Why CoSchedule is One of the Best Marketing Investments You Can Make

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All your content marketing, blogging, and social media promotion in one place? Brilliant!

Digital marketing has evolved drastically in the last few years and these days, content is where it’s at. But it’s not as easy as just cranking out a blog post whenever you get around to it.

In order to be successful with your content marketing efforts, you need a plan, a strategy and the ability to execute on it regularly.

Our team has been content marketing for quite a while. In fact, recently I had the opportunity to speak at WooConf about the topic of using Social Media and Content Marketing to drive more business.

In this talk I explained what I believe to be the definition of content marketing:

Earning the attention, trust and business of your target audience through producing and sharing valuable content that meets their needs.

By producing valuable content that your target audience is looking for, you become more than just a product or vendor, you become an indispensable resource for them.

Content marketing also has many different faces, such as:

Blog posts
Social media posts
Ebooks
Newsletters
Videos
Forums

Now, you don’t have to engage every single form of content marketing to be successful. All you need to do is pick the formats that work best for you and execute on them regularly.

And that’s why I will never be without CoSchedule.

Every serious content marketing team should be using @CoSchedule. Here's why...Click To Tweet

What is CoSchedule?

For those that don’t know what it is:

CoSchedule is an all-in-one marketing calendar that brings your content and social media in the same place.

It is a drag-and-drop digital editorial calendar built specifically for content marketing. It allows you to plan and schedule blog posts, social media posts, and virtually any type of content you can think of.

On top of that, it’s also packed full of awesome features that savvy digital marketers love!

Drag-And-Drop Marketing Calendar
Easy Social Media Scheduling
Easy Workflow Management For Your Marketing Team
Easily Re-Schedule Old Blog Content
Works Great With WordPress
Manage Google Docs Content
Manage Evernote Content
Convert Evernote & Google Docs Content To WordPress
Lot’s Of Integrations That Will Simplify Your Life

I’m going to review the features that our team uses the most and trust you’ll do your own investigating once you’re finished reading.

Blog Content (WordPress Integration!)

One of the best features of the CoSchedule content calendar is that it integrates seamlessly with WordPress.

Once you connect your CoSchedule account with your WordPress install via their plugin, you can begin drafting and scheduling WordPress posts right from the calendar.

You can draft a new blog post by clicking the pencil icon in any date block. Type out your title and hit the Continue button and you will be given a number of options for the blog post:

Pick the category
Choose the author
Schedule for a specific date/time

This post is then added as a draft inside WordPress with all the settings you’ve selected. In addition to the WordPress level controls and settings, though, you have a lot more you can do with the CoSchedule interface for this post in order to help the creation and collaboration process:

Select a color (in case you like to color-coordinate post types/categories)
Comment with ideas, notes, etc.
Create and assign tasks for the post
Attach files
Schedule the social shares of the post for after it’s published
Use the headline analyzer to grade your post title

This is the single most powerful blog post collaboration tool there is. But it’s not only for scheduling, collaborating and publishing blog posts.

The single most powerful blog post collaboration tool is @CoSchedule. But that's not all it does...Click To Tweet

Just like Buffer, Hootsuite, TweetDeck and other social media management tools, CoSchedule allows you to manage and schedule social media posts for multiple social media accounts. The bonus, though, is that you get the benefit of the visual calendar!

Currently, you can connect the following social networks:

Twitter
Facebook (Profiles, Pages and Groups)
LinkedIn (Profiles and Company Pages)
Tumblr blogs
Google+ Pages (via Buffer integration)
Pinterest Profiles

Depending on what level your plan is, you can add anywhere from 5 to 100 social profiles. Team members can also add personal accounts that are only visible to themselves so that only they have access to their accounts.

This makes CoSchedule the most powerful social scheduling tool there is if you like to collaborate on and plan your social strategy with a team.

All the Content Marketing Things

Beyond just blog posts and social posts, CoSchedule has introduced a format simply called “Content” that now allows you to plan, schedule and collaborate on any type of content you can possibly imagine.

Simply create a new piece of content, type your title and you can then choose from 20 different icons to indicate what kind of content you’re creating.

We’re using this feature to plan a number of different content types including:

Support articles
Video tutorials
Newsletters
Live video

The possibilities for the types of content really are endless. Even if you’re not going to be creating a piece of digital content, you can still utilize this as your team’s planning and collaboration tool.

There are three other types of things you can add to the calendar— events, notes, and tasks. Since the first three formats are pretty much all we need, I haven’t found much reason to utilize these personally. But they’re there if you need them!

How to Use CoSchedule Effectively

When I talk to people about content marketing I am always intentional about explaining the importance of planning and consistency. So if you want to give CoSchedule a try with your team (or even your solo efforts) here’s what I recommend:

Commit to the process
Keep it simple and effective
Be consistent

Like all tools both digital and physical, it comes down to how you use it. Nothing is going to magically do the work for you. So this will help you get the most out of CoSchedule in a short amount of time.

Commit to the Process

First and foremost, you and your team need to go all in. If you’re going to be collaborating on content, it’s not going to work if everyone is not committed to using the same workflows.

Some people may be used to working in different ways, but to be effective you all need to be on the same page. Otherwise, the process will be clunky, time-consuming and ineffective— not to mention frustration and completely un-fun.

Tell your team, this is the system we’re using. Period.

It might not be easy, but in order to know without a doubt that this is going to be a worthwhile tool for your team, you need everybody’s buy-in.

Keep it Simple and Effective

Do not overcomplicate things. Ever.

There are a ton of things you can do with CoSchedule, but that doesn’t mean you have to use all of them. If you try to utilize everything right off the bat, you’re going to get overwhelmed and it’s not going to work for you— I don’t care how high-functioning your team is.

Overcomplication is procrastination’s best friend.Click To Tweet

Stick to the basics at the beginning. Create a piece of content, give it a color using the color selector, make a few tasks and assign them to appropriate team members.

Here’s an example of our typical blog post at Warfare Plugins:

You can see in this example there are a number of things we have set up:

Content owner and author: Dustin
Category: Content Marketing
Color: Purple (the color we’ve associated with our Content Marketing category)
Schedule: A specific date and time
Tasks: A template I’ve created for our Editorial Process

And that’s it.

From there we can comment as needed, but for the most part, we just get to work knocking off the tasks for that piece of content.

The ability to create task templates are really helpful.

Conclusion

For me, having a visual plan gets me motivated— it pushes me to hold myself accountable to the goals I’ve set.

On top of that, having all my content marketing in one place including the social media promotion of that content allows me and my team to save loads of time.

So if you’re looking to do some serious content marketing and want the best tool at your disposal– CoSchedule is definitely the way to do.