In this era of content marketing, creating and maintaining an editorial calendar and managing all of your content assets are essential for implementing a successful content marketing program.
Content planning tools give you a holistic view of how your brand content editorial calendar fits into your entire content marketing strategy and answers important questions: How does content fulfill the expectations of specific customer segments? Are appropriate content types, topics and promotions in place? Does planned content fit within business growth initiatives and what are the connections to calls to action?
TopRank® Online Marketing takes an integrated approach to content planning and we write extensively on the subject, today I’ll focus on five different tools that you can use to track, control and manage online content. Using content planning tools like these, you can spend more time creating the content objects that will attract, engage and convert more traffic to grow your business.
DivvyHQ provides a way to plan, divvy up and conquer the tasks associated with editorial planning without the headache of using clunky spreadsheets. This is a cloud-based application you can call “home” built specifically for professional content producers. With the ability to organize and manage a robust list of content types and tracks its production, tracking a successful content marketing effort is a snap.
You can quickly add your content ideas right from your dashboard. You can choose to add more detail, or you can simply “park it” in your Parking Lot and add the details later, so you can keep right on brainstorming. Use your Parking Lot to store your ideas and allow your team to submit content ideas to you for review.
Setting up your calendars to fit your production needs is easy. You can choose to set up calendars based on client name, campaign name, team name, content type or website. Then you assign the team members you want to have access to your calendars. It’s that easy to manage your calendars and your teams.
If you’re managing a lot of content and multiple team members, this application definitely takes the hassle out of planning and collaboration.
GatherContent includes simple site mapping tools make it easy to organize content for new websites or site redesigns. Using drag and drop, you can quickly rearrange the order of your content, as well as see an overview of the entire project.
You’re able to plan, structure and collaborate across the entire workflow. Planning content is just a matter of adding pages, gathering content, uploading files and saving your work. You can manage the project by assigning pages, setting due dates, discussing content elements and setting status approvals and, finally, exporting the content to your CMS.
If you’re looking to save time on your client’s web projects, this might be the solution for you.
Kapost makes content marketing easy by managing every step of the process in a single platform. The software can manage blog posts, videos, eBooks and white papers, social media posts, presentations and infographics, emails, landing pages and webinars.
For marketers committed to becoming content publishers, Kapost represents a true strategic platform designed to target each asset for a specific buyer persona at a specific stage in the buyer’s journey. The content object is visible to all collaborators through a content dashboard and becomes part of the workflow in a calendar format, identifying due dates for content assets and campaigns.
The ability to distribute content to all your channels with a click of a button is a huge time saver. In addition, as you publish content across different channels, Kapost aggregates performance metrics and displays them in one place, including links earned and conversions. With the integration of marketing automation platforms, like Eloquo and Marketo, businesses are also able to score content performance for its impact on the sales funnel.
Having used this platform, it does require a steeper learning curve than your typical blogging editorial calendar. But, for businesses that want to become publishing powerhouses, Kapost could be for you.
Compendium orchestrates all of the content necessary today to maintain a consistent message for your brand. They make it easy to create and place compelling content from both inside and outside your company. You can plan your content with a calendar-based tool to pinpoint your audiences; map and organize your content; schedule all of your messaging; store your ideas and gather feedback.
Compendium makes it possible for everyone inside your company and your customers, even, to become content creators with a suite of tools that motivates them. You can publish each campaign where your customers will see it and promote your story through social networks and keyword tagging. Finally, they provide a way to prove your performance with their reporting and tracking features that display critical metrics in a single dashboard.
WordPress, with its thousands of plugins, has made publishing content for the masses possible. One popular plugin for bloggers and content marketers is their Editorial Calendar, which allows you to set up all your posts in a simple calendar format. It’s a clean interface that allows you to drag and drop blog posts to better manage your ideas.
It’s not as robust as DivvyHQ, but for the small business or solo blogger who wants to keep track of concepts and rearrange posts to provide diversity in their content planning, this is an easy one-click install that will keep you better organized by allowing you to schedule content in advance.
Thanks to marketing software, companies of every size have the ability to create, collaborate, collect, and curate their story and brand message. These tools allow for you to streamline planning, offer unified messaging, ensure quality and promote your story. Three of the above tools allow companies to do this at scale.
Based on Lee’s post about the future of content yesterday, what types of content marketing tools do you anticipate marketers will be needing in the in the next 12 months? How about 3-5 years?
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