Best Content Marketing Software for Small Business in 2025

Content marketing delivers leads and drives sales. No longer a side thought to your overall marketing strategy and living off budget bread crumbs, content marketing is a mission-critical part of your sales pipeline.

It helps you grow a mailing list, engage your audience at every buyer’s journey stage, keep a consistent brand presence and, essentially, keep your revenues streaming.

With a good strategy and a clear goal, small businesses can leverage content marketing to compete with large enterprises for brand awareness and conversions. Statistics are on their side–72% of content marketers said they saw an increase in engagement and leads, according to a Content Marketing Institute report.

This guide aims to walk you through the importance of content marketing software, how it can help you plan and manage a content strategy with measurable gains.

A good content marketing software should match your needs, including features for managing an editorial workflow, a collaborative space for ideation, possibly an integrated CMS and email marketing and SEO. Reading our expert software reviews should help point you to your choice of solutions. But go beyond our perspective; try the top products yourself to gain firsthand experience.

All vendors on our database offer a free trial or demo, which allows you to test all features without commitment. You can, in fact, give these software products a free test right away: HubSpot Marketing, monday.com, Semrush, Wrike, Contently and Mayple. Subject these apps to your workflow, use cases and other requirements and see which one appeals to you. The good thing about getting to know the top products is you get to set your benchmark on par with the latest features technology has to offer.

Many content marketing software solutions are targeted at small businesses, small agencies and individual contractors. Midsized businesses wanting to explore the features first or see how this software fits into their processes before subscribing to a premium plan may also try the small business plans.

Often, small businesses have at their disposal freemiums or basic plans that allow them to set up a content plan, track and manage their content assets, funnel leads from their content and measure content engagement at a managed cost.

Freelancers and contractors offering content marketing services also benefit from small business plans.

Critically, content marketing for small business plans are designed to grow with your business. You can easily bump up the plan for more advanced features should your requirements demand.

Content marketing software comes in different shapes and may overlap with other software categories like SEO, CMS, marketing, sales and email marketing. Some focus on content creation, while others on SEO, and still others on task management. But all of them aim to help you plan, create, manage, track and measure content engagement.

Here are a few examples of the different types of content marketing:

HubSpot Marketing. Focuses on lead and conversion, it features tools for blogging, social ads, PPC, landing pages, email marketing, marketing automation and more. It has powerful reporting that enables you to measure ROI.

monday.com. Focuses on task management and collaboration, it offers a shared workspace and tools for task automation, project visibility, creative request tracking, image and video annotations, and versioning.

Semrush. Focuses on SEO, it features on-page SEO analysis, keyword research, competitor analysis, social media management and local SEO rank tracking on top of its content marketing module. You can leverage its analytics-driven features to create content that is optimized for your audience.

Wrike. Focuses on project management, it adapts to an editorial workflow with key tools such as task management, versioning, a single source of truth for shared creative and marketing files and folders and a collaborative space for brainstorming.

Contently. It combines content marketing tech and talent solution, offering a platform for ideation, planning, creation and analytics and a talent marketplace of writers, designers and videographers.

Mayple. A marketplace for top-tiered marketing talents vetted for their work portfolio. An AI-powered matching tool gives you a high chance of finding the right talent for your marketing needs.

As with other software categories, content marketing software is generally categorized by deployment.

On-premise. On-premise means you install the app on your local computer or server and be in charge of its maintenance and security. You usually pay a one-time huge licensing fee.

Cloud-hosted or SaaS. In a cloud-hosted or SaaS setup, you “rent” the software for a monthly fee. The vendor takes care of its maintenance and security.

Small businesses will do well using SaaS software, owing to the fact that they do not have the means to keep a resident IT staff to manage the software.

Today, most small companies rely on SaaS for their business software, so this way of categorizing content marketing software may no longer be consistent with the times. Rather, it may be more meaningful to look at type by the software’s focus. Many content marketing software products have one or a combination of these focuses:

• CMS/blogging platform
• Project or task management
• SEO and analytics
• Marketplace of talents

Choosing the type of content marketing software by focus ensures it will help you focus on your primary KPIs, be it content production, workflow efficiency, SEO or talent sourcing.

Content marketing software is usually a toolbox of features “borrowed” from more established categories like SEO tools, CRM, CMS, blogging platform and task management, and collaboration workspaces. Together, they help you plan, create, monitor and measure a content pipeline that delivers leads and increases brand awareness.

When choosing content marketing for small business software, consider these features:

• Content management – This is a core feature with tools such as WYSIWYG editor, asset library, blogging, and content calendar. In short, this feature set helps you schedule, create and publish content on your websites, social media pages or other online channels. Some software products may have a fully featured CMS while others only offer simple blog publishing features.

• Workflow management – Content creation is a project that needs to be managed efficiently. Hence, many content marketing software solutions are built on project or task management systems. They allow you to divide tasks into subtasks, assign tasks to individuals or teams and track the status of each task. Some good-to-have features here include project templates, approval pipeline, shared workspace, notifications and user role permissions.

• Calendar – This feature may be included in a CMS or task management tool or as a standalone feature. A content marketing software calendar should allow you to be shared at different role levels, tweaked to daily, weekly, monthly or date-range views or filtered in meaningful ways, for instance, by team member or project.

• Automation – It helps you streamline the administrative and repetitive tasks with automation such as collecting leads from your content assets, social media posting and content approval process. Software products vary greatly in the level of automation, so make sure to pay attention to the details.

• Analytics – This is a critical part of your content marketing pipeline, enabling you to track clicks and links, measure content performance and, overall, your content campaign ROI.

• Integrations – Your content marketing software should be able to exchange data with your other business and productivity apps like CMS, social media management, SEO tools, document management and even an affiliate marketing tracker. Integration allows you to generate extensive reports covering the different aspects of your business and showing your content marketing efforts at a strategic level.

Other features to consider when subscribing to a plan include the software’s scalability, pricing and vendor support.

• Streamlines your content workflow. Managing a content marketing initiative is akin to operating an editorial department, something that may not be your core competency. But with a clear strategy supported by content marketing software, even a small business can manage a consistent delivery of content. Repetitive tasks can be automated. A visual task pipeline helps you monitor content tasks in one place. Notifications alert you to potential issues or bottlenecks. In short, your content workflow can run smoothly, from planning to executing to measuring, even as you busy yourself with other marketing initiatives.
• Cost-effective marketing. Content marketing has costs, no doubt, but once you gain traffic and engagement traction–that is, your audience starts consuming your content–the cost is drastically lower than PPC bids or other paid promotions. And the traction only builds up over a period of time, as long as you stick to a content strategy. Content marketing for small business software helps you keep track of your goals and keep you on the right strategic path.
• Data-driven engagement. Creating valuable content is one but measuring which content assets generate more interest over the others is another. Many content marketing software solutions feature analytics to help you focus on higher-engaging content, thus earning you more engagement. The software can measure engagement metrics such as click rate, website visits, shares and likes, views, conversion rate and more.
• Laser-focused ROI. Because you can measure metrics with accuracy, collectively, these insights deliver to you clear KPIs. Content marketing software can measure your content strategy’s ROI and helps you make smarter decisions like pivoting to a new strategy if need be.

• Hyper-personalization. AI and machine learning analytics are reinforcing content marketing software with predictive analytics. This allows marketers to serve content that, not only matches a prospect’s interest in real-time but anticipates his or her interest. Leveraging social and transactional data collected from multiple channels engaged by web visitors, AI-powered content marketing software can profile web visitors with accuracy and convert them into leads.
• AR and VR content. The addition of AR or VR component to content marketing bumps up the engagement level exponentially. When properly deployed, AR/VR content adds an interactive layer to static content like images, articles and videos. Forward-looking content marketing software products integrate AR/VR for retail, education, travel and healthcare content.
• Video marketing. This content type has been around for years now but it will dominate content in the coming years if it hasn’t yet. Content marketing software that allows you to publish videos on social platforms and other channels will give you a key component in engaging your online audience. Data backs this up—a Cisco report found out that 82% of online traffic will be video, while 84% of customers have made a purchase after watching a video.

• Security and privacy. This issue hounds not just businesses but almost everyone connected to the internet. When using content marketing software, you are centralizing all customer data, transactions and details in one place. On paper, this scenario looks scary. But truth be told, most vendors employ bank-grade security to protect customer data. If you are okay with banking online and engaging on social media, using content marketing software should be no different.
• Vendor downtime. Again, on paper, this is the stuff of nightmare content marketers fear–when they cannot access the software. While a server downtime happens in the SaaS industry, most incidents last only for a few seconds or a minute tops. The same thing does happen in online banking.
• Recurring subscription costs. Using SaaS content marketing software means paying a monthly fee as long as you are using it. That amounts to a recurring operating cost. But if you factor in the fact that you need not manage the system and its security, plus, your software is always updated, the ROI should easily outweigh the cost.
• Mistaking software for strategy. Content marketing software is just a tool. Even the best tool cannot deliver your goals if you lack a plan. Subscribing to a software product before planning your content strategy can lead to mismatched features and uncoordinated actions between teams and departments. The right approach is to develop your content plan and analyze the requirements to execute and measure it.