The 7 best content marketing tools

A solid content marketing strategy can boost your brand visibility and increase conversions tenfold. But executing that strategy is easier said than done. You need content marketing tools that keep cross-functional teams coordinated, provide access to accurate data, and more.

The right platform can help your team develop, organize, and deploy high-quality materials. But, with hundreds of options out there, choosing just one can be overwhelming.

The 7 best content marketing tools

1. Airtable

2. Asana

3. Smartsheet

4. Monday.com

5. Sprinklr

6. Kapost

7. Opal

Content marketing software is a broad category that spans a wide variety of functions. Your software needs to include functionality for ideation, planning and scheduling, publishing, and more.

While we believe Airtable is a great platform for content marketing, we also wanted to provide a clear-eyed evaluation of what else is out there. So we researched and tested each option—here’s a look at highly rated solutions for producing and marketing content at scale.

What is a content marketing app?

A content marketing app is typically software that helps teams brainstorm, develop, organize, and distribute branded materials like blogs, social media posts, videos, ebooks, and more.

Many of these platforms also offer Digital Asset Management (DAM) and  Content Management System (CMS) functionality. This makes it possible to combine asset management and distribution with website building.

How to choose the best content marketing software

Before we dive into the actual software, we wanted to step back and provide the criteria with which we’re evaluating. Here are some qualities that the best content marketing tools have in common:

• User-friendliness: With the right tool, your team can create, optimize, and deliver content to the right audience. That means your software needs an intuitive design, frictionless collaboration capabilities, and customizable settings for a personalized experience.

• Cross-functional team connection: Fragmented teams rarely operate efficiently. The platform you choose should unify cross-functional teams by syncing data in real time and accommodating many data formats, so that everyone is kept in the loop as project details develop and evolve.

• Linked granular and high-level views: Great content marketing software should make it easy for team leads to monitor both the day-to-day and the big picture. Your software should offer both types of views and enable data between those views to sync so projects and tasks are clearly mapped to organizational goals.

• Automation: Whether you’re assigning a project to a team member or publishing content on a set schedule, the platform you choose should automate repetitive tasks in a workflow, freeing up time for teams to focus on creative and strategic tasks.

• Customizable fields: “Content” is a vague term. It could mean blog posts, videos, images, webinars—nearly anything on the internet can be (semi-accurately) described as content. Your tool needs to be compatible with a wide variety of formats.

• Scalability: As your organization grows, so should your content operations. Adopt a platform that can grow with you, categorizing and storing a massive number of records.

1. Airtable

Airtable is a connected apps platform that enables teams to create custom applications built with shared data. With Airtable, marketing teams can have their own apps while product teams have theirs, without the risk of misalignment since data updated in one app can sync with the others.

Content marketing requires collaboration among several teams in order to provide your audience with a consistent, brand and product-aligned message. Whether you focus on blog posts, social media, video, or a blend of content types, Airtable adapts to your workflow.

Here are some key features that make Airtable an excellent content marketing platform:

• Interactive relational database: Thanks to linked records and sync, Airtable functions as a single source of truth. This helps cross-functional teams stay synchronized during planning, creation, reviews, tracking, and reporting at scale. For example, managers can easily see which team members are tackling specific pieces of content to identify who has bandwidth for a new project.

• Flexible data model: Many project-management tools only allow you to structure project- and task-level data. Airtable doesn’t limit its users in this way, enabling teams to structure and connect any type of business data. Pull research, customer feedback, OKRs, and sprints into the same place to inform content creation and guide marketing efforts.

• Advanced automations for scale: With Airtable automations, you can set rules to handle repetitive tasks in your workflow, freeing up time and energy. For example, you can create an automation to notify cross-functional stakeholders when a new piece of content is published.

• Drag-and-drop Interface Designer: Marketing managers and team leads need visibility into campaign progress. With Airtable, you can design a completely custom interface filled with visual and interactive elements like data visualizations. Build dashboards that only contain what users need to see, rather than overwhelming them with entire datasets.

• Dynamic views: Save hundreds of uniquely filtered and sorted views in formats such as grid, gallery, calendar, kanban, timeline, Gantt, and more. Use the calendar view for your high-level content calendar and the list view for your day-to-day content creation and review tasks.

Reviews:

• G2: 4.6 stars; 2,126 reviews

• Capterra: 4.7 stars; 1,781 reviews

2. Asana

Asana is a project-management platform that’s popular among marketing teams due to its task assignment, goal-setting, collaboration, and project-monitoring features. The app’s “project and task” structure makes it a solid option for small marketing teams that don’t regularly collaborate with other departments. 

The following features equip Asana to serve content marketing teams:

• View options: Asana doesn’t skimp out on view types, allowing teams to create custom high-level dashboards with data visualizations that reflect project progress, as well as kanban, list, calendar, and timeline views.

• Dependencies: In content marketing, assets get passed around from team to team on strict set schedules. Oftentimes, after writers wrap up blog copy, designers step in to create visual elements that break up the text. Asana allows teams to easily create task dependencies, requiring that Step 1 be finished before Step 2 to prevent workflow disruptions.

• Workflow builder: With Asana’s workflow builder, you can create custom automations to expedite tasks like content creation assignments and approvals.

Reviews:

• G2: 4.3 stars; 9,347 reviews

• Capterra: 4.5 stars; 11,998 reviews

3. Smartsheet

The spreadsheet-based work management platform Smartsheet is a popular tool among content marketing teams. It offers multiple view options, making it easy to build content calendars and view important project details such as status and assignee at a glance. While the spreadsheet format has its perks, teams need to be wary of data silos. Train teams to actively notify cross-functional stakeholders whenever they make important updates to individual spreadsheets, so that all teams remain aligned.

The following features help Smartsheet serve content marketing teams:

• Comprehensive project management: Smartsheet allows teams to set dependencies, create critical path visualizations, and even track and log time spent working on projects. Overall, it’s a relatively comprehensive option for resource management and project tracking.

• Collaboration features: With Smartsheet, you can assign tasks to team members, gather annotated feedback on uploaded documents, and secure approvals. In short, it accommodates the workflows that content marketing teams need.

• Automated reminders: It’s easy for marketing tasks to slip through the cracks. Smartsheet offers customizable automated messages that can remind team members to move projects along, whether they’re creating or approving an asset.

Reviews:

• G2: 4.4 stars; 11,281 reviews

• Capterra: 4.5 stars; 2,888 reviews

4. Monday.com

Monday.com is another cloud-based project-management platform that can be used by many disciplines and departments, including content marketing. It includes a drag-and-drop editor, automations, custom fields, and a large selection of third-party integrations, enabling it to adapt to your creative workflow.

Unfortunately, Monday.com caps out at a record limit of 20,000 items, which could hamper growth. As you evaluate solutions, consider your organization’s size and scaling—if you foresee a present or future need for scale, be on the lookout for platforms that can accommodate over 200,000 records.

The following features make Monday.com an effective marketing solution:

• Advanced views: Monday.com is not stingy with its views, offering popular options like Gantt, timeline, calendar, kanban, custom dashboard, and more. It even offers a Workload view to see team capacity and reallocate tasks to prevent overworking team members.

• Real-time collaboration features: When it comes to content creation, teamwork is key. Monday.com allows team members to discuss specific items in context thanks to its handy comment and tagging feature.

• File versioning: Every content marketer knows that asset versions can stack up as various stakeholders request updates throughout a project’s lifecycle. Monday.com allows you to upload several versions of one asset and keep an organized, historical log of all of them.

Reviews:

• G2: 4.7 stars; 8,049 reviews

• Capterra: 4.6 stars; 3,845 reviews

5. Sprinklr

Sprinklr is a customer experience management (CXM) platform that offers a marketing solution with helpful content marketing features. It unifies tasks like planning, production, publishing, and analytics to serve as a one-stop-shop for your content creation and optimization needs. Since Sprinklr is a marketing point solution, you’ll want to make sure the other tools your cross-functional teams use integrate with it to avoid creating siloed workflows.

The following features make Sprinklr stand out:

• Omnichannel editorial calendar: The platform offers an editorial calendar view, enabling teams to visualize and share content plans that span all channels.

• Workflow Engine: With Sprinklr, you can design custom workflows for your project lifecycles. Set sequential tasks and assignees to keep your marketing team aligned and efficient.

• AI-powered analytics: Sprinklr Marketing also offers real-time content analysis, via charts and dashboards. With AI-powered insights, teams can see which content themes and tones have been performing best, informing future content strategy.

Reviews:

• G2: 3.9 stars; ‎69 reviews

• Capterra: 4.2; ‎76 reviews

6. Kapost

Upland’s content operations software Kapost aims to align content strategy with the customer journey. Kapost provides features to help with strategy development as well as content distribution and analysis. The platform integrates with a variety of automation, DAM, and CMS software—among other types of marketing tools. 

However, Kapost is solely built for content marketing teams. Cross-functional teams, such as UX research and product dev, don’t have visibility into processes, which is something to keep in mind if your content auditing and publishing work requires collaboration across departments.

Here are some of Kapost’s key features:

• Asset consolidation: The platform keeps metadata tags, files, briefs, and design inputs consolidated so that all relevant information is easily accessible.

• Canvas: Kapost’s content strategy module Canvas helps users build a customer-centric plan using customer personas and buying stages. It provides visibility into alignment of content with organizational goals, resource allocation, timelines, and more.

• Analytics and insights: Kapost offers analytics that unpack content effectiveness, as well as insights into the health of your operations. Transform these insights into custom dashboards with charts and graphs to present to stakeholders.

Reviews:

• G2: 4 stars; 42 reviews

• Capterra: 4.5 stars; 15 reviews

7. Opal

Opal is a marketing planning platform that, much like Sprinklr Marketing, aims to consolidate your team’s campaigns and channels. It enables teams to collaboratively brainstorm, schedule and visualize projects in the pipeline, glean insights from content performance, and more.

Here are some of Opal’s most notable features:

• Collaboration features: Thanks to file sharing, task assignments, live chat with team member mentions, and more, Opal is equipped to help marketing teams collaborate and stay aligned.

• Customizable calendar view: The platform also offers a calendar feature where teams can see exactly what content will be published when and where, which prevents gaps and oversight. Drag & drop scheduling makes calendar management straightforward and user-friendly.

• Contextual previews: Opal presents mockup previews of social media posts to help users visualize how posts will appear in context, before they’re published. 

Reviews:

• G2: 4.1 stars; 110 reviews

• Capterra: 4.3 stars; 35 reviews

Every content marketing tool has its benefits and drawbacks. Some are straightforward yet basic, while others are comprehensive and complicated. Airtable is the only solution that balances flexibility with ease of use, all while unifying cross-functional teams and scaling alongside your business.