CoSchedule, an all-in-one marketing automation tool, social media scheduler, productivity management tool, and marketing calendar makes our marketing easier and more straightforward. We put all marketing in one place rather than having ten different spreadsheets, Google Docs, post-it notes and whiteboards. Don't get me wrong, Google Docs post-its and whiteboards are great (spreadsheets can go to hell), but having all our marketing in one place increases visibility, convenience, and ease of use.

We can put literally anything in our marketing calendar, whether it's a social post that will automatically be scheduled, an e-mail blast, a blog post, a note, or a task assigned to a team member. Primarily, we use it for automating our social media. We front-load our social media work by creating posts ahead of time, and we can set them as 'draft' so they can be reviewed and tweaked as necessary. Once we schedule them, we can either publish right away, or at a point in the future. We can even let CoSchedule's algorithm decide when the best time to send a post is. For the most part, the posts' engagement turn out pretty well using their algorithm.

Our posts can be part of a Marketing Campaign, which is a set of projects that are integrated into one Campaign, which allows for tracking posts in one place, and for tracking analytics associated to that campaign. We use Campaigns for new product launches, related content, and other sets of messages we want to send out that have a theme around them.

CoSchedule integrates with a suite of tools, but importantly it integrates with crucial tools like Evernote, Asana, Mailchimp, and Buffer. With CoSchedule +  Buffer, we can publish to Instagram automatically with the full power of CoSchedule behind it. That removes the inconvenience of having to open Instagram everytime we want to make a single-image post. For video or multiple-image posts, you have to open Instagram, but the CoSchedule app will make it easy by sending you a reminder and giving you links to do so with minimal headache.

Our team members can even chat within CoSchedule so they don't have to go back and forth between it and Slack or e-mail. The workflow tool also allows us to assign tasks to each other from within CS, and allows us to set items as drafts and other stages in the workflow.

We can also create saved views for different departments, like creating a separate view to see all the e-mail blasts and promotions we're scheduling, another one to see just social media posts, another one for our blog, etc. These can be exported to provide a marketing snapshot to anyone, and they don't have to have a login to see it.

CS also has excellent analytics, providing reports that cover a suite of data that our investors and team look at on a weekly basis.

CoSchedule is also affordable. For less than $50 a month, we have a tool that makes all of our lives easier. Compare that with $500 a month we would have to spend on extra hours, whether we hire an agency or have someone in-house do the work that CoSchedule cuts out.

The team at CS clearly put a lot of thought and work into their product. We recommend it wholeheartedly for all brands.