The best content planning tools of 2023

Content is one of the most critical aspects of the digital world. Content can be in the form of pictures, videos, infographics, and of course in the form of words.

Creating the right content to target the right audience is imperative to your business. The audience is your potential leads and you need to work around their taste and schedule to ensure they come to your business.

If you have your content creators nailed, you just need one more thing, the right kind of planning. Planning content helps you toggle through strategies, budgets, goals, and targets instead of winging it all the time.

To reach new heights, you will require an additional layer of effort. Moreover, planning your content marketing strategy requires a very present mind and a bit of help from our friends who give us the tools. Of course, you can jot it all down on a spreadsheet or a document. But what if we tell you that you can be more efficient?

Read on as this guide tells you about content planning tools, their uses, and the best ones out there that will help you amplify your content marketing strategies.

Why is content planning important?

The first of many questions that we will be answering is why content planning is important.

Any piece of information in the form of words or media is content. However, to ensure that the right kind of content comes across the right audience, you need a plan. That is your content plan!

A content plan helps you organize content into calendars. Furthermore, they segregate key messaging, media requirements, platforms to roll content, goals and objectives, audiences, budget, and all other areas of publishing content.

A lot of companies still rely on spontaneity to manage their content. If you are one of them, here are a couple of reasons why switching to content planning will give your business a boost.

1. Stay organized

Let’s talk about the most obvious reason why content planning is a thumbs-up! You stay organized. With multiple things to do for your business, it is important to find yourself as organized as possible and even plan days ahead.

Staying organized allows you to focus on many other aspects apart from just what and when to go out.

2. No dead rush work

Speed does not mean quality. And most of the time, quick work turns out to be pretty faulty. Hence, you need time to ensure that all your work is perfect for your audience.

When you take out content planning from the game, you are risking your content quality to miss out on opportunities or even go out at a low-quality level.

You don’t want that, do you?

Content planning allows you to set a calendar and ensure that you are weeks ahead of what you have to post. This allows you to never miss out on opportunities for posting.

Moreover, if you have current affairs or ‘emergency content’ to be posted, your writers will never be burdened, because they are already days ahead of goals and targets.

3. Consistency

Now that you have everything planned with content planning, you are going to be more consistent with posting.

Staying consistent with your content creates a better customer experience. However, there is much more going on here. With consistency, you will be able to build a better reputation, and more credibility, and even add to the brand’s trust. According to Techipedia, consistent brands are valued 20% more than inconsistent brands.

Once you have consistency, you will have more data to understand the way your audience functions. Moreover, you can use Google Analytics to find out how and when your customer engages. This means that you can learn the days and times to post your content to get maximum reach, and even leads.

4. Variety of content

Since you will be planning your content, and becoming more mindful of the time you have because of being organized, you will now be able to work with a variety of content all the time.

You see, content does not mean words only. There is media content such as video, GIFs, and even static images. Or, you can make your content into social posts, or even shorten them for different platforms. Content planning allows you to repurpose your content without worrying about it being repetitive.

A simple plan will allow you to find new ways to repurpose content and use it for a different variety of audiences as well.

5. Cuts cost

 Content planning cuts costs. Yes! When a haphazard system of marketing is employed, the budgeting also becomes unexpected. There might be two things you will be doing in this case scenario. Either you will set a permanent budget for each of the aspects of marketing and stick to that. This will in the long term limit your strategies and reach to audiences.

Or, you will wing it every time. Whenever something new comes up you will define a budget for it and you won’t know what the future holds and how much budget it will need.

Content planning allows you to know what is days down the road. This means that you can set the right budget every time. Now that you know the budget for every aspect through planning, you will save much more money.

Top content planning tools

Content creation is not the easiest thing in the world. However, content planning is even more difficult. Why? Because the calculations and memorizations, everything really, leaves a bigger room for human errors.

Errors are not just errors, they just come from being human. So, what do you do? You simply go for the best Content planning app and tools.

Not sure which ones are the best out there? We got your back! Read about some of the best content planning tools to choose from.

Trello

On our list of the most effective content planning tools, the first is Trello. If you don’t use Trello, you might have still at least heard about it. This tool uses a board with ‘cards’. These can be best described as targets for each piece where you can add the to-dos and the tasks.

Trello can be used in all sizes of organizations. Swift through the tool department-wise, project-wise, and in any form of segregation that seems fitting to your company.

If you want to make it more automated, Trello has you covered. You can create commands such as ‘if this, then that’ and automate the workflow.

While Trello is amazing, we do believe that it could bring some more cleanliness to the board to make it visually appealing too.

BaseCamp

BaseCamp is another one of the tools that works best for content planning. It is more comprehensive. However, it may be for smaller businesses. Or you can use it departmentally. It does not have a limitation on adding team members. However, the interface will limit you because there is so much going on.

BaseCamp gives you several cards or categories where you can add to-dos, check-ins, assignees, and even a section where you can add files and links of almost all formats. With BaseCamp, you no longer have to share files via email and worry about losing them. It stays there and everyone on the board can look at it.

BaseCamp also has its own calendar and can be integrated into Google Calendar too. Scheduling your blog posts has never been easier. However, this calendar works as a reminder only.

This tool helps you manage to progress as well in accordance with workflow. You have the bird’s eye view or even the graph to track the progress of your team and assignments.

Concured

In the world of AI content planning tools, Concured has easily made its way into one of the best content planning tools integrated with AI. The tool uses Content AI Rules as a feature exclusively for the users.

This tool helps identify the content that needs to work for different types of target audiences. This allows the content team to plan their content according to what the users want. Furthermore, you save plenty of time on creating content that only works.

Another amazing feature this tool uses is the AI Tagging feature. In this feature, you can practically upload any kind of content to help you extract the parts of the content that need improvements, or the most effective one.

One drawback may be the setup of this tool. It takes about 60 minutes to sign up to the tool. You enter the information and then wait for them to reach out to you.

Monday

Everybody hates Mondays, but you cannot hate Monday.com as much. You cannot hate it at all. This tool pretty much plans to the extent that it takes the boo out of the actual Mondays.

This tool helps you add campaigns in different forms. Moreover, it helps you mark the status, timeline, and even budgets of the campaign. You have several data points, and entering them all helps you work around it.

Huge team? Need more communication? You can start communication at every stage of a campaign or you can integrate Zoom or even Slack into this tool.

If you don’t want to make the manual effort of using this tool, then you can set parameters (if this, then this) to help you make the process even faster and smoother.

Add teammates and you are good to go.

Notion

Last but not in any way the least is Notion on our list. Now we love Notion because of its overall ‘all-in-one’ kind of vibe. Notion allows you to add your team in one place or different members in different projects, thus making it a cleaner interface.

With Notion, the team can align their work, to-dos, and deadlines. But that is not only what this tool offers.

Notion AI is one of the strongest suits of this tool. With the tool, you can add meeting minutes and even summarize them. Moreover, AI can turn the meeting minutes into a proper to-do system and assign them to the relevant team members.

From budgeting to planning, this tool has almost all the steps covered in content creation.

Conclusion

There are so many different content-planning apps and tools out there. We have even told you the ones that we love the most. However, the selection will depend on the kind of content and the work that you are producing. However, missing out on content planning tools is not a neat idea. No matter if you get it written, or write it yourself.