Tools

7 Essential Content Planning Tools for Tech

CopyPress

October 31, 2022 (Updated: March 8, 2023)

Today, every industry experiences intense competition to see who can push out content to the highest number of people, and the tech scene is no different. Every brand and business wants the coveted top spots on SERPs, viral blog posts, and more. In light of this, you need all the help you can get if you want to get ahead of the competition. One way to do this is to leverage content planning tools that help you achieve increased productivity and efficiency when getting content out of the pipeline. But what tools should you be considering?

You can use a simple content planning solution or go all out with a more complex and comprehensive tool. The choice is yours to make. However, a planning tool will generally improve your marketing efforts irrespective of your choice. This article walks you through 7 of the best online content planning tools to help you manage and streamline your content development process. We also help you highlight the specific advantages these planning solutions offer you.

Importance of Using Content Planning Tools in Tech
7 Content Planning Tools to Streamline Your Marketing Strategy
Elements Your Content Planning Tool Should Have

Why Should You Use Content Planning Tools?

The key to any successful content is proper planning and execution. Here are some of the advantages of including content planning tools in your marketing process:

Save Time

Planning a content marketing campaign can be a time-consuming task. But with planning tools for tech content, you can save time and prevent headaches that come with scrambling when deadlines are close, and you need something to post. This doesn’t mean the software will do all the work for you. Instead, a content planning solution allows you to plan the details of your content ahead of time and put structures in place to ensure that the wheels stay in motion.

By planning out your content in advance, you’ll avoid the nightmare rush to create and distribute articles or build on ideas for fresh content. And if your brand uses social media marketing, a content planner can help you repurpose and distribute content across different platforms in advance, saving you time for other tasks. You can also automate specific tasks, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.

Maintain Consistency

In content marketing, consistency is essential. In other words, you need to produce informative, relevant, and, most importantly, quality content if you want to keep your audience interested. Content planning tools for tech marketing can help your team maintain this consistency in brand tone and value across all your channels.

Aside from ensuring the smooth running of your marketing campaign, consistently showing up with valuable content can demonstrate to your audience that you are a reliable brand they can trust.

Ensure High-Quality Content

The last thing you want to do is create poor-quality content. By leveraging content planning solutions, you can take your time to plan and ensure you only put out your best work. For example, when your content schedule follows a logical and sequential order in your content calendar, your team has a clear understanding of the direction and goal. Therefore, it can work effectively to achieve the objectives.

Besides, it will be much easier for you and your team to produce high-quality content with value if you don’t have to develop new topics on the spot every time. In other words, when a content planning solution does all the hard work of prompts and reminders, your team can focus better on coming up with original ideas.

Improve Organization

Sometimes, larger teams may find it more challenging to collaborate on projects due to the increased number of parts that have to work together to make the magic happen. Other times, distance and remote workers may be the issue. Either way, content planning tools simplify your content planning process.

In addition, you can use a content planner to ensure your content marketing campaign stays on track. For instance, CopyPress’s content analysis tool takes you straight from analytics to planning based on your current data. This way, you can strategize and gain from the new information you now have.

Plan Schedules

Since a content planning solution helps you plan your content, it is much easier to stay on schedule since you can create your content in advance and avoid the rush of incoming deadlines. In addition, planning your content also helps you to factor special occasions and holidays into your content creation campaigns.

This way, you don’t miss out on unique opportunities to promote your content and business. For instance, discount periods right after a holiday always present unmatched opportunities in the tech industry. No doubt, a content planner is a great way to ensure you don’t miss out on topical or creative content-sharing opportunities. But you should always ensure your content relates to the occasion if you post event-specific content.

7 Content Planning Tools to Streamline Your Marketing Strategy

Image via Unsplash by Estee Janssens

With so many content marketing channels at our disposal today, it’s critical to maintain organization and have a strategy for when and what you publish online. Here’s a look at our selection of the best content planning tools to help you stay on top of your marketing game:

1. SurferSEO

SurferSEO is an AI-powered content planning tool that helps you set up a content strategy for creating content that ranks well on search engines. This platform can also help you conduct SEO audits and monitor your SERP rankings.

With SurferSEO, you can also access several integrations to help you plan, schedule, and create content. It has a content planner feature that allows you automatically generate fresh content topics and keyphrases to use in your content strategy. Additionally, you can develop keyword clusters for a subject and find additional keyword opportunities to strengthen your position as an expert in your market.

You can also use the SEO audit tool to find mistakes in your content and reuse older content to improve the search rankings for your most authoritative posts. Surfer features a content editor that offers tips for improvement based on the best-performing pages. Some of the pros include effective SERP analysis and easy integration features, but the keyword research tool isn’t as advanced as others.

2. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a content planning tool that offers tools for SEO strategies such as link building, SEO audit, keyword research, competitor analysis, and many more. Unlike simple keyword research tools, Ahrefs has a lot of other capabilities, including rank tracking, SEO audit, and others. In addition, the platform can also help you generate content ideas and examine competitor content for keyword rankings and backlinks.

With the site audit function, you can analyze your website’s on-page SEO performance and find out where it falls short. It provides a thorough report that includes a summary, a crawl log, problems, and suggestions for improvement. The Ahrefs content explorer lets you locate the best-performing content for your topic online and unearth hundreds of fresh backlinking possibilities.

By sorting top-performing pages by SEO and social media analysis, you can find ideas for your content initiatives that may work well. The rank tracker lets you compare your performance to competitors and frequently check your ranks on SERPs, and the keyword and site explorer allow teams to research keywords, competitors, and backlinks. One of the only drawbacks to this tool, though, is that it doesn’t give you a free trial and requires a paid membership.

3. Content Cal

ContentCal is an intuitive content planning solution that makes collaborating with all team members simple. Using this tool, you can set up personalized permissions to grant access to the appropriate individuals. You can do much more with this content planner than just planning and arranging your content. For example, you can make drafts, preview blog articles, integrate your preferred tools like Grammarly and Pinterest, tag your topics and categories, and work directly with your team on the platform.

Additionally, you can monitor data like follower growth, audience engagement, and the most effective posting times. Content mapping allows for team collaboration, making it easier to see where production is within project completion timelines. You can also maintain designs, schedules, campaigns, and communication in one place, thanks to the tool’s asset management features. The only downside to ContentCal is its inability to integrate with other apps.

4. Semrush

Semrush is a comprehensive content planning solution that can also help increase your online visibility. You can use its features to find the tech topics users are searching for. In addition, you can audit your blog, find backlink opportunities, and much more with this tool. Using the platform’s SEO tool, you can look up hundreds of keywords for both the local and international markets. Use the backlink crawler to monitor the backlink profiles for your competitor’s website.

Semrush also supports marketing teams in planning content strategies with features like rank tracking and technical SEO audits. The platform also provides a topic research tool for finding topics that are relevant to your target audience. With the help of the market research tool, you can monitor the traffic on your competitors’ websites, learn about their marketing plans, and spot any weaknesses in your keyword and backlinking approach.

Semrush’s social media marketing tool enables you to monitor the social media accounts of your competitors, measure the effectiveness of your social media postings, and optimize your social ads. You can also generate and publish social media content using it as a scheduling tool for social media. Overall, Semrush is easy to use and provides one of the top keyword research tools you can use.

5. Asana

Asana is a project management program that performs well as a content planning tool. Both teams and individuals can plan, monitor, and manage content schedules and project workflows. You can also automate the majority of project-related and repetitive tasks. Asana’s drag-and-drop interface provides several perspectives, giving teams the ability to see content plans from different views. There’s also a visual tool for defining processes, organizing work, and linking teams to projects. Using this, you can create unique workflows and team tasks.

To ensure no one is overworked or underused, Asana provides insights into your team’s workload. This aids project planning and guarantees that each team member is covering their assigned processes. The timeline feature on Asana enables you to create plans that keep your project on schedule. Before beginning the actual work, you can map your tasks to deadlines and discover problems that could cause a delay.

6. Monday

Monday is another excellent tool for planning tech content. If your business’s projects require a lot of teamwork and collaboration, Monday makes an excellent choice. It gives you plenty of ways to plan content production by offering charts that show you who oversees each task and when projects are due. This makes it simple for you to work with teammates and highlights anyone who still needs to complete their task.

You can use Monday to automate repetitive processes, like status updates, email notifications, task assignments, and due date alerts. This is probably one of the biggest advantages here, as it helps teams ensure that everyone is on top of recent developments.

With a visual overview of your projects, the dashboard feature on Monday can guide better content planning and decision-making. Also, you can customize dashboards to track the data and key performance indicators (KPIs) you want. Teams can also collaborate on the dashboard to prioritize tasks, share files, and allocate projects. Plus, with Monday’s asset management feature, you can keep all your assets, such as graphics, videos, and brand assets in one spot.

7. Sendible

If social is a part of your tech content plans, Sendible is one tool you’ll want for managing and scheduling social media posts. It provides a robust calendar that simplifies content planning. Schedule and distribute posts across multiple channels, or schedule posts individually. You can even import your business’s created assets. You can also use it to exchange content with clients if you need to get their approval before scheduling it for publication.

In addition to its content management abilities, Sendible also helps boost engagement by giving you creative control to design, edit, and resize appealing images—all in a single app. Get quick insights into how well your content is doing, including best-performing posts, audience growth, and peak engagement periods. With automated publishing, you can also schedule your content in queues and automate the posting and publishing to target specific periods and optimal times. Sendible’s automated publishing also helps you achieve better consistency in your content campaign.

Elements Your Content Planning Tool Should Have

Choosing the right content planning tool for your tech marketing can be challenging. But with a list of must-have elements, you can make the decision easier. Here are several features you’ll want to look for in your planning tools:

Effective workflow: Your content planning tool should have an effective workflow for production and content planning documentation. This ensures that everyone on the team follows the same procedure and has no bottlenecks.
User-friendly: A unified content planning and curation platform should allow for clearer scheduling and communication.
Smooth onboarding system: There should be a fluid and consistent setup for onboarding and training for all new users and team members.
Content marketing system: An excellent content planning tool should offer effective distribution and promotion channels to reach your target market.
Analytics features: A good content planning solution must allow for measurement and improvement.
Transparency: The right content planning tool keeps everyone in the loop. This way, content planning efforts are clearly visible to every team—from sales to marketing, product managers, and other stakeholders — which helps enhance team dynamics and culture.

CopyPress Has the Tools You Need for Your Tech Content Strategy

Building a great content marketing campaign for your business in the tech industry begins with a strong content strategy. Thankfully, content planning tools make coordinating every aspect of your content marketing strategy much easier and amplify your results. At CopyPress, our content marketing analysis tool can help you identify the gaps you should be targeting in your plan. You’ll uncover the top keywords for your tech niche and find topics that’ll connect and deliver value to your audience.

Lauren Oliver

Digital Marketing Manager at CopyPress