Have you heard the saying, “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link”? In content marketing, that link could be your content plan.
As a content marketer, you create and manage a lot of content, including blogs, emails, and social media posts. Without a plan in place, all that content can easily become chaos.
Even with excellent content ideas that appeal to your target audience, lacking a detailed content plan could result in poor execution. Yet, a Content Marketing Institute report suggests that only 40% of marketers had a documented content plan in 2022.
For seamless content operations, one tool that’s a must-have in your content marketing arsenal is an editorial calendar tool. It’s your weekly or monthly content plan.
An editorial content calendar tool can help marketing teams visualize and track everything.
Be it ongoing blog content projects or upcoming content, content marketing calendars make it easier for marketing team members to meet content deadlines and deliver on time.
We’ve compiled a list of the best editorial calendar tools and social media content calendars for organizing all types of content.
But before we get to that, here’s some basic information on editorial calendars.
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What is an editorial calendar?
A content marketing editorial calendar is a timeline of all the content you plan to publish over a specific time, including project dates, assignees, task status, and deadlines.
Your content calendar must track all tasks, including new content, content audits, or content updates.
A good content calendar app helps keep all the content projects in a central location for easier access and organization.
Top content marketing editorial calendar tools
1. Narrato
Image provided by Narrato Team
Narrato Workspace is an AI content workflow platform. It brings several content planning, creation, optimization, and publishing tools under one roof. It has some cutting-edge AI content tools to help with content creation and optimization.
But if you’re looking for the perfect editorial calendar tool to track and manage all your content projects, Narrato can do that, too.
With Narrato, you can create a separate content calendar for each project. If you want an overview of all your content projects in a central location, it also has a Global Content Calendar.
And that’s not all. Narrato also lets you assign tasks, track content statuses, and manage your content workflow from the calendar view.
Here’s a look at the key features of this content calendar tool –
- Task creation and assignment: Create content tasks and assign them straight from the content calendar. You can manage many pieces of content at once.
- Adjusting due dates: Adjust due dates for content tasks simply by dragging and dropping them to the desired date
- Content items are color-coded based on their workflow status, allowing easy tracking
- Filtering content tasks on the calendar according to workflow status
- Weekly/Monthly Views: Switch between weekly and monthly views with the Month/Week toggle button
- AI Topic Generator: Use the AI Topic Generator (available with the content calendar) to get creative content ideas
- Scheduling and publishing content: Narrato also has publishing automation features. You can publish content to WordPress or build custom integrations using the API or Zapier to publish and schedule posts.
Narrato also offers Kanban Boards, which work the same way as the content calendar. Kanban boards allow you to track the status of all content tasks and move them from one workflow stage to another.
Another stellar content planning feature on Narrato Workspace is the AI Content Brief Generator. It generates SEO content briefs with keyword suggestions, questions/topics to include, and more.
And if you want to scale your content creation, you can also opt for their content writing service – Narrato Marketplace. Here you can get expert freelance writers for hire.
Pricing: Besides the free plan, Narrato Workspace provides Pro and Business plans, which start from $9 per user per month. There’s also a Custom plan to meet your unique content needs.
2. CoSchedule
CoSchedule is an advanced marketing tool with robust content planning capabilities. The marketing editorial calendar provides clarity on all your content projects. It also makes assigning and rescheduling tasks a breeze.
Here are key content planning features of this editorial calendar tool –
- The drag-and-drop marketing/social media calendar helps with easy planning. You can move content around, adjust deadlines, and collaborate with your team in real-time.
- Multiple read-only calendar views for different team members.
- Reusable task templates and an option for duplicating existing projects.
- Schedule posts on social media platforms with the social media automation tool, ReQueue. CoSchedule also allows you to view all your scheduled social posts in the same social media calendars as your other content. This makes it easy to see how all your content fits together.
CoSchedule can be a good choice for a content calendar tool, especially for social media managers in large organizations. But it does get a little complicated for content teams just getting started and isn’t as easy to use as some of the other tools on this list.
Pricing: The Free Forever plan provides all the basic content calendar capabilities. But if you want features like Recurring Tasks and Social Media Automation, you can use the Pro Marketing Calendar ($29 per monthly user).
3. ClickUp
The editorial content calendar in this project management tool is quite different. ClickUp gives you ready-to-use editorial calendar templates that you can edit and optimize for all types of content.
Some key content calendar planning capabilities provided in this tool are –
- Custom calendar templates for different content types, social media posts, blog posts, or videos. This ClickUp feature lets you create a consistent structure for every piece of content, helping you save time in the long run.
- Template Duplication: Duplicate specific templates to create new projects faster and easier. It’s great for creating several content projects with similar structures.
- ClickUp’s editorial calendar templates also let you create custom fields unique to your content team’s needs.
- Task Dependencies: Set task dependencies on the platform to keep your content creation process on track. With this feature, you can ensure that any particular task doesn’t start until another is complete.
Besides the content calendar templates, ClickUp also has tables, Gantt charts, maps and mind maps, workload, etc.
Pricing: ClickUp provides five pricing plans. Free Forever, Unlimited, Business, Business Plus, and Enterprise. Content calendar templates are available in the free version. But for advanced capabilities, you can upgrade to paid plans, starting from $5 per monthly member.
4. Asana
Image provided by Narrato Team
Asana is another project management platform with an editorial calendar tool. It doesn’t specialize in content management, but it has various features that can help you with content planning and collaboration. The editorial content calendar on Asana can help teams collaborate better and stay on top of their content projects.
Asana’s editorial content calendar has the following capabilities –
- Drag-and-drop interface: Review and reschedule work from the calendar.
- Calendar filtering: Use custom fields to sort projects and spot top content priorities.
- Multiple Calendar Views: View your content calendar in weekly, monthly, or daily formats. Besides the calendar view, you can visualize your content projects through a list view, Kanban board-style view, or timeline design. The timeline option is especially helpful for complex content marketing campaigns with several overlapping tasks.
- Advanced Search lets you see what content tasks your team is working on and keep track of their deadlines.
- Integrations: Asana offers integrations with Outlook, Google Calendar, and iCal to ensure a unified experience across your project management platform and other essential tools.
Pricing: Besides the Basic plan, which is free, Asana also provides Premium and Business plans. The paid plans start from $10.99 per user per month. Note that the content calendar is available with the free version too.
5. Google Sheets
Google Sheets is an indispensable tool for content planning. So much so that content teams often use it congruently with other content planning software. Why? For starters, it’s completely free, and if you’re working with other Google apps like Google Docs and Google Drive, it makes an entire ecosystem for you.
Also, the simple and intuitive interface makes it an accessible tool for all users. Be they inexperienced interns or tech-savvy content managers and social media marketers.
Google Sheets doesn’t have a dedicated editorial calendar feature, but you can use it to build your content calendar from scratch. If you don’t want to build a custom content calendar, you’ll find many free templates for Google Sheets on the web.
While it is an excellent tool for creating editorial content calendars, it does have some drawbacks –
- Limited functionality compared to other content calendar tools custom-built for the purpose.
- Doesn’t offer the same level of collaboration features
- Manual editing and updating of calendars
Pricing: Free.
What are the benefits of having a content calendar?
It’s clear from this list of tools given above that content calendar software can be very useful in the planning stage of the content marketing process. If you still aren’t convinced, here’s a look at all the benefits of using editorial content calendar tools
1. Keeping your content organized
When it comes to efficient content planning and execution, organizing is everything. If you aren’t organized during the planning process, keeping on top of all your deadlines, goals, and objectives will get difficult.
Things get even more complicated when using different content formats in your content marketing efforts. A content calendar, along with a content brief, makes this organization a little bit easier. It provides a visual overview of your content plan for a month/week.
2. Identification of content gaps
A content calendar provides a fresh viewpoint for how you see your content. It allows you to step back and assess the complete picture, covering blog posts, social media posts, or anything else.
An editorial calendar makes the identification of content gaps easier, allowing you to leverage any opportunities for improvement. Without this big-picture perspective, it’s easy to get caught up in the details of content creation.
3. Greater visibility into the content plan for all team members
Kapost’s research has found that almost 36% of organizations miss content deadlines when they don’t have a centralized editorial content calendar. An editorial content calendar makes it easy to check the progress of content tasks and stay updated on who is working on which task.
When you know how your content projects are progressing, you can ensure that all the team members stay on track and guide those falling behind.
It also increases transparency and accountability.
4. Provides enough prep time for content publishing
Most content creators prefer to work ahead of time on their content tasks to ensure that they have enough time for content publishing and content optimization. An editorial content calendar makes this easier.
When you can spot which content tasks are coming up, you’ll be able to manage your schedule better.
5. Streamlines your content workflow
There’s usually a lot of back and forth involved in content creation and collaboration between the content writers, editors, and other stakeholders. When so many people are involved in the same task, it can result in chaos.
A content calendar can be a godsend here, making the content processes more efficient and the entire content workflow more streamlined.
Wrapping Up
This covers everything you need to know about content calendar tools. Do you feel spoiled for choice? Here are some things to consider before you make a final choice –
- Does it offer you flexibility? A good editorial calendar tool would have features that allow you to make any quick last-minute changes, whether it is changing due dates or task reassignment, etc.
- Does it make collaboration easier? A content calendar should make planning and collaborating on content tasks easier for all content team members.
- Does it come with an easy-to-use interface? The editorial calendar tool should be easy to navigate and provide a simple and intuitive user interface. Check if the tool provides different calendar views and has a drag-and-drop interface.
There’s no shortage of options when it comes to editorial calendar tools. With these tips and the excellent list of editorial calendar tools, we hope we’ve made the choice a little easier for you.
