Erika Heald Marketing Consulting

Content marketing that drives business results

Alek Irvin

About Alek Irvin

Alek Irvin is a content marketing professional with a rich history in social media management, executive thought leadership development, and media relations. As a consultant at Erika Heald Marketing Consulting, he creates human-focused content and thought leadership platforms that help brand leaders connect and engage with their communities. Alek has worked with a range of startups and Fortune 500 companies across the B2B technology and consumer spaces, including IBM, Dell Technologies, Hitch Works, Emtrain, Integrate, and Frameable. Connect with him on Twitter @AlekIrvin.

Your Marketing Toolbox: 61 Templates and Tools To Boost Your Marketing Value

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The most successful marketers use tools and templates to fast-track their work and access essential audience insights to guide their planning. It makes sense—who has time to reinvent the wheel each time and build campaigns based on gut instincts (which is also a guaranteed way to waste your marketing resources). 

To help you accelerate and improve your work across a range of content marketing tasks, check out these must-use tools, templates, and frameworks that come highly recommended by the #ContentChat community of marketers and content creators.

What are your favorite content marketing tools? Do you have a favorite template to share? Let us know in the comments and we will keep this post updated with all your relevant submissions. 

Content Curation Tools 

Curating content from industry experts, media outlets, and reputable third parties is an essential way to provide value to your brand audiences. It also shows that you do not use your social media and other communication channels solely as a microphone to promote your owned content. To kickstart your content curation program, use these tools:

  • Building Your Content Curation Road Map (Framework): Our consultancy founder Erika Heald shared this five-step road map for developing a content curation program in a past Content Marketing Institute session. It teaches you an effective content curation process and provides more details on a few of the tools we recommend below. 
  • Feedly: Feedly allows you to quickly create content streams from websites, RSS links, Twitter, and other content sources. You can even use Feedly to receive all your email newsletters. 
  • FeedOtter: Do you need to accelerate your email marketing? FeedOtter is a tool that can help you automate blog subscription emails to automatically alert blog subscribers when you publish new content. You can also build newsletters with its easy drag-and-drop tool. 
  • Flipboard: Quickly save, share, and comment on relevant articles through Flipboard. The site has a web browser extension that allows you to bookmark articles wherever you find them and organize them into various magazines. It’s like Pinterest, but primarily for news and non-visual content. 
  • Readwise: It’s one thing to simply save articles. But to effectively curate content, you need to know why an article is important to your audience (or why you saved the article in the first place). Readwise enables you to highlight portions of your articles and later revisit and organize those highlights.

Content Marketing Planning and Content Creation Tools and Templates

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50 Must-Follow Marketers to Boost Your Twitter Feed’s Value

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Are you looking for a few good, active marketing Twitter feeds to follow? Why not start by checking out these recent #ContentChat speakers and frequent participants.

We’ve included a quick highlight of what you’ll learn from each person and their general area of expertise. As you’ll see, this covers a full range of marketing professionals, including experts in content marketing, social media, email marketing, community development, and more.

Without further ado, consider following these 50 marketing professionals to supercharge your Twitter feed. We’ve also made this Twitter list so you can easily add everyone. Who do you recommend we follow, too? Let us know in the comments!

50 #ContentChat Community Members to Follow on Twitter

Shira Abel | @ShiraAbel | Sales Enablement

Shira is a sales obsessed marketer and CEO of Hunter & Bard, a design and account based marketing agency. She joined #ContentChat to discuss how to remove silos for sales enablement, and her Twitter feed features a healthy mix of business topics and marketing tips. 

Ed Alexander | @FanFoundry | Marketing 

Ed shares at least one article that can help you strengthen your marketing skills daily. He curates a great mix of topics with occasional industry commentary and insights that lend a fresh perspective. 

Charlie Appel Agency/Alyx | @ColfaxInsurance | Marketing

Alyx at the Charlie Appel Agency is one of the most consistent members of #ContentChat, and they are involved with several other marketing Twitter communities, too! Follow them to hear the latest from #BizapaloozaChat, #DigiBlogChat, #MTtalk, #TwitterSmarter, and more. In addition,  Alyx consistently shares great content marketing tips and is an expert at building relationships.

Amy Balliett | @AmyBalliett | Visual Communication

Some marketers thrive with written content. But brand audiences deserve to consume content in their preferred forms—including visual content. Amy leads Killer Visual Strategies, a design agency specializing in all things visual content, like infographics, interactive experiences, and motion graphics. Follow her to learn the best practices for visual communication, with plenty of examples along the way. Don’t miss her past #ContentChat recap on how to create memorable, one-of-a-kind visual content to elevate your strategy today. 

Manick Bhan | @MadManick | SEO

Search engine optimization is an increasingly complicated space that’s also vital to the success of your content marketing. Manick is an SEO expert who regularly shares data, tips, and how-to resources about SEO on his Twitter feed. He joined #ContentChat to discuss how to create content that ranks higher in SERPs, and you can keep improving your SEO skills by following him on Twitter.

Louise Brogan | @LouiseBrogan_ | LinkedIn Marketing

Social media marketers will love Louise’s posts about how to maximize your success on LinkedIn. Louise discusses the latest platform updates and explains how marketers can drive success on LinkedIn. She shares an overview of how to use LinkedIn for content marketing in this chat recap so you can get a quick glance at the value she provides.

Ruth Carter | @RBCarter | Legal 

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December 6, 2021 Content Chat Recap: How To Build An Effective Social Media Content Calendar For 2022

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How will your marketing team use social media in 2022? As we continue to adapt to a primarily digital-first life, social media channels can be vital in helping brands (re)engage their communities and provide new content experiences.

The reality for many teams, though, is that they are unable to drive meaningful results from their social media activities. There are many reasons for this, often including a lack of team resources, competing priorities, or a misunderstanding of how to best engage a social media community.

An essential way to address this problem is to build a social media calendar that strategically balances your team’s priorities and provides a roadmap of content for your social media channels.

In this #ContentChat we explain how to build an effective social media content calendar with digital marketer Brandie McCallum (@lttlewys). Read the full recap below, where we explain what to include in a social media content calendar, how often you should update your content calendar, our favorite tools for social media management, and more. If you’re looking for further support in setting your social media strategy, check out our past blog post that details how a social media audit can improve your content strategy.

Q1: What should a useful social media content calendar include? Do you have a favorite template you can share?

A social media content calendar should only include the necessary information your team needs to execute its social media strategy. Some teams document only a few details, while others detail a range of key information.

Brandie recommends tracking hashtags and images in your social calendar.

Erika’s social media calendar details the type of content that should be posted on a specific channel at a specific time. Download her template calendar from this blog post.

The community shares a few other details you can document in your social media calendar, including the goals, team to-do’s and status updates, links shared in your social media posts, and handles or accounts to tag in your content.

However you structure your calendar, ensure that you plan time and resources to monitor for engagement, reply to your community content, and engage in “social” activities that can be impossible to plan for.

Q2: How often should a social media content calendar be updated? How far ahead can and should you schedule out your content (quarterly, weekly, etc)?

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November 29, 2021 Content Chat Recap: Why You Need To Include Interactive Content In Your 2022 Marketing Plan

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Tight on time and budget, marketers often stick to tried-and-true ways to engage their brand communities, which is an understandable approach. However, there is a case to be made for creating interactive content that directly involves your reader or viewer in the experience.

In this #ContentChat we explain how to include interactive content in your marketing plan with Maureen Jann (@NeoLuxeMo), co-founder and chief marketing strategist at NeoLuxe Marketing. Maureen and her team created the What Kind of Marketer Am I? quiz, which was made for marketers by marketers to predict what type of marketer you are. Read the chat recap below to learn what went into creating the quiz and how interactive content can drive results for brands, including an exploration of the common types and examples of interactive content, how to measure the success of interactive content, and more.

Q1: What is interactive content?

Interactive content gets your reader/viewer to engage and participate with your content, instead of passively consuming it.

Q2: What are the common types of interactive content that brands can create for content marketing?

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November 15, 2021 Content Chat Recap: How to Audit Your 2021 Content Strategy to Drive Your 2022 Strategic Content Marketing Planning

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Have you started your 2022 content marketing planning? Before you start to put pen to paper for your plan, it’s crucial to audit your 2021 content and uplevel key insights that can boost your team’s success next year.

In this #ContentChat we explain how to lead an effective content audit with Amy Higgins (@AmyWHiggins), director of content strategy at Salesforce for its Service Cloud. Read the full recap below, where we explain how to structure a content audit, the channels to prioritize during an audit, how to turn your data into insights, and more.

Q1: Why is an annual content audit essential for effective content marketing planning?

A content audit should not be a one-and-done exercise. An annual audit is necessary to understand how to best allocate your marketing budget and resources to meet your community needs.

Most readily available marketing data is just one piece of the puzzle. An audit helps piece everything together.

An audit can also uncover how your customer content needs have shifted over the last year.

Q2: How do you structure your content audit? Do you have a template you can share?

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5 Types of Video Content for a More Effective Content Marketing Strategy

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Is your marketing team using video content to its fullest potential? 

Wyzowl’s 2021 State of Video Marketing report found that businesses increasingly use video marketing, with an estimated 86% of teams creating video content today. Some teams have achieved a notable return on investment (ROI) through video, including boosts to website traffic, the average time users spend on a web page, and even direct sales, plus a decrease in support calls. 

However, the report found that not all teams are prepared for success with video. Nearly 20% of non-video marketers don’t know where to start with video, and 30% of teams have a decreased video budget because of the pandemic. 

To help teams understand how to create and distribute effective video content, let’s explore what equipment you need, the common ways you can use video in marketing, and examples of brands that exemplify the best practices of video.  

Recommended Equipment for Video Content Creation

What equipment is necessary to create effective videos for marketing? All you need is a smartphone or laptop (yes, really).

Most modern phones and laptops with built-in webcams—and free-to-use social media or video hosting sites and apps—have ample video and audio recording and editing capabilities. However, we recommend you start with just your smartphone to get comfortable creating and integrating video content into your marketing strategy. 

After your team matures with video and can demonstrate its ROI, you can explore purchasing new equipment, like a DSLR camera or recording device, boom mics, and advanced editing software like Adobe Premiere. 

A few completely optional (but incredibly helpful!) pieces of equipment you can use to enhance the quality of your video marketing include:

  • A microphone for improved audio quality, like the Shure MV5 (affiliate link*) or one of the Blue Yeti (affiliate link*) offerings, or a lapel mic
  • Ample lighting support, like a ring light (affiliate link*) (this New York Times article reviews some of your best options) or umbrella lights
    * Note that if you purchase an item through our affiliate links, you do not pay a higher price, and a portion of your purchase price benefits this blog.

5 Types of Video to Include in Your Content Marketing Plan

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