Looking for the best CoSchedule review 2018? You don’t have to look further as this is the only post you will ever need. This post is going to be long, and therefore, I recommend you to bookmark this for future reading (references).
My consultancy business is picking up and managing more than 10 clients at the same time is hectic. As a startup for two years, we decided to work lean. This means that we are all on saving mode and purchases are only required (when we truly need them). We focus a lot of social media posting schedule and creating marketing calendars that work for our clients, and only use a handful of productivity tools.
We were good at all those, but we forgotten about ourselves. We used editorial app and Trello calendar to streamline our marketing and projects – but those we not enough. We needed more firepower – a better content calendar a.k.a. marketing calendar a.k.a social media calendar.
It’s not 1998. Stop organizing spreadsheets with spreadsheets.
In short, we realized that we are not productive enough. We were (at times) behind schedule and more importantly, we were struggling with spreadsheets. I hated them. My co-founder hated them. We all hated them!
We decided to go for an online calendar (or calendars that work) to manage all our tasks. Sure, Buffer was great but we needed more than that. Our second choice was Hootsuite but it was more of a social media calendar compared to a comprehensive online content calendar to manage all our tasks and social media marketing at the same time.
And for the record, we love Evernote so much that we uses Evernote for Business. But we still needed more firepower. More automation and a better marketing calendar.
Trello was also one of our go-to tools for content scheduling and creating a marketing schedule. But, it is pretty complicated for beginners and some of our members didn’t like it either. We love the functionality and we are looking for a Trello alternative (or a Trello like alternative).
As the Chief Innovation Officer for Marketing Lancers, I knew we needed an online content calendar + marketing calendar that is affordable and powerful. Since we are using WordPress and MailChimp, it is a bonus to have the marketing calendar software able to sync and work perfectly with them all.
And we found CoSchedule …
It was a great feeling knowing that CoSchedule works pretty darn well with WordPress and MailChimp (integration part). It also works with Google Docs which we use it a lot as well.
What is CoSchedule?
CoSchedule calls themselves “One calendar to rule them all” – an online content calendar a.k.a. marketing calendar a.k.a. calendar planning tool to help stressed marketers increase their productivity. It’s a cloud-based content marketing calendar that helps marketers and business owners like us arrange our lives and buying more time to do things we love (closing sale, being with family and staying saint, for example).
But we didn’t jump into CoSchedule immediately. We were convinced, but not convinced enough (sorry CoSchedule team) that the tool fits us well. There’s only one reason why we were hesitant to use CoSchedule in the early stages and we will share this in the last part of this CoSchedule review (to be fair to the brand and for you).
CoSchedule Review 2018: Online Marketing Calendar
Now, we are really getting ready to start our CoSchedule review and let’s start with the features it provides.
1. CoSchedule Marketing Calendar
Are you looking for a centralized view for all your marketing efforts? That’s what CoSchedule is all about.
Using CoSchedule, you can see your entire marketing schedule at a glance. At that time, we were looking for a unified workflow for every project inside a collaborative, cross-functional calendar for social, content, email, events, and more, and CoSchedule makes it possible.
Here’s how it looks like.
Disclaimer: When we first saw the unified marketing calendar, we were blown away almost instantly. I see my team nodding their heads knowing the powerful features CoSchedule can offer.
And there are more to this!
The reason we were very happy with CoSchedule was because it made us more productive. Our current process of using Google Docs wasn’t good enough. We went from A-team to C-team almost instantly.
The introduction to CoSchedule content marketing calendar template helped us to align our work and tasks – keeping track with our clients’ expectations.
2. Color labels
The CoSchedule calendar allows you to use custom colours to tag projects. Of course, you can use it for to prioritize and emphasize important tasks that needed to be completed on time.
You can also go crazy with using the colours to tag your team members.
3. Tags
You know it takes forever to find some documents or content on Google Drive or DropBox especially when one of the guys label them wrongly. It sucks.
With CoSchedule’s tagging feature, you no longer need to go through the calendar, one by one. As each content is can be tagged, you can quickly find the content you need, no matter where it’s located.
4. Saved views
Did you know?
The Saved Views feature made CoSchedule one of the best Trello competitors.
If you are managing over 20 social media accounts like my agency does, it can really be a tedious job. CoSchedule allow you to create custom calendar views based on your filters (color labels, tags, team members, project types, etc.) in just a few clicks.
As a result, you will be able to find content quickly and access any form of information almost instantly.
5. Custom calendars
Some of us don’t like content to be clustered and you want to have complete control of the calendars (by having multiple calendars).
While most content calendar app doesn’t allows you to do so, you can do exactly that with CoSchedule – when you subscribe to CoSchedule Business Plans and above.
6. Drag and drop scheduling
If you are using native social media platforms for scheduling content, you know exactly how much hassle it is to schedule and reschedule campaigns.
When you use CoSchedule social media editorial calendar, you can easily drag and drop content to any day.
The best part? Everything associated with the content will automatically sync to the new time!
7. Read only views
If you are a control freak like I do, you are going to love this. As the co-founder of one of the best digital marketing agency in Malaysia, I tend to work with many freelancers and marketers. At any given time, my team members can grow from three all the way to fifteen. And this is where the problem starts.
The saying “too many cooks spoil the soup” best fit this scenario. When too many of my team members have administrative access to certain files, accidents may happen – accidentally removed a file, change the content etc.
With CoSchedule marketing calendar tool, I can provide very specific access (such as read-only view) to my team members. This way, they will still get the information neded to perform the job and without accidentally compromising the source.
CoSchedule Review 2018: Social Media Scheduling
If you are looking for a social media calendar and planner, CoSchedule does the job perfectly well.
1. Unified calendar
One of the clearest advantages using CoSchedule is the unified calendar view. I know a lot of marketers and business owners easily feel overwhelmed with the numerous calendar views. Okay, this can really be very messy!
CoSchedule is a social media calendar software that allows you to manage all your social promotion and marketing efforts under one roof.
In other words, you can eliminate:
- Convoluted email threads
- Potentially gaps in communication
- Crazy marketing silos that never made sense
You can also set rules and automations on CoSchedule to ensure that workflows especially approvals will be delivered on time and effectively (just a few clicks of the mouse).
2. Best Time Scheduling
Get the MOST engagement every time you post to social media.
With the Best Time Scheduling tool by CoSchedule, you can now intelligently (and smartly) share important messages at the right time. And the right time means the highest traffic times for each network with minimal effort.
3. Online marketing templates, anyone?
Want to get work done faster and more efficient? Using predefined templates by CoSchedule, you can easily create and reuse social sharing plans over and over again to focuson creating exceptional content – and not just filling up your social queue just because your competitors are doing it.
4. Social curation (minus the hassle)
In this CoSchedule review, I want to highlight that our goal (just like majority of you) is to save time and get more work done.
Using CoSchedule, we can now instantly share content from anywhere on the web with just a few clicks. Yes, you read that right!
No more copy and paste commands or switching from one tab to another just to copy the content.
5. CoSchedule Social media automation at its best
CoSchedule ReQueue allows you to set once and forget social media campaigns.
With this content planning tool, you will be able to fill all the gaps in your online content calendar (and minus the guess works).
6. Mobile app and instant access
With the technology advancement today, we spend more time on smartphones and tablets than we do on desktop.
I know there are many calendar planning tool that doesn’t come with mobile app but CoSchedule does!
CoSchedule mobile app allows you to check on the scheduled contents, receive timely notification and even compose social media contents on the go!
CoSchedule Review 2018: Make smarter decision with comprehensive analytics data
Data, data and more data. Successful online marketing is all about data (and analytics).
Analytics from CoSchedule allows you to make smarter decisions along with beautiful data-driven information and results.
1. Social Network Reports
If you loves viewing reports from social media platforms instead of downloading them, you are going to find CoSchedule social media calendar tool extremely useful.
CoSchedule allows you to track social media performance across individual accounts with real-time data. This allows you to understand what works and what doesn’t.
More importantly, CoSchedule allows you to connect with your audience and constantly craft messages that offer high engagement rates.
2. Social campaign reports
Every social media marketer I talk with says the same thing – all of us want to gauge the success of the latest event, product launch and even holiday campaigns.
CoSchedule allows you compile and unite all the data from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest in one report. Yes, gone were the days where you need to generate multiple reports (not to forget printing them out) and compare them side by side.
3. Social engagement report
When it comes to analytics, don’t just scratch the surface. Dig in deeper with advanced marketing analytics and even team performance reports with CoSchedule.
From blog editorial calendar to social media calendar tool, CoSchedule allows you to analyze your social performance across every profile and social media campaign.
And with just a few clicks, you can re-promote your best social media messages using CoSchedule Top Message Analytics. This data tells you exactly what your audience are looking for and has a high possibility of engaging with the post!
4. Team performance report
When it comes to CoSchedule, any apps like Trello or free editorial calendar, knowing your team’s performance is critical for your business growth.
With CoSchedule Team Performance Report, you can easily identify the strengths and weaknesses of your team – which you can highlight, provide sufficient support and improve performance of your team.
Want more? You can easily schedule weekly and monthly reports to be delivered automatically into your inbox!
Now, that’s crazy and probably the best editorial calendar software I’ve seen or used.
CoSchedule Review 2018: Marketing Campaigns
Are you looking for a calendar planning tool that allows you to execute full-scale marketing campaigns in just a few clicks?
Welcome to CoSchedule.
1. Consolidate everything into a single marketing campaign
Instead of seeing upcoming projects or marketing campaigns in the coming week, you have access to the whole month (and beyond). Now, you can easily plan your entire marketing roadmap with this editorial content calendar.
2. Team progress + fast adjustment = Win
Having numerous reports don’t matter if you are not using them correctly and with CoSchedule reports, you are not going to face that problem (like never ever).
CoSchedule’s advanced analytics suite and social campaign reports are extremely easy to decipher. This means that you will the right data at the right time, and all the time. Period!
CoSchedule Review: Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the best primary channel to drive conversions, profits, and customer relationships. More importantly, you know it as well.
Business influencers such as Pat Flynn, Darren Hardy and Eric Siu use email to transform first time website visitors into paying customers. Email marketing had proven to provide one of the best ROI in marketing (apart from search engine optimization).
Here’s a little problem. Too many of us are doing email marketing the old way.
Does this sounds common to you?
Orchestrating your marketing projects via complex spreadsheets while simultaneously jumping from screen to screen in a pathetic attempt to make your social promo, blog content, and email campaigns look “cohesive + organized”. It’s an absolute disaster!
With CoSchedule, you can now …
See how your email campaigns relate to the rest of your planned content, quickly make adjustments, and easily maintain a cohesive + organized marketing strategy with minimum effort. Wait, what?
Absolute time (and life) saver!
With CoSchedule, email marketing doesn’t need to be boring, unplanned and messy. The best part?
You can do it in just three steps:
- Connect your preferred email marketing tool to CoSchedule.
- Auto-magically see your planned (and future) emails appear in CoSchedule.
- Manage your planned email campaigns alongside the rest of your marketing strategy.
Awesome, right?
CoSchedule also integrates with major email service providers such as AWeber, ConvertKit, Drip and MailChimp. So, you don’t have to worry that there will unforseen issues with integration.
Here are a few more advantages CoSchedule email marketing services offer:
1. Full visibility
Say “buh-bye” to disjointed marketing content (and constantly jumping from screen to screen). With CoSchedule email marketing feature, you can now see how your email campaigns relate to the rest of your marketing strategy easily and quickly make adjustments if necessary.
2. Craft the best email lines
You can send the best email content but if the email line is not attractive enough, no one is going to open it. CoSchedule integrates its headline analyzer (some call it title analyzer) with your email to ensure that you can craft the best email lines (for results).
By using CoSchedule headline analyzer tool, we were able to improve our open rates on our email and not to mention the click-through rates (CTR) of our blog posts too.
CoSchedule Review: Analytics that matters
Last but not least, I know analytics are in some of your minds right now. How good is CoSchedule social media analytics?
Let’s find out more.
1. Social network report
We all love to know how much each post does and we need detailed analytics to uncover that.
CoSchedule analytics is extremely detailed and it certainly provides a long list of features including engagement by day and time (which is extremely critical).
Now, you can easily create social media posts that drive results (along with effectively, faster and hassle free).
2. Social campaign reports
Yes, I spoke about this earlier in this post but I believe there is no harm to repeat myself with this feature.
With CoSchedule social campaign reports, you can now unite all the reports from various social media platforms in one report and compare the correlations between one another in just a few clicks.
When it comes to social media marketing campaign, it is paramount to have the right information at the right time to ensure that you resonate with your audience.
My Verdict: CoSchedule Review 2018
Before I end this review on CoSchedule, I think it is only fair for me to share my personal experience using CoSchedule.
Carry on reading. Trust me, it is worth it!
CoSchedule Review: CoSchedule Marketing Calendar
With CoSchedule, creating and managing multiple marketing calendars is extremely easy. The unified calendar allows you to have detailed (and snapshots) of your marketing campaigns under one roof. Therefore, you know exactly what’s happening and you can leverage real-time data to improve your marketing results.
Verdict: CoSchedule all-in-one editorial calendar app worth checking out.
CoSchedule Review: Social Media Editorial Calendar
If you are looking for a social media marketing software that works, CoSchedule is definitely on the top spot. You can easily schedule content to various social media platforms simultaneously and more importantly, you can select the best time based on data collected by CoSchedule.
When you schedule social media posts using CoSchedule, you can have a live preview on the outcome and do the needed changes. So,no more guessing how the post will turn out to be like!
Verdict: CoSchedule makes other social media automation tools such as Buffer and Hootsuite look like newbies (sorry!)
CoSchedule Review: CoSchedule Pricing / Is CoSchedule Worth It?
Finally, the most important page which many of you are hoping for. Let’s start by taking a look at CoSchedule pricing.
Part 1: CoSchedule pricing for individuals (bloggers, freelancers and marketers)
Part 2: CoSchedule pricing for business (small to medium sized businesses)
Part 3: CoSchedule pricing for agencies
As you can see, CoSchedule pricing structure is very straightforward and works perfectly well for bloggers, entrepreneurs or even big companies and agencies.
CoSchedule Discount
Let’s face it. $40 per month for a content marketing calendar app could be very pricey for bloggers and entrepreneurs. So, why do I still recommend CoSchedule?
The answer is simple. CoSchedule is offering discount of 50% if you are able to produce an honest review on CoSchedule (and passing through some of their requirements). This means that CoSchedule pricing is only $20 for the lowest tier.
Verdict: Is CoSchedule worth it? The answer is yes. It is one of the best calendars that work, offers very powerful content marketing calendar app and even allows you to perform social media scheduling under one roof. Without a doubt, CoSchedule (added with CoSchedule headline analyzer) is one of the best editorial app in the market today for bloggers, entrepreneurs, freelancers and business owners alike.
