrastructure and customisable themes allow you to use the system’s back-end code and apply a custom design with relative ease.

Key Features

Content management:

Create, publish and manage content across your website.

Visual editor:

Type page content and posts as if you’re using a word processor – without writing any code.

Customisable themes:

Customise the design of any WordPress theme while taking advantage of the back-end functionality.

Plugins:

Add functionality to your website and CMS from thousands of plugins.

Google Trends Fig. 1

Benefits & Costs

Pros

Publishing:

WordPress makes it easy for anyone to write and publish content without writing any code.

Website building:

Although WordPress isn’t a website builder, its open-source infrastructure allows you to customise themes and sites with complete freedom.

Development:

Customising WordPress themes reduces development time and cost.

Cons

Code bloat:

WordPress is code-heavy out of the box and this can impact performance (eg: loading times) without care.

Security:

With 43% of the entire web using WordPress, the CMS is a big target for hackers so you have to understand and mitigate the security risks.