With target audiences steadily moving online, firms have turned to digital media channels to build brand awareness, credibility, and trust while educating and engaging with stakeholders. Whether it’s infographics on a company’s performance, stop motion animated recruitment videos, or podcasts and blogs featuring a company’s CEO, a host of new mediums have made their way into the mainstream. To create this engagement, firms need content (and a lot of it!), with 60% of marketers creating at least one piece of content each day. However, herein lies the problem—44% of marketers identify the content production process as the biggest challenge. Solutions like outsourcing content creation to external design agencies are expensive and time-consuming, while traditional design software has a steep learning curve and a hefty price tag. 

Enter, content curation tools. These provide non-technical, affordable solutions geared toward producing content at scale for the digital age. We have identified 100+ startups in this space, with Canva and Grammarly having amassed a large user base and significant funding. Even firms providing well-known traditional design software including Adobe and Corel have caught up to the changing times, introducing new solutions for digital media channels.

Although demand for these tools is only set to grow as new digital customer touchpoints open up more opportunities, there remain some risks. These cloud-based tools are vulnerable to data loss and fraud as well as compatibility and switching costs. In this introductory article to the content creation tools industry, we take a deep dive into the type of tools available, differentiators, growth drivers, potential risks, and what the future holds.