Creativity doesn’t always come when you need it. If you’ve ever suffered writer’s block, then these tools can help you push through it.
These days, there are thousands of tools that offer idea generation help, visual design inspiration, and pre-made social media content. While you should not rely on these tools for all your content creation – if all digital marketers did it, all content would look the same! – these apps and tools can inspire you when your creativity runs dry.
Here are eight of our favorite tools to help you generate content ideas that will wow your followers.
While there are dozens of headline generation tools out there, TweakYourBiz takes a slightly different track. When you type your brand’s keywords into the search bar, it generates hundreds of title options, broken down into List, How-To, Best, and Question style titles, to help you sort through them faster.
Given these headlines are going to be highly-targeted toward your keywords (it’s best to use your long-tail keywords), TweakYourBiz’ headlines are a great way to come up with ideas for your next blog post as well. However, try not to copy these headlines exactly. Instead, use them as inspiration to come up with something even better.
Everyone knows how valuable visual content can be. But what if you’re not great with design? DesignSpiration looks and functions a bit like Pinterest, except it allows you to search for images by color using their handy paintbrush tool.
Using DesignSpiration, you can come up with a dozen different designs and visuals that are on brand and that will help you start thinking outside the box. Graphic designers swear by DesignSpiration since the images are more curated and design-focused than Pinterest. The ability to search by up to 5 colors makes it an unbeatable tool for visuals that are in line with specific branding guidelines.
ThingLink invites you to think outside the box from the get-go. If you feel that image content is too one-dimensional, ThingLink allows you to turn photos into clickable pictures with links to your products or site. It even has a built-in analytics tool so you can see how well your photos perform.
ThingLink allows you to provide more creative, interactive media to your audience without needing a background in coding.
Canva may not be the newest tool on the market, but it is still one of the best. With thousands of free templates, fonts, and tutorials, Canva helps less design-oriented content creators make beautiful images for their social media sites.
Canva allows you to choose from a variety of templates, including Facebook banners, Instagram ads, and even print flyers. You don’t even have to know what you want to build before you log in. Canva can help generate plenty of ideas through its premade templates. Best of all, most of the features are free!
If you are trying to grow your audience, running a social media contest is one of the best ways to do so. Rafflecopter is a crowd favorite because of its incredibly intuitive drag-and-drop tools that allow you to set up a contest through your chosen channels in a matter of minutes.
With Rafflecopter, you can display your contest right on your landing page by copying and pasting the embed code wherever you want your widget to be displayed. Rafflecopter makes it easy to run and track your social media contests all while staying on brand.
Woobox’s features go a little beyond Rafflecopter by providing fully-branded marketing campaigns beyond just social media contests. While Woobox is best for Facebook contests, you can also manage YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest campaigns through the web application.
Woobox also allows you to broadcast your campaigns across multiple platforms, such as email, on your landing pages, on social media, in blog posts, and in pop-ups. With Woobox, you have the freedom to reach your audience where they spend the most time.
This Google Doc tool generates blog ideas based on current events in your industry right into a Google Spreadsheet. Using sources like Google News, Reddit, and YouTube, Content Strategy Helper provides insights on current trends in the news and even hints about who to contact with your story.
While there are other news management tools out there, Content Strategy Helper can help you come up with a topic that is right on the mark, and exactly when your audience is ready to hear it.
Memes are the language of this generation. By combining popular images with text that fits your message, you can hit the sweet spot between silly and memorable by using memes in your content marketing. QuickMeme is a meme generator that allows you to pick a photo and use your own text so you can stay on brand. Scroll through the past examples to get inspired and discover how memes could help transmit your message with a little humor.
While an app can never replace the human imagination, these tools are a perfect way to jumpstart your content creation with some fresh ideas.
Do you have any favorite content marketing tools to add to the list? Share them with us in the comments!
