What do cross-country road trips, wedding speeches, and social media marketing have in common? Planning.
You could improvise all three, but it’s better to have a plan for what direction you’re heading — especially when developing your social media content strategy.
By now, most marketers recognize that social media plays an integral role in an effective inbound marketing strategy. Here are the best Calender tools:
Google Drive
Content Calendar and Asset Organization
Google Drive has several helpful features that make it easy for social media marketers to build out an effective content calendar.
Here’s an example of how a team might use Google Calendar to track both their editorial and social media calendars to make sure they’re aligning posts with new blog content. These calendars can be easily shared with multiple teams to avoid scheduling conflicts and ensure that campaigns are aligned.
Marketers can also use shared Google Sheets to schedule posts on social media, track the status of different pieces of content, and assign tasks to team members — all on the same platform as their calendar.
With the help of Google Docs, users can keep comments all in one place and can collaborate on different projects without emailing back-and-forth or having to schedule a meeting. This is a particularly useful feature when editing content for social media, which may need to be drafted and approved quickly.
(HubSpot customers: You can link your Google Drive account to your HubSpot portal to easily upload files from Drive into your HubSpot software.)
Loomly
Content Planning, Creation, Publishing, and Calendar
If you want more mileage out of a content calendar than publishing dates, you can turn to an all-in-one content planning and publishing platform such as Loomly.
Loomly offers tools beyond the management of content, going even so far as to provide post inspiration and ideas to help you create content. It also allows you to manage your content assets, schedule posts, manage them in both a list view and a calendar view, and analyze what’s working.
Their most robust feature set, though, includes a collaboration and approval environment so that teams can submit mockups, provide comments, see version logs, and flag for approval. This can help you streamline for efficiency when it may otherwise seem as though there are “too many cooks in the kitchen” on a particular project.
Trello
Task Management and Content Calendar
Trello is another organizational tool that’s highly effective for team collaboration. Trello also offers a full calendar view (shown above) which makes it easy to visualize what content is going out, and when. More specifically, social media managers can use Trello’s flexible assignment “cards” and customizable “boards” and “lists” to map out to-do lists, manage a content calendar, plan a campaign, and house ideas from a brainstorm.
But you’re not limited to just one structure: Users can customize boards according to their needs. For example, a team could create a board to organize social media posts for a given week, on a specific platform, or post ideas around a topic, such as a campaign or awareness day.
Trello cards allow for a ton of customization as well. You can track progress toward completing a checklist, which could be useful for social media marketers looking to track campaign progress.
Additionally, Trello cards can be assigned to different team members, marked with due dates, and commented on. Users can even customize labels with different publication statuses so the entire team can see the progress of their social media posts and when they’re due on the calendar. The labels could also indicate different social networks that content is being published on.
SproutSocial
Social Publishing and Content Calendar
Sprout Social’s social media calendar and publishing tool makes it easy for teams or individuals to plan and schedule all of their social posts. You can schedule content to automatically post to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and more.
You can also tag each social post and add notes to better track and report on your posting strategy and campaigns. Additionally, their publishing suite includes a tool called Optimal Send Times which analyzes your social media data and automatically publishes at a time your audience is most engaged.
Evernote
Content Calendar, Task Management, and Asset Organization
Evernote is a note-taking app that marketers can use to keep track of all the moving parts that comprise a social media campaign.
The tool also features yearly, monthly, weekly, and hourly logs, which make it easy to keep track of when you’re publishing content on social media, when you’re producing blog content, and other team-wide priorities. (Evernote offers customizable templates for each of these that can be downloaded into the app.)
Another useful feature? Evernote’s Web Clipper extension for Chrome. Marketers can use this tool to easily save links to their Evernote Notebook for sharing later on.
The Evernote mobile app also boasts some interesting features to help marketers keep their social content ideas straight. For example, you can easily snap a photo and save it to your Evernote files for review later.
This feature is of particular valuable for social content creators looking to maintain a backlog of photos to publish on Instagram.
Hootsuite
Social Publishing and Content Calendar
Hootsuite offers a built-in Planner tool to help you create campaigns, identify publishing gaps, and collaborate with your content creation team. Its primary features are in social publishing so that you can release content to your networks in advance, but it also has rich features for collaboration and post approvals. You can even curate content from other sources without logging into your account. Once your content is created, you can preview it with the Composer tool, which displays according to each social network’s unique format.
Agorapulse
Social Publishing and Content Calendar
Similar to Hootsuite, Agorapulse offers social publishing tools and a content calendar so that you can manage your social media accounts with ease. This includes scheduling (or rescheduling), queuing, and bulk uploading posts, which is incredibly helpful for those who do quarterly or monthly content plans. What makes Agorapulse different, though, is its social inbox that allows you to manage all the interactions from various platforms in a single place. After all, content isn’t just a one-and-done activity; it’s about building awareness and engagement with your readers as well.
StoryChief
Content Planning and Distribution
If you want more from your content calendar than simply knowing when posts go live, StoryChief is a good option. With StoryChief’s smart calendar, you can better strategize and plan your content strategy across channels. It not only displays your timetable; it also allows you to assign collaborators to tasks and filter by campaign. StoryChief self-describes their tool as a “content distribution platform” that unifies analytics and publishing across multiple channels for a more simplified approach to content creation. Best of all, it syncs with your favorite calendar apps as well as HubSpot.
ClearVoice
Content Creation and Management
So what about content planning and creation? ClearVoice offers content creation tools to fit into your workflow. While their big claim to fame is their Talent Network Search which allows you to find and connect to content creators to work on your projects, ClearVoice also has features for task management for internal and external collaborators. You can create, edit, and approve projects in an interface that makes editorial management easy. They also have a dashboard and dynamic editorial calendar with plenty of interactive functionality, and there’s integrations with other popular software.
Zerys
Content Creation and Management
Zerys is another platform that matches you with your ideal content creation freelancers. However, it markets itself as a platform dedicated to content success, offering features for content planning, production, publishing, promotion, conversion, and analytics. You can manage unlimited content projects, plan keywords and titles for blog content, hire writers, and view all deadlines on an integrated calendar. Your in-house writers can use the platform, too, with the project management features that Zerys offers. It also integrates with HubSpot so that publishing is a breeze.
Visually
Visually is a complete tool for managing and monitoring your Digital Marketing strategy.
The solution includes a collaborative platform where you can contact your teams, delegate tasks, pass feedback, and revise your creative teams’ work.
Visually also allows you to launch content projects quickly and intuitively, using the various templates provided by the tool.
You can produce:
Using the software, you can also get in touch with over 1000 carefully selected creative professionals.
Designers, writers, animators are matched with your project according to your company’s characteristics and objectives.
When it comes to price, Visually adopts a very flexible policy. To start using the platform, you need to fill out a form specifying your project’s details and have a representative contact you.
Once you accept the quote, you can start enjoying the solution’s benefits.
Wrike
A leading player in the Marketing Calendar Software market, Wrike is a platform that has been gaining prominence due to its ease for the management of remote teams.
The tool ensures efficient internal communication and facilitates collaboration between creative teams and other professionals.
Another point that calls attention is its versatility: Wrike can be applied to satisfy the needs of an entire corporation, but can also be used on a smaller scale, as in a temporary project.
You can easily configure Wrike to meet the demands of all working styles.
The tool is also an excellent application for collecting and analyzing relevant data, which end up becoming fundamental assets for any company’s success.
In order to protect such valuable information, the product also relies on advanced security features: it allows companies to own and manage keys to their encrypted data.
CoSchedule
CoSchedule Marketing Calendar allows you to centralize all your marketing efforts and activities in a single platform.
By using colors and icons to differentiate projects, tasks, and responsible teams, the application provides an easy overview of the strategy and helps you to prioritize the most urgent actions.
You can also use CoSchedule’s sharing resources to report the progress of your approaches to your superiors. This helps prove the efficiency and relevance of the efforts conducted by your department.
The software is also extremely flexible, something indispensable in an oscillating sector such as marketing.
If you see the need to make any strategy changes, you can quickly alter the schedule and ensure that all teams are aware of all changes.
You can try CoSchedule for free for 14 days. After this period, it is necessary to subscribe to the service, which costs $29 USD per month, per user.
CrossCap
Easy setup, navigation, and visualization. These are the highlights presented by CrossCap on its homepage.
In fact, the platform is known for being extremely intuitive, facilitating use even for professionals without technical skills.
The tool centralizes all your marketing activities onto a dashboard, which can be viewed according to various filters.
Besides, it allows integration with other software, which paves the way for you to customize the calendar to best fit your workflow.
Users of the platform can access it from their own mobile devices. All you have to do is download the apps specially developed for tablets and smartphones.
In CrossCap, you can configure your campaigns according to your specific KPIs and then have access to performance reports that focus on evaluating those metrics.
There is no information on pricing, so you will need to contact a sales rep. Before you receive your budget, you can use the demo version of CrossCap, which is available for free.
Monday.com
Monday.com is another Marketing Calendar Software that promises agility in project planning and execution. The platform allows teams to add tasks to their workflow, creating a collaborative environment, and encouraging proactivity among employees.
Used by over 100,000 companies worldwide, this solution offers customizable workflow templates that allow you to mold the calendar in accordance with your strategy.
In addition, automation features make your employees’ routine more effective by letting the machine handle less creative and more repetitive tasks.
Monday.com’s dashboard includes valuable insights on your campaign development and on the team’s performance. To ensure compliance with deadlines, you can activate time tracking applications and view detailed reports on each process.
The solution is available in over 10 languages, including English, Portuguese, French, Spanish, and Japanese.
You can test the tool for free, but afterward, you must choose one of the 3 plans available, which vary between $5 and $10 USD a month. It is also possible to create a customized corporate plan.
Conclusionion
We’ve discussed what makes up a content calendar, why they’re helpful to you and your projects, how to use them in the most effective way, and provided some awesome examples of businesses that put all of these ideas into practice.
With all of these great reasons to use a collaborative content calendar and examples to back them up, it’s time to start putting your own content calendar together.
It’s a boatload of work that is well worth the extra effort, and your team will thank you for it.
Your future self will be thanking you, too.