Content marketing software: 7 tools to guide strategy and drive conversions

You’ve created what you think is fantastic content—compelling and informative—but the data tells a different story. Low engagement, minimal conversions, and a nagging feeling you’re missing something important. Sound familiar? 

The truth is that even the best content marketers struggle to connect their efforts to tangible business results. That’s because traditional content marketing software only scratches the surface of understanding your audience’s experience with your content. 

In this guide, we explore 7 powerful tools to give you deeper insights into the ‘why’ behind user behaviors, helping you improve your content strategy and create more high-quality, conversion-focused content. 

Key insights

• Successful content marketing requires looking beyond traditional analytics—understanding not just what users do, but why they do it

• The most effective content strategies integrate both quantitative data (clicks, conversions) and qualitative data (user behavior, feedback) for a complete picture of your audience

• Experience analytics tools reveal hidden content friction points that standard analytics miss, often leading to significant conversion improvements

1. Session replays

Session replays, also known as session recordings, capture how real visitors interact with your content, showing their entire journey through your site—every click, tap, and scroll. 

Unlike traditional content marketing analytics that tell you what happened, session replays show you exactly how it happened and why—crucial context for understanding your audience’s behavior and content performance.

Use Contentsquare’s Session Replay to 

• Identify content engagement patterns: see where users slow down to read thoroughly and where they skip sections, helping you optimize content structure, readability, and flow

• Discover friction points: spot moments where users hesitate, backtrack, or abandon your content due to unclear messaging, poor layout, or technical issues that traditional analytics wouldn’t reveal

• Validate content strategy with real behavior: watch how different audience segments interact with your thought leadership pieces, product descriptions, case studies, or landing pages to see if they’re consuming content as intended

💡Pro tip: streamline your content optimization workflows by using Contentsquare’s AI-powered Session Replay Summaries to quickly analyze hours of user interactions, highlighting key patterns and friction points without having to manually review countless recordings.

Session Replay Summaries analyze your user recordings to surface key insights and potential issues.

2. Heatmaps 

Heatmaps use color to show where users click, tap, and scroll as they engage with your content. For digital marketers, heatmaps transform abstract aggregate data into intuitive visualizations that reveal which content elements truly resonate with your audience and which ones get overlooked.

Use Contentsquare Heatmaps to 

• Optimize layout and hierarchy: identify which headlines, images, calls to action (CTAs), and content blocks receive the most attention, so you can place your most important messages where users actually look

• Improve content consumption: track scroll depth to see how far down users read your articles or landing pages, helping you restructure your content to ensure key information doesn’t get buried

• Refine conversion elements: analyze which elements—like testimonials, product benefits, or pricing details—drive the most engagement and conversions, and then optimize underperforming sections

• Compare content performance: view heatmaps side by side to understand how different audience segments, traffic sources, or returning visitors interact with the same content, allowing for more targeted refinements 

• Measure ROI: visualize which content elements contribute directly to revenue and conversions, helping you quantify the value of different content investments

Discover the exposure, click, and conversion rates of each page element, as well as revenue attribution, with Contentsquare

3. Surveys

Surveys let you collect direct feedback from your audience about their content experience, preferences, and pain points. While analytics tell you what users do, surveys tell you why they do it.

For content marketers, this qualitative data is invaluable for understanding audience needs, validating content marketing strategy decisions, and gathering authentic voice-of-customer language to incorporate into future content. 

Use Contentsquare’s Voice of Customer tools to 

• Validate content relevance and quality: launch a free survey from a customizable template to get direct feedback on whether your content delivers on its promises, helping you refine topics and approaches

• Improve content conversion paths: launch exit-intent surveys when visitors leave without converting to understand their objections or missing information that prevented them from taking action

• Identify gaps and opportunities: ask users what additional information they were hoping to find, revealing untapped content areas that could address audience needs and drive engagement. Our Interviews tool is perfect for this—schedule, host, and analyze interviews with real users and conduct User Tests to get candid feedback on your landing pages or blog design.

• Enhance content personalization: use an on-page feedback button to collect preference data for content segmentation and tailor content to different user needs, increasing relevance and engagement.

Place a feedback button on any page of your site to learn how users experience your content

4. SEO

If you invest time and resources in creating valuable content, you want to ensure it gets discovered by your target audience. And that requires strategic search engine optimization (SEO).

For content marketers, organic SEO isn’t just about keywords—it’s about understanding user intent, delivering exceptional experiences, and creating authoritative content that search engines want to surface for readers.

“In my career, the organic channel has been the most successful in driving traffic and new business via the broader content marketing vertical,” says Sean Potter, Organic Search and SEO Lead at Contentsquare. 

SEO tools like Semrush offer comprehensive keyword research and competitive analysis, while platforms like Clearscope help optimize content for search intent and topic authority. However, even perfectly optimized content may underperform if the user experience (UX) doesn’t engage visitors.

Use Contentsquare’s capabilities to 

• Identify and resolve technical SEO barriers: use Speed Analysis to diagnose and fix page load issues that impact search rankings and the user experience, ensuring your content has the technical foundation to perform well

• Optimize for engagement signals: view Zone-based heatmaps to see which content sections keep visitors on the page longer—helping you prioritize elements that contribute to positive SEO engagement metrics like time on page and bounce rate

• Reduce content friction points: use our Frustration Score feature to identify where users struggle with specific page elements—allowing you to streamline the experience and improve SEO user signals like dwell time (the amount of time users spend on the page before clicking back to the search results)

Find errors and slow page load times that disrupt the user experience before they affect how your page ranks

5. Email marketing

Email marketing is an effective channel for distributing high-quality content, nurturing leads, and driving conversions. For content marketers, email provides a direct line to your audience, allowing you to deliver personalized content experiences that move prospects through the funnel. 

When done right, email marketing campaigns transform static content into dynamic digital assets that reach users at exactly the right moment in their journey. 

Email marketing platforms like Mailchimp offer user-friendly interfaces with AI-powered content creation and automation tools, while ActiveCampaign offers advanced personalization features for scaling sophisticated email marketing programs. 

However, even the best email marketing software can’t tell you how users engage with your content once they click through—that’s where digital experience analytics tools are invaluable.

Use Contentsquare’s capabilities to

• Optimize landing page experiences: ensure that the pages you link to in emails deliver on expectations by using heatmaps and session replays to refine the post-click experience

• Personalize email content strategy: analyze how different audience segments interact with your site content. This helps you develop email messaging that addresses their specific pain points, interests, and content consumption preferences.

• Refine email campaign performance: use the Journeys tool to compare the paths of users arriving through various email campaigns to identify which content resonates best with different segments

Use Contentsquare to compare customer journeys to discover which content resonates.

6. A/B testing

A/B testing allows content marketers to move beyond gut feelings and make data-driven decisions about how effective their content is. Rather than guessing which headline or CTA drives the most engagement, test variations with real users to determine what truly resonates.

Tools like AB Tasty provide comprehensive testing features with user-friendly interfaces for marketing teams, while Optimizely offers advanced functionalities for businesses with complex testing needs and high traffic volumes. (Great news: Contentsquare has integrations with both of these tools!)

Use Contentsquare’s capabilities to

• Generate data-backed testing hypotheses: leverage the Heatmaps and Journey Analysis tools to spot content elements that underperform or frustrate users—and then create targeted A/B tests based on these behavior patterns

• Look beyond conversion rates: compare behavioral data between test variants to understand not just which version won but why—giving you deeper insights into user preferences

• Identify segment-specific content preferences: compare how different user segments respond to content variations, allowing you to create more tailored content experiences

• Visualize the full impact of content changes: use Impact Quantification to see how certain content elements affect revenue and business outcomes, helping you prioritize which content optimizations deserve more resources

Use Contentsquare’s Impact Quantification to see session-level revenue predictions for each testing variant

🔥 How RingCentral’s marketing team boosted conversions by 25% 🔥

RingCentral, a cloud-based communication and collaboration platform, had strong website traffic, but their visitors didn’t always convert. Using Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis, the team discovered that their lead-capture forms—a critical content conversion point—created friction for their users. 

The team had conducted A/B testing, but Contentsquare’s experience analytics allowed them to dig deeper, revealing exactly how users interacted with their content and where potential leads abandoned the process. 

This new understanding allowed them to 

• Identify which content elements needed a redesign

• Discover what visitors actually searched for

• Determine which page elements hindered conversions

The result? A targeted redesign of their main lead capture form that delivered a 25% increase in conversion rate. 👏

7. Reporting

Effective reporting transforms raw data into actionable insights that drive content marketing strategy decisions. Modern reporting goes beyond basic metrics like views and clicks, providing a deeper understanding of how content performs throughout the customer journey.

For content marketers, the ability to visualize performance metrics, track progress against goals, and share results with stakeholders is essential to secure buy-in and resources.

“A clear understanding of genuine business impact is central to a successful content marketing strategy,” Sean says. “Regular reporting and refinement of your objectives and key results (OKRs) and key performance indicators (KPIs) help you to keep meeting business goals over time.”

Use Contentsquare’s customizable reporting capabilities to 

• Create a single source of truth: use dashboards to combine traditional content metrics with behavioral insights for a complete picture of your content’s effectiveness in real time

• Generate insights with natural language: use AI to ask plain-English questions about content performance (“Which blog posts drive the most newsletter signups?”) and generate easy-to-understand visualizations

• Identify content conversion bottlenecks: use Funnel Analysis to track how visitors move through your content, pinpointing exactly where potential customers drop off and why, allowing you to optimize critical content touchpoints

Use Contentsquare Funnel Analysis to find out whether your content is converting and winning customers to your brand

Elevate your content strategy with the right tools 

Content marketing success demands more than compelling content creation—it requires understanding performance, identifying improvements, and making data-driven decisions.

By implementing the 7 types of tools above into your workflow, you gain visibility into your audience’s behavior and preferences. This holistic approach allows you to refine your content continuously based on actual user interactions. By creating a powerful cycle of optimization, you drive engagement and conversions while boosting user satisfaction.

FAQs about content marketing software