In April this year, Struto was awarded a HubSpot Agency Partner Client Impact Award in the Graphic Design Category. We also received an honourable mention for our entry into the Inbound Growth Story category. The Impact Awards celebrate agencies’ inbound marketing success, and in this round, Struto was the only UK-based agency to make the cut.
Today I’d like to introduce you to the team who contributed to the award-winning projects by presenting you with their favourite content marketing tools for making the B2B marketing magic.
[Ps. HubSpot has created an eBook comprising all the 2017 Round 1 winners, and you can download your own copy of the eBook here to learn about the work Struto and other award winning agencies are doing for their clients.]
Lauren names Grammarly as her favourite (non-HubSpot) content marketing tool. Here’s why:
Lauren’s favourite HubSpot tool is the WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) blog editor. She explains:
“While HubSpot allows you various ways for uploading and optimising your blog posts, their WYSIWYG (‘Inline Mode’) blog editor is my tool of choice. It lets me write, format, edit and publish – all in one place. The most important aspect is that I get to see the product as it’s taking shape. This allows me to adjust and tailor the visual layout of my blogs to ensure that the content comes to its right.
Kurt is the newest member of Struto’s marketing team. He bases his choice of Hootsuite’s social media management tool on his experience as one-man marketing team in his previous position as well as his weekend job as deejay:
“When you’re the face of a business, you have to create a strong personal brand. Establishing yourself as an industry leader, whether it’s in music or the b2b software sector, takes up enough of your day. Promoting your carefully created content on social media shouldn’t have to occupy much more of your time. Hootsuite cuts down on the time you spend on social media management by letting you publish, manage, and monitor your pages and profiles – all in one place.”
As a new user of HubSpot’s all-in-one marketing software, the range of features available on the HubSpot social media management tool has blown Kurt away. Kurt gushes:
“I wish I had access to HubSpot’s software since the beginning of my career. The tool makes it a hundred times easier to manage multiple accounts – this is essential where a business has several representatives on social media. At this point I’ve only dabbled in the tool’s features. My next steps will be to dive into the reporting feature that gives you a quick overview of your results and the stream monitoring feature that lets you ‘listen in’ on industry-relevant social media chatter.”
As our in-house SEO specialist and Moz evangelist, it wasn’t difficult to guess Marcel’s most preferred external content marketing tool. More specifically, he highlights Moz’s new keyword exploration and SERP analysis tool:
When it comes to his favourite HubSpot tool, I don’t even have to ask. Marcel has been an evangelist of HubSpot’s brand new content strategy tool ever since Struto got to test the beta version earlier this year. Marcel gives me the low down on what the tool means for SEO specialists like him:
“Topic clusters are the next evolution of SEO and best practice in terms of site architecture. The topic cluster methodology guides you to select topics that are best aligned with your business’s focus areas and then to organise the related content that is favoured by search engines. Instead of scattering content across your website and blog pages and hoping it will communicate effectively, your website gets established on pillars (‘topic clusters’) that are neatly organised on your pages. Related content (‘satellite topics’) are linked back to each of these pillars, to create a neat internal linking structure. Planning and organising your content in this way communicates well with users and benefits your search engine rankings. HubSpot’s content strategy tool lets you whip together a topic cluster from scratch in five minutes flat!”
Multi-tasking is the very nature of Estee’s position, which is why she chose Pocket as her favourite external content marketing tool.
“It’s more than just a content curation tool,” she explains. “Pocket lets me keep a tab on content sources and communications that I need to read or respond to. Here’s how it works: the tool syncs the articles, emails, and web pages I’ve placed in my Pocket to all my devices while I’m in the office. The content then becomes available for me to read offline while I’m commuting. What’s more is that there’s an iOS app with a text-to-speech feature that will read the content to you as you work out at the gym.”
To wrap up, here are my own favourite content marketing tools.
Before discovering Blast, ad copy assignments filled me with more than a bit of trepidation. Writing ad copy is one of a very few tasks where the format of the finished product looks completely different from what it looks like on my word processor. How can I be sure that I’ve used my limited characters optimally? The solution: Blast’s preview tool! Not only does it take the guesswork out of what the finished product will look like, but it lets me play around until the phrasing is crystal clear.
I have a confession: the thing I love most about my position as marketer and content writer is that I get to research and learn about new topics every day. This then is why my favourite content strategy tool is the HubSpot Academy. Certification courses that are open to everyone include the Inbound Marketing Certification, Inbound Sales Certification, and Email Marketing Certification. As a HubSpot customer, Struto and our clients get free access to all of the Academy’s courses and resources.
If you’ve been intrigued by what you’ve read, you can learn more about HubSpot’s all-in-one marketing and sales software on our website. As a HubSpot partner agency, we can guide you to find the best combination of software and support for your business. Get in touch with us to get started on your journey to better marketing.