Content Creation for the Lone–and Sometimes Broke–Marketer

Sometimes you have a team. Sometimes you need to be the team. Similarly, marketing budgets can prove to be feast or famine. Here are tools that have been steady regulars in my marketing tech stack when I’ve had to create content with little-to-no resources.

While the super-economy-priced tier of service is no longer available, I mention HubSpot Starter because so many companies pay for marketing automation tools and don’t make full use of what they buy. HubSpot Starter is chockfull of features and tools—if you take the time to tinker around with it regularly. If you have a HubSpot subscription but don’t feel like you’re getting value out of it:

Once you’re up and running, you’d be surprised how much you can do without being a web developer or having to invest in a ton of other tools. You may find that HubSpot is the only tool you need to manage the bulk of your digital marketing efforts.

At $15/mo for a Pro subscription, Buffer is the ideal solution to publish text, photos, and videos to all of your social media channels. After doing a fair amount of research, this is the only tool I found that will publish videos directly to Instagram without getting annoying reminders to your phone to schedule your post. You can even pick your video thumbnail/cover and add a comment to post all your hashtags. This is a huge timesaver! Plus, I hate typing anything on my phone with tiny keys, clumsy fingers, and limited screen space.

I started using Canva years ago specifically to make social media images with little text or simple graphics. Then, I found myself using it to make email and landing page hero images. Now, I use it for everything! I can make flyers and handouts, as well as simple GIFs and animations.

My love for Canva came out of my sheer refusal to learn Adobe CC. While I wouldn’t call Canva an Adobe CC replacement, you can certainly get a lot done with limited graphic design skills. You can use one of its prebuilt templates and update the content and color scheme to match your brand. Or you can upload your own images and mix in stock graphics and images included with the Pro subscription.

In an effort to get more traction out of my organic social media posts, I stumbled upon Animoto to create short social media videos. With basically no video-making skills, you can upload images of products (or anything you want to promote), pick from a variety of prebuilt storyboards, and create a video just using drag and drop. Add a voiceover if you’d like (not an easy feature to use, I’ll be honest). Finish your video off with one of their stock music clips to bring your story together.

This is a good alternative to iMovie, but the learning curve and price are a bit more steep than Animoto. Moovly is good for making explainer videos, as well as short videos with animations and moving graphics. You have greater control over sounds, voiceovers, and scenes. You can achieve professional videos with animations for a fraction of the price of outsourcing to a video agency.

When you have other members on your team or outside agencies collaborating on content–such as blogs, eBooks, and even website pages–tools like Kentico Cloud can help you build templates for pieces of content you create often (e.g., blogs, landing pages, anything imaginable). It will manage revision history and allow you to add comments (e.g., revision requests). For a very small team, you can get started for free.

A great alternative to Kentico Cloud that I actually prefer is GatherContent. It’s literally designed to gather content. GatherContent doesn’t have a free plan, but it’s $15/mo. when you subscribe monthly, as of the writing of this blog.

This is my current tool of choice for outsourcing blog posts and, in times of desperation, any long-form content, such as eBooks. I like their UI and ease of navigation. I’ve been very fortunate to find a writer who follows instructions and style guidelines pretty closely.

Zerys is an alternative to Writer’s Access. While I’ve had success outsourcing writing projects to Zerys, I think their web app is a bit tough to navigate. Quite often, it takes several steps to submit a writing project. However, I greatly appreciate the ability to make inline copyedits before approving and paying for a blog — not a feature that Writer’s Access has.

Both tools, I’ve found, run me about $60-70 per blog post when I require 600-800 words and an experienced writer.

Stock photos aren’t ideal for marketing because they aren’t genuine and don’t always speak to your brand. Customers know the difference between stock images and images that are unique to your company. But when original–and high quality–photos aren’t available, I turn to sites like:

If you have a few bucks to spend on better quality stock photos, Adobe Stock seems to provide pretty good value for a subscription.

Last I checked, WordPress is still the leading content management system (CMS) out there. I won’t lie – it has its own learning curve. And depending on how well your site is maintained, you’ll find that there are inevitably “quirks” with how you have to manage your website. But if you have a knowledgeable web developer or the ability to outsource your website management for very technical tasks, you’ll find that WordPress is a great way to manage your website’s day-to-day needs usually without having to touch any code.

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I will add more tools as I think of them and update this blog as my tastes and preferences change. What tools are in your marketing arsenal? Please share in the comments below.