Creating content has its challenges. First of all, there’s coming up with engaging ideas. Next there’s producing the copy. And then there’s planning when you’ll post your content and to which platforms, before (finally) checking that everything is accurate, spelled correctly, and properly referenced.
Although it won’t solve all of your content struggles, a content calendar is a great way of diarising your content, making sure you have key dates covered and that none of your key messages clash with each other.
Looking for the best tool to help you plan your content? We’ve put together this list of the top tools available to help you plan out your content calendar for the months ahead.
What is a content calendar?
Before we get into it, let’s start with the basics. What exactly is a content calendar? A content calendar is a tool that you can use to plan your content. You can use it for your website and social media channels, and it can be as detailed or as top-level as you like.
It helps you to keep track of all the marketing messages you have. With 60% of marketers saying they create at least one piece of content per day (source: Insider Intelligence), that’s a lot of content to schedule!
If you have a large team working on content, it’s a great way to ensure that everyone is on the same page and that the right messages are going out at the right time.
It’s also a fantastic way to make sure that your content is relevant. Having a content calendar means that you can plan ahead for national events for example, such as the recent Coronation or perhaps the Rugby World Cup, meaning that your business won’t get left behind when other brands are capitalising on topics.
How a content calendar tool can help your business
Of course, you can create your own content calendar with a spreadsheet or table, but why start from scratch when the hard work has already been done for you?
A content calendar tool may have extra features that help to make your life easier, including functionality such as assigning tasks to different members of the team, being able to monitor the status of different pieces of content, and collaborating with different team members.
Without this, there is always the danger that your content marketing fall into silos. With one person responsible for web content and someone else responsible for social media, sometimes campaigns aren’t executed to their potential, and repurposing opportunities can be lost.
A content calendar tool will help you to keep these different channels together for a successful omnichannel marketing strategy. They can also help with inspiration and discovering topics that you may want to cover in your content.
Some content calendar tools also come with built-in analytics, allowing you to monitor chosen metrics for your campaigns and analyse the results.
5 of the best tools to help you plan your content
These are some of our favourite tools to use to plan out content:
1. HubSpot Blog Editorial Calendar
If you’re short on budget, then Hubspot offers some excellent free templates to help you get started with your content calendar. You can use their Blog Editorial Calendar to plan content for your website and social media channels.
The downside of this is that it isn’t an all-singing, all-dancing content calendar tool. It’s really just a basic spreadsheet. However, it’s a good starter for ten if you’re just getting started with your content strategy.
Top tip: Use one of these templates in Google Sheets to make them more collaborative. This way, several people can edit the calendar at the same time, whether they’re part of your team or an external agency. You can also leave notes for each other.
2. Storychief
If you are looking for more of a sophisticated content calendar tool, then Storychief is one that does it all. You can use this for content planning, blogging, social media, and SEO, as well as integrating other tools into it.
You can schedule, publish and distribute your content straight from the dashboard here, saving you time and alleviating the need for a two-step process of planning and posting.
3. BuzzSumo
One of the most difficult parts of planning your upcoming content is making sure that your content is relevant. BuzzSumo can help with this.
This online tool can help you to find out what’s popular or trending in your field. Once you know what people are talking about, this can help you to come up with your own content ideas.
BuzzSumo can help you to discover new keywords, trending stories, and things your customers may be searching for, helping you to plan quick social media content as well as long-form content like blog posts.
4. Monday
Probably better known as a project management tool, Monday also has a calendar view where you can plan content and assign tasks to different team members.
Its handy notification system will let you know when a task is due, behind schedule, or completed, and it also has version control which is great for getting new team members up to scratch with things like tone of voice.
Monday is great if you have a few team members, but you still need to have approval over content. Your content team can add annotations and tag editors to make the approval process quicker and easier.
5. ClickUp
ClickUp is great for anyone regularly working with freelancers or agencies on their content marketing. It is a content calendar and management tool which has custom access rights so you can choose the level of access for each team member.
This makes collaboration easy as you can all be working on projects at the same time. You can also assign tasks and communicate via comments and annotations.
ClickUp offers a library of over 1,000 templates for you to use for your content calendar, or you can build your own from scratch. Its drag-and-drop feature makes it easy for you to move pieces of content around if plans change – and we marketers know how often that happens!
There’s even an offline mode so you can work on a train, a plane, or even if you’re just having Wi-Fi issues.
Looking for more support with your content?
Want to reach bigger audiences through more engaging content? Get in touch with The Content Marketing Team to find out more about how we can help you engage your customers more effectively and get your website found online.
Whether you are looking for a content marketing strategy for your brand or just a hand with your blog posts, we would love to catch up and show you how we can help make a difference.
