You’re looking to ramp up your content output and refine your marketing strategy, yet the mountain of social media posts and blog posts you want to get through feels overwhelming. With the next quarter rapidly approaching, you don’t have much time to put together a comprehensive plan.
Sometimes in business, we have to accept that external tools and automation are essential to optimizing pipelines and streamlining our efforts.
Why spend countless hours fretting over how to tackle an overwhelming amount of content when you can automate and outsource large parts of the process?
This guide will explore the 10 best content planning tools on the market that content marketers can use to achieve more with less when it comes to executing their content marketing strategy.
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Why are Content Planning Tools Important?
Content is a cornerstone of any effective marketing strategy — it brings value to existing customers and can generate new leads for your funnel. There’s a reason 97% of marketers include content marketing as part of their overall strategy in 2022.
A piece of content doesn’t have to be text-based, though. It can be anything from a social media graphic to a promotional product video.
Given that there are so many different types of content belonging on various platforms, from social media to your website, organizing it all can feel like an impossible task. But the key to raising brand awareness and generating leads with content is putting out high-quality pieces consistently, so it’s not something you can afford to ignore.
Here are three reasons why you should consider using content planning tools to execute your content strategy and bring your content ideas to life.
Better resource management
Content planning tools provide you with an overview of how your content marketing strategy looks in reality. With this perspective, you can peek down the pipeline and make personnel decisions and allocate resources accordingly.
It’s a lot more difficult to manage your resources well when you’re not sure what the next month or quarter will bring.
Increased efficiency
The main reason to use any business software is to cut costs and save time. Content planning tools can free you up to focus on the implementation side of your marketing and how you’re going to promote your content.
They also give you breathing space so you can cut upcoming content should something happen that will deem it redundant or no longer useful for your marketing.
Deeper analysis and improvement
When you plug your content into a planning tool, you gain access to a range of valuable metrics that you can use to measure success with each post.
At the most basic level, you’ll see when and how often you’ve posted across the various platforms. With this information, you can assess what’s been working well and where you could make improvements.
The 10 Best Content Planning Tools
The following ten content planning tools can help you effectively organize, arrange, and schedule your content weeks and months in advance.
1. Wordable
Wordable is the ultimate publishing platform that gives you everything you need to optimize and upload your content from Google Docs to WordPress (at scale, with no extra work).
Features like post status can help you plan content exports for various websites to keep up with an editorial calendar. You can connect your Wordable account directly to your CMS platform and use post status and export templates for a more streamlined editorial workflow.
Plus, increased efficiency is the main goal of getting into content planning in the first place. And if there’s one thing that slows the content production process down, it’s all the little things that go into publishing a finalized, optimized article.
With Wordable, this tedious and time-consuming process is reduced to a single click. It even lets you batch your posts so you can optimize and publish (or schedule) several at a time.
If you’re at all interested in reducing the time you spend optimizing your text content for SEO and uploading it to your WordPress website, then Wordable should absolutely be your go-to content planning tool.
Pricing
Wordable offers five flexible plans to suit your content needs:
- Hobbyist: 5 free exports a month
- Solo: 10 exports a month starting at $12.90 per month
- Team: 20 exports a month starting at $23.90 per month
- Agency: 150 exports a month starting at $146.90 per month
- Enterprise: 750 exports a month starting at $589.90 per month
Paid plans get you priority chat and email support. Plus, if you pay yearly on any plan, you’ll get 2 months free.
2. Trello
Trello is a project management tool that lets you harness the Kanban system to implement a seamless content pipeline for individuals and teams. The basic idea behind the software is simple: drag and drop all your tasks into columns that represent their current stage and movement through the pipeline.
For example, if you lead a writing team, you might name your columns to indicate what stage each article is in. The first could be titled ‘Brief,’ the next ‘Writing in progress,’ and the final could be called ‘Ready to publish.’
With a transparent system like this, you can organize the flow of your content with ease, and everyone in your team will know exactly what they need to be working on.
Replacing sticky notes on whiteboards, Trello’s interface is easy to understand and use. Other features like labels for individual tasks, due dates and reminders, and customizable boards for different projects or teams help streamline the content planning process.
Pricing
Trello Pricing offers four options to suit your needs: a free plan and three premium tiers ranging from $5 to $17.50 per month.
3. CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a content marketing hub, a digital HQ for creating, scheduling, and promoting various pieces of content in one place. This tool comes with a range of features to help you get on top of your content workload and manage your resources well.
The marketing calendar gives you a platform to view, plan, schedule, and share your content.
CoSchedule doesn’t just offer a calendar and basic planning tools — it’s also a comprehensive content marketing platform. It includes various tools to help you manage marketing requests and get rid of costly bottlenecks. It even has a Headline Studio for making sure your posts are published with the titles most likely to drive reader engagement.
Pricing
CoSchedule offers a free plan, a premium plan priced at $29 per month, and a custom plan.
4. MarketMuse
MarketMuse is an AI-based tool that helps you optimize your content so it can better meet Google’s criteria for high-quality content, consistently. With MarketMuse, you don’t have to guess which topics, questions, and related keywords the Google Algorithm (and your target audience) want you to cover for a keyword.
The tool takes the guesswork out of the equation and provides you with a roadmap for producing effective content. You can also analyze your existing content to find opportunities for refreshes and optimizations, as well as viable keywords to target with new content.
Pricing
MarketMuse has a free plan and two premium plans priced at $7,200 and $12,000 per year, respectively.
5. ContentCal
ContentCal, included in Adobe Express, is a social media planner that lets you plan out and schedule all future posts in a way that makes sense. Plus, since it’s part of Adobe Express, you can tap into the visual prowess of the suite to create stunning posts across your social media platforms.
If you’re part of a creative team, you may want to use ContentCal to organize your posts and push the envelope with striking visuals that engage your audience.
Pricing
ContentCal offers a free plan and a premium plan at the price of $9.99 per month.
6. Airtable
Airtable is a customizable workflow tool that allows you to build out your content plan and execute it with useful automations and easy collaboration. Plus, it even offers a tailored template for content marketing management.
Airtable helps marketing professionals centralize multiple campaigns to gain full visibility at a glance. You can easily highlight information like personas, categories, publishing dates, and more.
If you’re investing in paid distribution or pay extra for visuals, you can also create easy-to-digest spreadsheets to track your distribution ad spend, design costs, and other expenses involved with each post and campaign.
Pricing
Airtable offers a free plan, two premium plans priced at $10 and $20 per month, and a custom pricing plan.
7. Notion
A workflow management platform, Notion is essentially a blank canvas that you can mold into your ideal content planning system. You can build custom workflows, organize your content into categories and lists, collaborate with team members directly in the tool, and more.
With Kanban boards, you can also create a roadmap for your marketing team that will show everyone the current status of each piece of content.
Pricing
Notion offers a free plan, two premium plans priced at $4 and $8, and a custom enterprise plan.
8. HubSpot Content Marketing Planning Template
If you just want to stick to a basic Google Sheets or Excel-based approach, HubSpot offers a pre-built content planning template that can help you get off the ground quickly.
Fill out HubSpot’s Planning Template with relevant information about your marketing goals and competitors, and it will guide you through the process of planning out content month-by-month, quarterly, and yearly.
Pricing
The HubSpot Planning Template is available as a free download.
9. Loomly
Loomly is a brand voice development platform that can help you build awareness for your business through content marketing and better brand management.
Features include social media post scheduling, content collaboration tools to streamline how your team members work together like notifications and comments, and a calendar for mapping out upcoming content (with suggested content ideas based on holidays and events).
Pricing
Loomly offers four premium plans ranging from $26 to $269 per month, and also a custom enterprise pricing plan.
10. Narrato
Narrato is a virtual workspace for building content workflows, automating tasks, and collaborating to boost your output and efficiency. It can replace spreadsheets, documents, and project management software in your existing workflows.
The content platform even has an AI Content Assistant that can generate clear content briefs with SEO suggestions, draw up content outlines and ideas, and optimize articles for readability and grammar.
Pricing
Narrato offers four pricing plans ranging from $1.30 to $5.50 for every 100 words you write in the app. This pricing model is the big con of the platform, as it’s almost as expensive as paying for a human editor to fix up a piece of content.
Conclusion
To build an effective content marketing strategy, you need to plan in advance and stick to the plan over the long term. Content planning tools can help you schedule posts for the upcoming weeks and months, letting you focus on creating better content and promoting and sharing it with your audience more effectively.
Sign up for your free trial with Wordable today and see how you can instantly upgrade your content production process.
Related reading:
- 9 Content Marketing Tips to Stand Out in a Crowded Digital World
- How to Create a Mouthwatering Content Brief for Your Writers
- How to Create a Content Production Machine that Outpublishes Your Competition
- Pro Content Optimization Tips from Doing 300+ Articles per Month
- 5 Reasons You Need a Content Marketing Manager (+ How to Hire One)
