What is ContentCal?

With social media marketing being the vogue of marketing, marketers need tools that will help them push their content, products, and services on different social media platforms. Marketing agencies can help brands access audiences on social media. In what is ContentCal I will give you all the tips.

With the different management tools in the market, it becomes even much easier to manage products on social media. It has become much easier to create and manage campaigns for different organizations and brands.

ContentCal is one of those tools that have made it easy to help brands and businesses grow. It increases the efficiency of your team members in creating content for publishing across multiple channels.

ContentCal has been in the market for so long. This tool was launched by Alex Packham in 2014 to ease his social media marketing campaigns. Over the years, it keeps getting improvements in line with social media marketing standards.

ContentCal is useful to those who create and market content across social media platforms. There is so much ContentCal can do for you. It can help you plan and create content. Useful as you collaborate with your team members and your clients.

It is also useful in publishing content and analyzing the performance of your content across the different social media that you have posted it. Makes working with content very easy because the tools that you need are all in one place. It makes the workflow very easy and does not leave any room for bottlenecks.

ContentCal is Right for You

ContentCal is a tool that is very effective in helping you manage your content. You can work with this tool alone if you are a solo publisher and if you have a team. It is effective for ensuring workflow within the team.

You can use it to create content as well as publish the content. There are, however, a few things that you cannot do with ContentCal. You cannot use it to track comments or reply to comments on social media.

The tool is, however, not as advanced in analytic reporting as other tools. But it does well with managing your content and publishing it. When working for clients, you may have to use different tools and a shared calendar to manage their social content.

ContentCal takes all of these into consideration. The ContentCal calendar is helpful as you plan content ahead with your team. Then you get your ideas together to create new content. When the new content is completed, you request the client to approve it and then schedule it using ContentCal.

Features

• Ease of workflow

When you work with your team, you can set up a system that makes the workflow much simpler. There are user permissions and roles that you can assign to those in your team. This will make creating and publishing content much easier.

If you have an admin to manage the account, other team members can send their content to him for the appropriate action to take. He can also send the work to the client to get it approved before publishing. He can approve the work himself and then get it published. Other tools that have a similar setup cost more than ContentCal.

• Ease of content management

It has content planning features that you can use to store content ideas and posts on your calendar. As you create your campaigns, add a header image so that it can be different from the other campaigns.

Then you set the date range. Images and videos can be saved for future use. When you are through, the campaigns will be placed like sticky notes at the top of your calendar. If you wish to repeat some of the posts, you just need to select several dates on the calendar after you have created the post.

Your content for an entire month can be displayed for you. This can give you direction for your next campaign plans. Adding tags makes the planning more effective. It is possible to filter your calendar by post-state, category, post creator, channel, or posts with comments.

• Audit

You can audit your content trail so that you can see all the different stages at which your content is being managed. Auditing lets you know the tasks that each member of the team performs. This makes your team more efficient and effective.

Content library

Keeping assets secure can be a bit difficult as you may not always remember where you have stored them. Sometimes too, you may not be able to access the hard drive when you need it.

A place where you can store your content and other assets which will always be accessible to you. You can use the image and video optimizer to compress large files for ease of storage and publishing. And you and your team will be able to access them at any time.

• ContentCal with  4 Social Platforms

Social platforms like Facebook, Linked In, and Twitter can easily integrate with ContentCal. Once content has been approved, it is very easy to post them on these platforms. Even on Instagram, you can use the ContentCal mobile app to post directly on the platform.

You can also use this tool to plan a content calendar for networks that it does not fully integrate with. ContentCal can help you plan content and get it assigned within your team. After the post is ready, it can be sent to the relevant platform for publishing.

ContentCal can easily integrate with bit.ly. This is helpful if you have to shorten a link. The in-built emoji keyboard makes it easy to select and use your emoji of choice.

• Hashtags

ContentCal can save your most frequently used hashtags. You will find them in the setup area of your calendar. Sometimes, you may want to append one hashtag to one post. When you type a hashtag (#) symbol, it will come up with the list of your saved hashtags, and then you choose the right one for the post.

Analytics

ContentCal has similar analytics across all their plans. Using their analytics, you can easily identify opportunities for your content and analyze data from the different social media to which you post content.

With analytics, you can discover the best time to post content. You can also follow the posts to know the best performing posts. You can also see how your audiences are engaging with your posts.

ContentCal Analytics also shows you how your audiences are growing with your posts according to your different social media. However, if you have published using a third-party tool, the analytics will not be displayed.

On the dashboard, you can see how much organic traffic and paid traffic you have got for your post. If you identify your best-performing posts, you can re-purpose them and schedule them back on the calendar.

You can also see those engaging with your posts from the data. It can show you the performance of your competitors and the best content which are driving conversions for them. If you wish, you can download a copy of the report to help you in planning with your team.

• Panic button

This button is useful if there has been some mix-up or panic situation that requires you to stop publishing. It is not meant to delete your posts but to prevent them from being published. After you have rectified the situation, you can then proceed to publish your posts.

Integration

ContentCal offers a few integrations that are important for content creation. It offers Google, Bit.ly, Drive, and Dropbox. It also integrates with Zapier to connect it with other tools.

• White label

ContentCal offers a white label option for big businesses and agencies that would like to brand their user interface. You can also add a custom planning channel.

• Virtual assistant

In situations where you do not have enough members on your team or you need help, sourcing for content, ContentCal is always available to provide you with virtual assistants that will help you solve your problem.

They offer different services including social media strategy, content writing and amplification, and paid media advertising.

Advantages

• This tool supports ease of work between you and your team members. You can set up publishing approvals for you and your team with user permissions and roles. If you set up an admin, he will control the account and will give approvals for content that the team members deliver before publishing.
• Other tools that allow for team workflow like Agora Pulse and Hootsuite all cost much more than ContentCal.
• On ContentCal, you can set up a custom approval workflow. This gives you more control over the tool and your team.
• Once you subscribe to a paid ContentCal plan, you will be given an account manager that will guide you and help you run your account effectively.
• There are three roles that you will find in the ContentCal package. They are the owner, the team member, and the client. When you add them to a calendar, you can give permission for their status like creator + approver, View + comment only.
• You can use ContentCal to plan your work ahead. The “Backlog” can store your draft ideas and posts. When creating content and other ideas are flowing in, you can create placeholder posts. Create campaigns to store and help you manage your content.
• You can also see the state of your post and apply filters. Filter by post-state, post creator, category tags, channel, and posts with comments.
• With the audit trail, you can see the different stages of managing your content This encourages your team members to work better and faster.

Disadvantages

• When your audience relates with your social posts and makes comments, ContentCal cannot track them.
• It also does not enable you to reply to comments on social media. However, they are working on integrating a tool that can solve this problem.

Pricing

Free Plan – ContentCal has a free plan for individuals. This plan allows only one user who can access only one calendar. On this plan, you can schedule your posts and publish them on up to four social networks.

If you want to optimize ContentCal, you can migrate to the Pro plan. This plan also allows one user and has one calendar and four social channels that you can publish your posts on. You can also create campaigns on this plan.

Pro Plan – It is a good plan for solopreneurs since it does not take more than one person. The Pro plan costs $17 monthly but payment has to be made for one year.

The company plan – is most suitable when you work with other members of your team. On this plan, you can have two users and two calendars. With this package, you can assign roles and give approvals.

You also have access to the advanced video uploader. This plan costs $59 monthly but if you are paying for a whole year, it costs only $49 a month.

On the Premium plan, you can manage a good number of profiles. You and your team can access their training, access multiple calendars, and analytics filtering. The Engage feature allows all messages and comments to be centralized.

If you need to add extra users to your team and more calendars, you will have to pay some extra charges. You can also customize as much as you wish, with the assistance of your team manager. You can even get a custom plan if any of the plans do not fit with your management plan.

Conclusion

Social media marketing has become very important to the success of businesses. This has led to the springing up of several social media managers and management tools. ContentCal offers you easy management
of your social media content.

You can use it to plan, schedule, and publish your content on social media. It makes it easy for you to work with your team as you create content. It is also more affordable than several other content management tools. And they can give you a virtual assistant where you need help with some tasks. If you are a content manager, then this tool is right for you.

If this has helped you in your research, I would love you to leave a comment, or a like and share.

Thanks for visiting.

LILY