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Creating a content marketing strategy that is scalable, repeatable, and effective is about more than just making a list of blog topics and working through it. To create content that engages and delights across platforms you'll want to take the time to plan out your content and content strategy. That's how you can build a content marketing strategy that brings in more leads and customers than you've ever seen before - or at least get your content and brand found on search engines.
But as anyone who's ever tried to develop a content marketing strategy that works can tell you, it isn't easy.
Sometimes you need the right content planning tools to help you on your way.
If you want to streamline your content marketing and create an efficient and effective content marketing strategy, you've come to the right place. Here are 29 awesome content planning tools you can use to get the most from your content marketing plans.
Why Planning Your Content Matters
Planning your blog, social media, and video content makes your marketing plan work more effectively. Consistency is important for everything from growing your email list to driving website traffic to increasing revenue. When you take the time to sit down and figure out what you want from your content marketing, you'll be able to create the type of content that will help you meet those goals—and ensure that your overall business goals are aligned with your content goals so they work together instead of fighting against one another.
Outside of setting powerful goals, there are a few other reasons it's important to plan out your content:
Building Consistency
Chances are, you don't just post content to a single marketing channel and call it good. You probably publish to a blog, post to social media, send an email newsletter, and share video content on YouTube, among other things. But when you have multiple channels to keep track of, it can be hard to build the consistency you need to build a following and become a thought leader in your niche.
Spotting Gaps
Once you've set your goals, you can plug your content into one of the content planning tools on our list and easily spot gaps in your content plan or see at a glance if your content is going to help you hit your business goals. You can also see if you're sending too many sales emails, going live often enough, or posting enough original, native content to your social media platforms. By planning your content, you'll be able to address gaps before they turn into problems for your brand.
Staying on Track
Both solo influencers and enterprise marketing teams need content planning tools to stay on track. If you're going it solo, planning your content helps you understand how much time you're going to be spending to create the content you've planned. If you have a marketing team, you'll probably have multiple hands before your content is published. With a good plan, you'll be able to get the disparate pieces of your marketing team on the same page to keep your content on time.
Content Planning Tools to Try
Creating content is hard enough. But when you add to that stress the stress of not knowing when or how you should be creating and publishing your content, it's easy to get overwhelmed and let something (likely many things) slip through the cracks. Fortunately, we’ve pulled together a list of 29 of the best content planning tools we’ve found to help you level up your content marketing.
1. Brandwatch Social Media Management
Brandwatch (formerly called Falcon.io) is one of the top digital consumer intelligence companies. It helps users to analyze online conversations to gain a better understanding of their audience’s needs and interests. Armed with this knowledge, you’re better equipped to create content that’s relevant and resonates with your target market. It also offers a number of tools that can help with content marketing planning that include a unified calendar, and approval flows.
Clients: Pierre Fabre, Insta360, Veganz, Quantum
Pricing: Brandwatch offers three pricing plans:
- Consumer Intelligence – For Researchers and Analysts
- Social Media Management – For Social Media Managers
- Influencer Marketing – For influencer marketers
To get pricing, book a meeting with their specialists.
2. Loomly
Loomly is built for social media content and can help you track your ideas, create, optimize, and preview posts, as well as schedule your posts right from the app. You can also track the performance of your social media content so you know what’s working and what isn’t. Loomly also lets you interact with users who engage with your social media content.
Clients: L’Oreal, Porche, LVMH, Henkel, BMW
Pricing: Free trial. Pricing ranges from $26–$269/month, and an option to request a Quote for a dedicated plan.
3. Sendible
Sendible is one of the leading social media scheduling and management tools. It offers a powerful calendar that makes content planning a breeze. You can use its calendar to plan and customize posts for different platforms, assign posts to various team members, and import designed media. If you need to include a client, you can also use it to share content with them for approval before you schedule it for publishing.
Clients: Expedia, Deaf Minds Education, Texas A&M, TravelClick
Pricing: Plans range from $29–$399/month.
4. PromoRepublic
PromoRepublic stands out in the realm of Content Planning Tools with its dual functionality as an Asset Manager and Graphics Editor. Tailored for enterprises and agencies, it offers a White Label solution that ensures brand consistency across all marketing materials. The platform’s content suggestions and templates cater to a variety of industries, making it a versatile choice for localized marketing strategies. With PromoRepublic, you can manage and schedule content across multiple social media platforms, leveraging its comprehensive reporting and social listening tools to refine your strategy. The tool’s ability to store and organize digital assets makes it a centralized hub for all your content planning activities.
Clients: Medi-Weightloss, City Wide, Curves, ohDEER
Pricing: PromoRepublic’s prices range from $49-$79, with a custom plan for multi-location agencies upon request.
5. HeyOrca
HeyOrca is your go-to Content Planning Tool if seamless collaboration and client management are at the heart of your social media strategy. With HeyOrca, you can create a shared space where your team and clients can effortlessly approve and schedule content. Its AI Caption Writer is a standout feature, enabling you to craft engaging captions that resonate with your audience. The platform’s visual calendar and optimal posting time insights ensure that your content hits social media when your audience is most active.
Clients: Client testimonials are available on their website
Pricing: Free trial available. Paid plans range from $29-$149/month.
6. Agorapulse
AgoraPulse equips you with a robust suite of Content Planning Tools, making it a powerhouse for teams and agencies. Its features are designed to optimize and schedule content across multiple platforms, ensuring your posts are perfectly timed and crafted. The platform’s Writing Assistant aids in enhancing the quality of your content, while real-time collaboration tools keep your team in sync. UTM tracking and consistent branding tools are also included, providing a comprehensive solution for your content planning needs. AgoraPulse’s all-in-one social inbox and detailed analytics help you stay on top of your social media game.
Clients: West Virginia University, Digital Butter, Ogilvy, Shipt
Pricing: AgoraPulse plans range from $49-$119, with a custom plan available upon request.
7. MarketMuse
MarketMuse is an AI-based content planning tool that gives you the chance to look and your content from a high-level view or get deep into the weeds and details. It helps creators analyze not only their content but also their competitor’s content so you can find ranking opportunities and content gaps. MarketMuse also generates briefs with internal linking opportunities, title and keyword suggestions, as well as questions to answer in each piece of content.
Pricing: A Free plan is offered at no charge. The Standard plan is set at $149 per month, while the Team tier is priced at $399 per month. For those seeking specialized features, the “Premium” tier provides custom pricing tailored to individual requirements.
8. Monday.com
Monday is a project management tool that works perfectly as a content planning tool. It’s customizable to your team’s needs and includes a calendar, Kanban, and other templates to manage your content. You can set up a schedule and assign tasks to team members, making it easy to track progress. With Monday, you can schedule content, plan future content, and even invite others outside your organization to collaborate. Monday integrates with your other project and communication tools like Trello, Slack, Excel, Google Apps, and Dropbox.
Pricing: Free trial. Pricing ranges from $8.88–$21.09+/month.
9. Trello
Trello is one of the easiest content planning tools on our list. It uses a Kanban approach to content planning with cards you can move to different boards as you need to. Trello also makes collaboration really easy with comment and task management features. You can use Trello boards to manage a content calendar, plan a marketing campaign, plot out to-do-lists, and brainstorm ideas, among other things. Trello also has a calendar view that makes it easy to spot gaps or duplicates in your content marketing plan.
Pricing: Free plan. Prices range from $5.00–17.50+/month.
10. DYNO Mapper
DYNO Mapper is another content planning tool that can help you plan content for your website, develop your content strategy, generate the content you need to meet your goals, and fix your website linking to make it easier for visitors to navigate. DYNO Mapper integrates with Google Analytics so you can get deeper insights into your customers.
Pricing: Free trial. Plans range from $49–$360/month.
11. Content Snare
Content Snare is a great content planning tool that will help you organize your content marketing campaigns in a single place. It has an easy to use drag-and-drop interface and lets you add instructions, prompts, and reminders for all collaborators or content marketing agencies. You can check the progress of any outstanding actions right from the Content Snare dashboard.
Pricing: Free trial. Plans range from $29–$179+/month, if billed annually.
12. Asana
Asana is a project management tool that works really well as a content planning tool. Teams and individuals can use Asana to organize, track, and manage their content calendars. Asana is another drag-and-drop tool that offers several different views so you can see your content plan the way that works for you.
Pricing: Free plan. Free trial. Pricing ranges from $10.99–$24.99+/month.
13. Concured
Concured is another AI-powered content planning tool that uses deep learning to understand your video, podcasts, articles, blog posts, and more. Concured will then recommend new content to fill gaps and compare your content to your competitors, finding ways you can rank. You can use Concured to automate topic research, content promotion, content audits, the creation of data-driven content briefs, and performance tracking.
Clients: Capdesk, Sony, Content Marketing Institute, S&P Global
Pricing: Contact for pricing.
14. Gather Content
Gather Content gives you a single location where you can collect your content ideas, emails, and data. You can also invite others to collaborate on each piece of content. While Gather Content is geared more toward project management than content, you can use it to organize your content, create templates to keep your content consistent, track your progress, and more.
Clients: Boston University, NHS, Ogilvy, Intel
Pricing: Free trial. Pricing ranges from $99–$799/month, with option for custom plan.
15. ProjectManager
As you can probably guess from the name, ProjectManager is a project management tool. However, it’s also great as a content planning tool. There are several views like Gantt charts, Kanban, and the dashboard where you can get details about your content marketing plan, who’s responsible for what, and what still needs to be done.
Pricing: Free trial. Pricing ranges from $13–$24/user/month. Enterprise plan is also available.
16. Notion
Notion is a content planning tool with a broad range of project management tools so you can assign and track tasks, create calendars and Kanban charts, and more. With the All Posts feature, you can see which pieces of content are waiting for action. You can also store images with the content, as well as track the captions, hashtags, and marketing channels you want to associate with the content.
Clients: Raise, Paper, Sendbird, Deel, Foolproof
Pricing: Free plan. Pricing ranges from $8–$15+/user/month.
17. Airtable
Airtable is part spreadsheet, part database and you can use it to organize just about anything. If you have multiple content marketers or collaborators on your team, Airtable can keep everything organized while still giving everyone access to the same database view. Any changes—adding notes, links, images, etc.—are automatically synced across accounts and devices. Airtable has tools and features specifically for content planning.
Clients: Equinox, West Elm, Baker Hughes, Code and Theory
Pricing: Free plan. Pricing ranges from $10–$20/user/month.
18. Wrike
Wrike is a content planning tool geared toward detailed content marketing plans. It has an easy to use interface where you can use dropdowns to organize your content, check on actionable items and tasks, and communicate with other team members using the message board.
Clients: Sega, Lyft, Siemens, T-Mobile, P&G
Pricing: Free plan. Free trial. Pricing ranges from $9.80–$24.80+/month.
19. CoSchedule
CoSchedule touts itself as a drag-and-drop content builder that lets you plan, publish, and promote your content from a single location. It’s actually a bit more than that. CoSchedule includes a content calendar, options for social media content, project management, collaboration, and more.
Clients: Forbes, Yamaha, Unicef, Vericast
Pricing: Free trial. Plans start at $29/user/month.
20. Wistia
Wistia is one of the best content planning tools built specifically for video content. You can use it to create, host, and publish your video content. Plus, Wistia adds SEO optimized metadata into your videos so it’s easier for them to rank. Wistia also lets you monitor video performance and engagement analytics. It supports a broad range of integrations as well as 4K resolution for super high-quality videos.
Clients: Zendesk, BambooHR, Mailchimp, 360Learning
Pricing: Free plan. Pricing starts at $19/month.
21. HubSpot Planning Template
HubSpot’s Planning Template is a free template for brainstorming content that is then used to populate a basic calendar. While it’s pretty simple, it might be the perfect content planning tool for people wanting to become an influencer or content marketers that only use a couple of marketing channels.
Clients: Headspace, Discord, Hopin, Eventbrite
Pricing: Free download.
22. Upland Kapost
Upland Kapost is one of the only enterprise-level content planning tools on our list. It’s a content management platform that fully integrates with your content marketing platform. Your team can use Upland Kapost to plan, publish, and track your content. Upland Kapost also uses AI to make sure your content is promoting the brand messaging you want.
Clients: Tableau, Frontier Airlines, NRDC, GE Healthcare
Pricing: Contact for pricing.
23. Basecamp
Basecamp is a simple and easy to use project management tool that your team can use as a content planning tool. Basecamp also includes communication tools like task-based comments, chat, announcements, and other collaboration tools. You can also create guest accounts if you work with freelancers, have multiple clients, or need to add other collaborators. You’ll need to connect Basecamp to your Google Calendar in order to create a content calendar.
Clients: Full Sail University, APEX, WordSouth, Ionic, Zendesk
Pricing: Free plan. Free trial. The paid plan starts from $15 per user per month.
24. Smartsheet
Smartsheet is a project management tool that lets you track your project budget, manage resources, assign tasks, and more. You can easily visualize your tasks using grid, calendar, Gantt, and chart views and even create custom forms so you can gather data from users. Smartsheet also has a content calendar planner that you can use to map out your content.
Clients: LEGO, Pfizer, Alaska, JPL
Pricing: Free trial. Pricing starts at $7/month.
25. SEMrush
Semrush serves as an all-in-one toolkit designed to boost your online visibility and help you determine the real questions that search engines get from people. Its features will allow you to do keyword research, get backlinking opportunities, audit your blog, and a whole lot more. The platform also has content marketing tools that can help you look for related topics, better headlines, questions, and SEO recommendations, so you can come up with an effective content plan.
Clients: Wix, Tuff, Amberscript, Flowrite, Decision Foundry
Pricing: Free trial. Plans range from $108.33–$416.66 per month (billed annually).
26. Canva Content Planner
We all know Canva as one of the best free graphic design tools that you can use to make not just flyers and posters but also social media posts and marketing materials. The Canva Pro version comes with a Content Planner designed to make your social media management easier—from creating and scheduling daily, weekly, or monthly posts on multiple platforms.
Clients: Raindance Film Festival, COBS Bread, Peppy, F45, Zoom
Pricing: Free trial. Canva Pro Bundle is $12.99 per month.
27. Frase.io
Frase is a great platform for planning and strategizing your content overall, but its best feature is answering questions that users might be thinking about. Frase can create content briefs for a more convenient content production. It’s a good option if you’re looking for an affordable tool and you have time to generate subtopics lists by yourself.
Clients: Digitas, Coursera, Merkle, Talk Space
Pricing: Plans range from $14.99–$114.99 monthly.
28. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an article planning tool designed to help users expand their reach and rank higher on Google. Using Ahrefs, you can come up with engaging content ideas you can use, explore various keywords, and monitor your competitors’ keyword rankings and backlinks. Some of the other tools it offers include site audit and rank tracker.
Clients: Arkadin SAS, Red Hat Inc, Authority Hacker, Shopify, Alibaba
Pricing: Plans range from $99–$999 monthly.
29. Hootsuite
With Hootsuite Planner, you can draft, preview, schedule, and publish all your posts directly via its interactive calendar. Its calendar is also useful for getting a quick visual overview of your planned content and digital assets. If you work as part of a bigger team, it’s easy to share the calendar with other team members, and, if needed, you can set up a custom approval workflow too.
Clients: Domino’s Ikea, Roche, Allianz
Pricing: Plans range from $99–$739/month.
Wrapping Up
A solid content strategy is an important first step toward building effective content marketing campaigns but you also need the right content planning tools to execute your campaign. Content planning tools help you bring your entire content marketing strategy together, streamlining your efforts for best results.
To choose the best content planning tools for your brand, you'll need to decide what's important to you. Are you more interested in a tool that will post directly to your social media accounts or do you need a comprehensive tool like Monday or Kapost to manage your content marketing campaign from start to finish?
No matter what you need, the content planning tools on this list give you a great place to start!
Frequently Asked Questions
What tools do content strategists use?
These are some of the most powerful tools for content marketing strategy:
1. Monday.com
2. Loomly
3. ContentCal
4. MarketMuse
5. Trello
6. DYNO Mapper
7. Content Snare
8. Asana
9. Concured
10. GatherContent
What are examples of planning tools?
Planning tools don’t always need to be specific to the industry or initiative. These tools may include:
- Organizational timelines
- Action item checklists
- To-do lists
- Sample meeting agendas
How do I organize my content plan?
To organize your content plan, keep in mind these crucial tips:
- Keep a Google doc or sheet with brainstormed ideas
- Keep track of certain topics with mentions
- Use one tool to manage everything
- Consider creating a to-do list for everyone
- Track your most successful pieces of content
What is a content planner?
A content planner is a way in which your company will determine how content is being published. You can determine content initiatives and decide when to execute them.
What does a content plan include?
A great content plan includes the following:
- Marketing assets
- Data-gathering functions
- SEO research
- Engagement tracking
