Household names are good and all… but sometimes, it’s important to venture out in the world, open your horizons, and take a chance on things you don’t yet know. When it comes to software solutions, a search for new tools can result in alternatives and valuable platforms you never knew existed.

 

But hidden gems are only there for those who search. For those that aren’t sure where to get started, you don’t have to look too long to find the seven most amazing editorial calendar tools that you might have been missing out on!

 

All you have to do is read below about the companies whose editorial calendars consist of ergonomic features that increase productivity and efficiency for your brand’s, company’s, or agency’s communications! 

 

Gather Content – https://gathercontent.com/

 

Over 2000 companies are currently enjoying the many different facets of Gather Content, whether it developing content for website redesigns, new marketing campaigns, managing new sections of your website, or creating your first help documentation. 

 

Drupal.org reports that those companies who choose Gather Content are the very companies that don’t have to “struggle with shared folders, spreadsheets, documents and email to produce content for their website projects.” 

 

This editorial calendar service allows teams to assign writing and editing responsibilities to collaborators who can now follow a consistent format and know exactly when something is due. 

 

Gather Content conducted reviews of use with their customers and found, in one such study, how a Dell Technologies business—Boomi—was able to increase and optimize their editorial production by 370% thanks to their efficient features.

 

Charles Waltner, Head of Content Marketing at Boomi, said that the three key reasons why Gather Content aided in producing such success were that the service’s “templates prescribe content requirements to contributors,” the “workflow provides a clear picture of content status,” and the “content collaboration is centralized.”

 

With Gather Content, users can ultimately rely on an editorial tool that allows for all authors and content creators to have access and centralize essential marketing material. This allows the editorial team to offset some of the website and operational logistics and strictly focus on producing high-quality content! 

 

Gather Content is $99 per month for unlimited users. 

 

Corrus – https://corrus.com/

 

Corrus is a platform that emphasizes “teamwork.” As the platform’s site explains, “Within each workflow, Corrus provides custom project intake forms,” and “these forms, ensure correct information is provided to the team before a project is started.”

 

All authors and collaborators— team-mates— can also leave comments on the content just by using “@” and the mentioned person, depending on their settings, will be notified via app and email right away. This in turn leads to more interactive project management.

 

Specifically for marketing campaigns and a marketing team’s tasks, Corrus provides step by step instructions on how to achieve and curate the best-producing content due to total transparency, faster approval processes, and user-friendly calendar features where requests for updates on tasks are simple to assign. 

 

As the company’s saying goes, “Together, we achieve more.”

 

Corrus’ basic features are free for a team of up to 15 users! 

 

DivvyHQ – https://divvyhq.com/

 

 Work mainly with freelancers? Or perhaps your teams work remotely?

 

DivvyHQ is here to help you stand out while you’re staying in! In fact, DivvyHQ was recently named the top content marketing, team collaboration, project management, and social media analytics tool by The Content Marketing Institute in 2019!

 

Indeed, DivvyHQ allows your team to easily track how well your content resonates with readers whether it be your social media posts, your blog entries, or your case studies. 

 

The Silicon Prairie News reported on the company’s growing success, noting that “DivvyHQ has attracted clients such as Lowes, Samsung, and Ben & Jerry’s, just to name a few.”

 

MonitorBackLinks also praises the editorial tool, ultimately concluding that “it emphasizes content marketing best practices by giving users unlimited shared content calendars, customizable content types and easy management of even the most in-depth content marketing campaigns.”

 

Divvy HQ is $29 per month for each user.

 

AirTable – https://airtable.com

 

AirTable is a hybrid of a spreadsheet and a database. Best part? It was built to be entirely customizable to the type of content you want to produce and provides the option of arranging and re-arranging your work until it fits your liking! 

 

You can choose different layouts for your calendar — grid, gallery, calendar, or form.

 

A popular music streaming platform— Boiler Room— was able to reach 283 million people thanks to AirTable’s features.

 

Larry Gale, the Head of Live Production, swears by the program’s features that simplify and optimize the music streaming events with seamless communication between team members.

 

“Typically, with Livestream content, the idea will start with the music team, who have to put together a budget. When the budget gets approved, we’ll generate a unique code called a project code,” Gale explained. “All this information is submitted via an AirTable form, which then notifies Gale and the project management team.”

 

AirTable’s basic features are free for unlimited users! 

 

Storychief – https://storychief.io/ 

 

Storychief’s name gives it all away. This program allows you to share your company’s story with unique features like tracking your content that is both scheduled and live all in one view,. You can also seamlessly sync your content schedule to your Apple device or Google / Outlook email calendar. 

 

Better yet, Storychief has a unique offer of disseminating your content (once live) to your email contacts, your social media platforms, or your lists of referrals. This unique feature called Brand Ambassadors truly helps StoryChief separate itself as a hybrid of an editorial calendar and content promotion tool.

 

Hans Hermans, a freelance journalist, and ghostwriter finds Storychief makes his life much easier.

 

“StoryChief is such a great tool to work with. Creating an article is easy. No code is required, importing videos goes smoothly and the dimensions of my photos are correct,” he explained.

 

StoryChief shares that its users are seeing “80% more engagement on creating quality content and getting your stakeholders onboard,” leading to its win of Forbes’s Entrepreneur Awards of the Year in 2019. 

 

Storychief has a free plan to test out all its editorial publishing features!

 

KanbanFlow – https://kanbanflow.com/

 

KanbanFlow is great for your workflow, spelling out everything you have created and will create in a simple, aesthetic view. 

 

Meant for visual users, this editorial calendar tool breaks up your work in “To Do,” “Do Today,” “In Progress,” and “Done”, using different colors and an easy layout to put these tasks in order. 

 

KabanFlow finds that such an easy visual board “simplifies communication and leads to improved productivity.”

 

Another creative feature of this tool is that it comes with a Timetracker, so you can track time spent on certain tasks and overall create an environment where time is never wasted. 

 

Google Chrome reports that this program’s best feature is that “as soon as any of the team members makes a change to the Kanban board, that change is visible on all the team members screens”— so, if you “add, delete or move a task on your screen, the same action happens instantly for the rest of the team on their screens.”

 

Kabanflow is free-$5 per user a month. 

 

ContentCal – https://www.contentcal.io/

 

Do you rely on a blog for your content, or release Youtube videos? 

 

ContentCal just might be the tool you’re waiting for, as it’s essentially a social media scheduler and an excel spreadsheet all rolled into one. 

 

This platform has been used by many noteworthy companies like Village Gym, Gravity Force, and OST Marketing. 

 

Gravity Force’s Marketing Executive, Chloe Lovell, reports, “Being able to view everything and schedule everything in one place has saved a lot of work time for the team; also, the fact we can bank our ideas and easily see them for the future meaning we don’t forget about them and have content for the future.”

 

The program also comes with an analytics feature so you can see how your content fares in the world of media, and also has an approval workflows feature where all team members can share ideas on one platform. 

 

ContentCal starts at $59 a month for a team of two.

 

 

Content Studio – https://contentstudio.io/

 

As a bonus editorial tool, our team uses Content Studio, self-described as “The Most Robus Content Scheduling Solution”. Indeed, with several different modules for content discovery, content planning, analytics and the ability to centralize your team’s communication Content Studio is one amazing editorial calendar tool.

 

Designed by an agency that sought to streamline their content creation and approval process with clients, Content Studio is ranked #27 on G2’s list of Best Software for 2020 and also within the list of top fifty products for marketers. 

 

Mitch Zenger, Founder of Synctrics believes Content Studio to be a gamechanger for his brand. “ContentStudio has been one of the best purchases I have made. I have been able to grow my Twitter followers to 15K with very little effort on my part,” says Mitch. ” I am able to use this one product to generate social media content to all of my channels: Facebook, LinkedIn, LinkedIn Groups, Twitter, Instagram, and Medium. You can’t get much better than that. ”

 

While team-based content planning is the core of the platform, the curated discovery is what tips the scale for Content Studio. With a rating of 4.7 on Capterra and 4.6 on G2, Content Studio’s rabid fanbase makes up for the lack of top tier enterprise clients.

 

Content Studio is $99 per month for a team of five.