Tools we love and use all the time for effective content marketing are listed below. In this era of AI there are many apps and tools that come and go, that we either have used or use currently that aren’t listed here.
Think of this list more as the greatest hits and less of an exhaustive archive. When applicable we use referral links and may earn a commission if you sign up with our links.
Canva – so good and reasonably priced (good for thumbnails, logo work, charts, general design, photo editing, vids and so much more). The video editor has also been very helpful over the years for things like simple motion graphics and reformatting clips to vertical for shorts.
Headliner – quickly and easily turn your podcast into sharable videos. Huge fans of what they’ve done, and their automations have made building a YouTube channel much easier. Get 2 weeks of free pro plan using my link above.
Captivate.fm – so here’s a podcast outfit that DOES NOT charge you for volume of shows or data, but rather based upon listenership. This allows shows to grow organically, and gives the podcaster the option to do multiple shows at once under a single affordable plan.
Adobe – I know a lot of people look for alternatives due to the high cost, but we still use Adobe Creative Cloud all the time. Tools like Express offer powerful features, our fav is the animate characters to voice. Premier Pro is good for video as well. Audition is our go-to for podcasting.
Capcut – great for web-based video editing, creating shorts, and the like. Though it can be easy to fall into the trap of doing vids like everyone else, since it’s so popular now. Cloud-based offers great options for vids that are larger that might take up too much space on your HD. Get 7 days pro free with our link.
Remove Line Breaks – excellent free tool to remove formatting from text. Use this probably the most of all the tools mentioned here for web formatting, content titles, and podcast notes, and so much more.
MS OneDrive and Google Drive – both offer great cloud storage options at reasonable rates. The sharing of files is also handy when you deal with larger files – say 25mb and up – and can’t email them as easily.
Google Workspace – Docs and Sheets are daily drivers around here. Notebook LM has a ton of potential. Now you’re seeing AI help integrations in all of their apps, these open another avenue of being productive at work. But honestly, just having everything in the cloud in this age of phone / pc / tablet / desktop makes things so much easier to manage. Get 10% off using our link.
Loom – best browser-based screencasting tool we’ve ever used. Though haven’t used as much since Atlassian bought them. Prior to the AQ this was a go-to tool for content creation, especially for anything educational. Hoping it stays the same moving forward.
OneTab – great for keeping browser tabs in check, and computer memory down. Also nice to have as an archive to look back at over the course of 6 mos, a year, or more, as to what you’ve been working on.
Keyword.com – we use this to track keyword rank in Google, which is surprisingly hard to do without a tool like this. We’ve made our own tools that seem to struggle, and this one has always been good. They offer 10 free keywords before you have to pay anything.
Comet Browser – great for automating web tasks – extracting links from the web, reviewing and organizing data, etc. I’m pretty sure all AI tools will have some variation of this soon, but it certainly stands out on its own right now.
Google Flow – not sure if this is the best way to use Veo or not, but, this is how we use it. Lots of issues still, far from polished product, but very handy in creating web based videos from a single prompt, image, or frame. A lot less noise than some of the other tools out there – in a good way.
Claude – excellent for code, data sets, blog post help / organization / content, and much more. Seems as if it has a deeper library to pull from than other LLMs, not that I can prove it, but if I have a tough problem the others can’t solve, I go to Claude.
Surfer SEO – limited experience with this tool, but the one blog post we worked on – for a highly competitive term – ranked on page one in Google after about six months. How competitive, Google Ads is charging my client $17.14 per click at the clip of over 40 clicks per month, that’s $700+ in ad spend per month just for this one KW. The Surfer SEO post helps augment such a spend, as well as bring new valuable traffic free. The term has a 23% conversion rate as well. So pick something like that, if it’s needed for you or a client, and see if Surfer SEO doesn’t help.
VidIQ – another tool we decided to include that we don’t heavily use. I can’t think of a video SEO tool that’s more robust, and the few use cases we’ve had with it so far tells me it is very good for helping with KW titles, content ideas, channel optimization, and more.
Pirate Ship – in content marketing every once and awhile you need to ship something – like swag or a sticker, or a product sample. These guys are flat out the best for buying postage online. The software costs nothing to use, and has discounted rates for USPS and UPS – but no FedEx at the time of writing this post. We’ve used a lot of the other tools out there, and this one has the best UI and most competitive rates.
Beyond the roughly 18 tools mentioned above there are so many others that provide value to content marketers. But if you just were looking for a baseline content marketing toolbox for 2026, 2027 and beyond, the above would certainly offer a great start.