Product Review: CoSchedule Marketing Calendar
Let’s face it, we are living in a time where social media is key to elevating your brand, business, career, etc. The reality is that there are not enough hours in a day to actually do the work that brings in the income and also post on social media to help further your goals.
If only there was a tool that one could use that allowed you to have one central place to coordinate, schedule and manage your online campaigns, content and promotions…
Oh wait, there is and it’s called CoSchedule!
What is CoSchedule?
CoSchedule is a calendar scheduling tool that lets you (a solo entrepreneur), or a larger team, connect your blog and social media accounts in one singular calendar view. It allows the coordination, scheduling and management of online campaigns, content and promotion. There is also the ability to integrate with third-party applications such as WordPress, Social Media accounts, Google Calendar, Analytics, etc.
How does it work?
Well, it’s quite simple and straight-forward. Whether it’s promoting a blog or posting to your social media accounts, CoSchedule’s interface is easy to use and manage.
For blogs, and if you use WordPress, there is a great plugin that brings a calendar right to your blog dashboard. If WordPress is not your Content Management System (“CMS”) of choice (such as ourselves), you can still use CoSchedule’s blogging tool to write your post and then export it to import it into your CMS. Alternatively, you could just create your posts in your CMS and then use CoSchedule as you normally would to promote your content.
For social media, you can link all of your accounts such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. The advantage with this is that you can schedule your posts for all of your accounts in one single interface instead of having to do each one individually.
One thing that will hopefully get fixed soon is that you can’t have your Instagram post automatically. CoSchedule will send you a notification when it’s time to post and then you follow the steps to do so. It’s easy, but it would be much easier if it could automatically post to Instagram for you.
How do we use it?
Right now, we are using CoSchedule primarily to coordinate all of our social media posts at one time. It’s really hard to think about posting to social media when you are going about your regular work day. Being that we oversee and are hands-on with our renovation projects, we don’t have time during the day to take a break and post something on social media. By the time we realize it, the day is over and we are on to the next.
With CoSchedule, we plan out a week, two weeks, three week, etc. in advance and schedule our posts knowing they will go out as we planned them.
We can also easily drag and drop scheduled entries should we need to rearrange them on the calendar. Adding and assigning tasks are quite simple too. This helps you keep track of what work needs to be done and who can do it if your team is more than just you. The tasks all have a checkbox that can be ticked off once it is complete.
The draft section that is located on the right of the CoSchedule calendar is there for you to place posts or ideas that you plan to use but haven’t flushed it out yet or decided on a date (you can easily drag this into the calendar when you are ready. Alternatively, if you have a post that is scheduled already and you realize that you want to change it, you can move it to the draft section so it can be rescheduled at a later date.
Finally, the ReQueue feature is great. If you have a post that you feel is evergreen content, then you can select the ReQueue feature so that it will post that content again at a later time. All automatically!
Pricing?
The Marketing Calendar product from CoSchedule that we are using costs $39/monthly or $29/monthly when paid annually. The price is more than others, but it will end up boiling down to the features and ease of use. They do have a lower plan that costs $19/monthly or $14/monthly when paid annually, if that better suits your needs. We strongly recommend that you take full advantage of the free 2-week trial period before deciding which plan works best for you.
Is it worth it?
Absolutely, yes! The time that we save by having all of content in place is extremely advantageous. We can stay on top of our projects and not feel like we are falling behind or trying to play catch-up. The peace of mind knowing that we schedule posts and that they will go out as planned puts us at ease.
Definitely give it a try. There are no commitments with the free 2-week trail that we mentioned above!
Disclaimer: With this post, we are receiving a 50% discount on the price of the Marketing Calendar product as well as a 10% discount for every paying referral that comes from our post.