10 Must-Have B2B Content Marketing Tools in 2023

Despite what many believe, building a powerful content engine takes much more effort than just publishing content consistently. 

On top of creating quality content that resonates with the intended audience, B2B content marketers have to juggle multiple aspects: strategy, planning, distribution, performance tracking, attribution, and more—all while staying on top of the latest tech and trends. 

While this can easily become overwhelming, the best B2B content marketers rely on a powerful tech stack to stay ahead of the curve and beat their competitors. 

That’s why I’ve curated this list of the 10 must-have content marketing tools to help you win at marketing.

10 content marketing tools you need to have in your arsenal in 2023

Here’s our list of the 10 essential content marketing tools for every B2B marketer. Let’s understand why you should add these tools to your content marketing stack right now.

1. SparkToro

Best for: Conducting audience research

G2 rating: 4.5 out of 5 (11 reviews) – SparkToro’s listing on G2 is unclaimed. All listings provided on the platform are by G2 themselves. 

Pricing: Free, Personal at $50/month, Business at $150/month, Agency at $300/month

SparkToro is an audience research tool offering exhaustive insights into your buyer behavior and expectations. The tool gives you granular data about your audience—who they are, where they live, what they do, what they search for, and more. 

You can also dig deeper to identify your audience profiles on social media with attributes like hashtags, bios, followers, engagement, and more. 

Why add SparkToroto to your stack

SparkToro informs you about metric-based audience behavior to understand exactly who you're targeting. This data helps shape your content strategy, PR efforts, and influencer marketing campaigns. 

Here’s a review from one of their customers on G2:

“Spark Toro takes a time-consuming and onerous audience interest and engagement research process and turns it into an easy and quick process, allowing me to go deeper with my user persona development.”

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2. HubSpot Make My Persona

Best for: Creating buyer personas

‍G2 rating: NA

Pricing: Free 

HubSpot’s free Make My Persona tool offers an easy and efficient way to visualize buyer personas. The tool prompts you to share details about your ideal persona, like gender, age, education, industry, company size, etc. Based on your responses, the tool creates a customizable infographic with all these details. 

You can customize the colors, add new sections, and move the other sections to tweak the design. Once you’re happy with the result, download it or share it with a URL. 

Why add Make My Persona to your stack

Buyer personas are at the core of every marketing campaign. With Make My Persona’s visualized designs, you can educate your team and collaborate more effectively to plan every campaign.

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3. Ahrefs

Best for: Strategizing and planning your SEO efforts

G2 rating: 4.6 out of 5 (462 reviews)

Pricing: Lite at $99/month, Standard at $199/month, Advanced at $399/month, Enterprise at $999/month

Ahrefs is an end-to-end SEO solution with a suite of tools to guide your entire SEO game plan. It allows you to conduct comprehensive competitor research, covering various aspects like organic keywords, PPC keywords, backlinks, and more.

You can also find backlinking opportunities and track your search rankings. Its website audit tool shows actionable suggestions to fix SEO issues and make your website rank-ready. 

Why add Ahrefs to your stack

Ahrefs is a complete solution for all things SEO. It’s also great for cross-functioning teams to create content for lead generation, customer education, and other goals. The user-friendly interface, social proof, and repository of learning resources are more reasons to use the tool.

Here’s a review from one of their customers on G2:

“Ahrefs is an essential tool for optimizing our search engine presence, providing detailed insights into search volume, SEO rankings, backlinks, and social shares that guide our business decisions.”

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4. Keyword Insights

Best for: Finding and clustering keywords

G2 rating: 4.9 out of 5 (11 reviews) 

Pricing: Basic at $49/month, Professional at $99/month, Premium at $299/month, Agency at $599/month

Keywords are the heart of any content program. With Keyword Insights, marketers can conduct in-depth research to find the most relevant keywords (according to their requirements) and plan their strategy. 

Besides keyword discovery, the tool helps you create clusters for geo-specific search engines. The content brief module will then present a basic layout for writers and editors to get started. 

Why add Keyword Insights to your stack

One of the biggest benefits of using Keyword Insights is the ability to scale your content production systematically. The tool sources keywords, creates clusters, and categorizes them into hubs, spokes, and does so much more. Its fast interface means you can do hours of work in a few minutes. 

Here’s a review from Vitaliy Verbitskiy, Head of Marketing at Videowise:

“Every content marketing strategy starts with proper semantics and in-depth research. I found Keyword Insights to be a super valuable and legit tool that gives relevant insights and straightforward outputs. For example, combining and analyzing keyword clustering within mid-size semantics takes a week or two. Besides taking some time also for aggregating quantitative and qualitative data across the web, it can sum up to a month to complete this process. Keyword Insights can do this for you within a day or two. It also uses various ML models to analyze and organize input data structurally. The tool is an absolute beast and a time saver for any content marketing team out there.”

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5. Buzzsumo

‍Best for: Finding trending topics

‍G2 rating: 4.5 out of 5 (95 reviews)

Pricing: Basic at $119/month, Content Creation at $249/month, PR & Comms at $249/month, Suite at $399/month, Enterprise at $499/month

Buzzsumo is a content research and discovery tool. It enables marketers to find trending topics for any industry and discover popular themes and niches. On top of that, it can also help you monitor your presence online by tracking brand mentions, keywords, and similar updates through real-time updates.

As a part of your content marketing tool stack, Buzzsumo is great for ideation and competitor analysis. Its detailed insights can guide your strategy forward.

Why add Buzzsumo to your stack:

Whether you’re planning a PPC campaign or designing your social media strategy, Buzzsumo will source the best-performing ideas for your content efforts. It gives you a pulse of your audience to create content that resonates with them.

Here’s a review from one of their customers on G2:

"I love how easy Buzzsumo is to navigate. You're not bombarded with a ton of features that aren't relevant to you—if you want to stick to just generating content ideas, there's one place for that; if you want to find trending topics, there's another. I also like the alert system where you can receive notifications right in your inbox."

Alternatives: If Buzzsumo doesn’t fit the bill, you can try public forums like Reddit and Quora to find new ideas and see what your buyers are really interested in.

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6. Surfer

‍Best for: Creating content briefs and optimizing existing content

‍G2 rating: 4.8 out of 5 (455 reviews)

Pricing: Basic at $49/month, Pro at $99/month, Business at $199/month, Enterprise at custom pricing

Surfer is a content intelligence tool for content audit, strategy, ideation, and optimization. The all-in-one platform lets B2B content marketers run the show from start to finish. You can audit a page and find suggestions to optimize it for better rankings. 

You can also create an editor for any keyword and location. This editor will analyze the top page ranking for that keyword(s) and offer data-driven guidelines to create an optimized post and outrank these posts. 

‍Why add Surfer to your stack

Surfer is a great solution for creating content briefs where writers get outlines for every top-ranking piece, a list of keywords, the number of images and headings to include, and more relevant details. Users also love its neat interface and ease of setup.

Here’s a review from one of their customers on G2:

“The Content Editor tool takes the guesswork out of optimizing content for SEO. I can easily analyze the top-performing pages in search results and get insights on keyword usage, content length, and more. It saves me so much time and effort, and my clients love the results.”

‍Alternatives: if you want to try other tools for creating content briefs & outlines, some Surfer alternatives include Frase and Clearscope.

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7. Wordtune

‍Best for: Supplementing and scaling content creation with AI

G2 rating: 4.3 out of 5 (51 reviews)

Pricing: Free plan, Premium at $9.99/month, and Premium for Teams at custom pricing

Wordtune is an AI-powered writing companion that helps B2B content marketers produce content at scale. Unlike other AI writing tools that produce content regurgitated from multiple sources, Wordtune refines your own ideas according to your needs. 

If you’ve created a rough draft, Wordtune can help you shorten it, expand it, or rewrite it in a specific tonality. If you’re stuck in your draft, Wordtune Spices will offer relevant suggestions to move the needle for your draft. 

With Wordtune Spices, you can instantly add meaningful data points with their original sources, insert topical jokes, add crisp explanations, and do much more! 

Why add Wordtune to your stack

Wordtune is an advanced AI solution designed to fast-track content creation. It helps content marketers leverage the power of AI to write clear and convincing content effortlessly. With a slick interface and fast functionality, it's a reliable solution to supplement your writing with its suite of features, including translation, rewriting, and integrations.

Here’s a review from one of their customers on G2:

"As a writer, I tend to over-explain things when I don't need to. Wordtune helps me eliminate my verbose approach for a more approachable tone for my readers. I write for different audiences, so it helps me see how I can approach a sentence."

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8. Hemingway

‍Best for: Checking and improving readability

‍G2 rating: 4.4 out of 5 (46 reviews)

Pricing: Free 

Readability is one of the core aspects of your content experience. Hemingway helps you transform any content into a scannable, reader-friendly format. It provides language-related insights to simplify your word choice, improve sentence structure, add transition words, and enhance the overall ease of reading the content. 

Depending on your target audience, you can check and optimize readability for a particular grade level. Plus, Hemingway also lets you publish directly to a WordPress and Medium website. 

Why add Hemingway to your stack

Hemingway is ideal for adding an extra layer of proofreading to your content creation workflow. It's fast, intuitive, and free, making it a top choice for writers and editors to meet high-quality benchmarks with a neat interface. 

Here’s a review from one of their customers on G2:

“Hemingway will cut through overly wordy writing and passive voice. The interface is easy to use and visually appealing. Making changes within the app itself or in docs is easy.”

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9. Canva‍

Best for: Designing graphics, slide decks, and videos

G2 rating: 4.7 out of 5 (4017 reviews)

Pricing: Free, Pro at $12.99/month 

Visual content allows B2B content marketers to cut through the high-density world of content and establish a differentiated brand. Canva is a go-to tool for many marketers to bring their creative ideas to life. 

Canva's user-friendly interface, minimal learning curve, and powerful set of features make it a top choice for all your graphic design needs. 

‍Why add Canva to your stack

A versatile design tool like Canva enables you to fulfill every design need—from social media posts and explainer videos to presentations and infographics. Its massive library of templates makes the job easier. 

Here’s a review from one of their customers on G2:

"Easy-to-use platform that provides various types of resources that on other platforms require a lot of knowledge. Completely intuitive adjustments and usability, in addition to the possibility of being easily guided through the various tools available such as movement, color editing in images, and a varied catalog of elements that enrich artistic projects."

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10. DashThis

‍Best for: Measuring the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts

DashThis is a reporting tool to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts. With over 30 data sources, the tool is designed to meet multiple reporting needs, including PPC, SEO, social media, Google My Business, and more. 

The tool can natively integrate with 34 platforms and create an all-in-one dashboard to visualize all KPIs. You can also add your custom data sources with a CSV file. 

Make content marketing a breeze with these tools!

That’s a wrap on our list of 11 must-have content marketing tools. If you’re a B2B content marketer, you need a robust tech stack to do some of the heavy lifting on your behalf. 

These tools can cut down your time spent on admin tasks, speed up your workflows, and reduce the workload on your plate. Try these tools and pick your best options!