How To Convince Your Team To Get Organized With CoSchedule ⁷⁴

You know that feeling. The one where you want to tear your hair out because your marketing team is completely disorganized. You hate that feeling, so you start searching for a tool. Something that is going to save your team (and your hair) when BAM!

You find CoSchedule.

Now the only thing standing in the way of marketing bliss is convincing your boss that you need CoSchedule.

Gain the information you need to explain the features that CoSchedule offers, how to master those features to show your team what makes them valuable, and how to pitch CoSchedule to your boss.

Plus we’ve even crafted a pre-built presentation slide deck template (<—- click that link to snag it) to help save you time. As you read through the post, we’ll show you how to use CoSchedule and how to explain all its awesome benefits.

By the time you’re done, you’ll be your company’s go-to CoSchedule expert.

Consolidate Your Marketing Workflow In One Place

Your team works with a lot of tools. First, you have your content calendar. Then your social media scheduling platform, some Evernote style platform and your email.

Everything was everywhere, and no one could find anything.

Why Is Working In Multiple Tools A Problem?

The biggest issues working with multiple tools are twofold.

One is that they usually don’t communicate with each other. The email that comes in to approve a social media campaign doesn’t connect to your scheduling platform and tell it, “Okay, you can send this now.”

Which means your team is stuck doing everything manually.

That leads into the next issue; if your tools don’t have automation features, your team is wasting time doing things that could be completed for you.

How A Tool Like CoSchedule Solves The Issue

CoSchedule allows you to put every marketing project that your team could ever want to complete into one calendar. The platform makes it easy to communicate, create, update, and publish your work while maximizing your time.

In fact, CoSchedule can help save your team up to 20 hours per week.

You could do a lot with 20 hours.

How does CoSchedule allow your team to save 20 hours a week?

By giving you a platform that consolidates your tools in one place. By not having to jump from tool to tool, your team can increase their efficiency and stay focused on their work.

It also helps maximize your social presence by integrating with all your social networks. Schedule your social posts in advance (and avoid the last-minute scramble of winging it day to day).

Finally, it allows your team to get more done in less time through automation features that take processes that your team used to do by hand and completing them in half the time.

Execute Your Projects Faster Than Ever

CoSchedule eliminates those roadblocks and gives your team the tools it needs to work quickly and efficiently while still staying organized.

Access Everything You Could Possibly Need to Know From One Calendar

Projects, to-do lists, comments and updates used to be scattered across your tools. CoSchedule gives you a platform where everything you could possibly need to execute your project is in one place.

Never Miss a Step With Task Templates

Task templates are reusable checklists that ensure your team never misses a step on any project.

To create a task template, go to a piece of content, look for the small box in the upper right-hand corner and select +New Template:

Title your template and enter the tasks that your team needs to complete:

Click the arrow that appears on the right-hand side of a task and assign a team member and due date. Due dates are calculated based on when the content is set to publish:

Once you’re back in the home screen, click the same box in the right-hand corner, select your template and hit Apply:

Each time you check off a task, the progress bar will calculate your completion status.

Quit Getting Feedback Lost in Your Inbox With In-app Commenting

Before CoSchedule your team used to rely on email or some internal chat system for relaying comments on marketing projects. Now you can communicate in CoSchedule and make sure your notes and messages don’t get lost.

To send feedback, a comment, or add any file to a project, scroll to the right-hand side of your screen and look for the chat bubble:

To add a comment, add your text, and click Add Comment:

You can also edit and delete comments by scrolling back over them. If you’re deleting a comment a secondary message will appear asking you to confirm it:

You can also add files and images in your comments by clicking the paperclip in the bottom left-hand corner. You’ll be able to choose the files you want to upload and add them to the comment section:

Never Accidently Ship an Incomplete Project Again Using Task Approvals

How many times has part of a project gone out without the consent of a manager? If your answer is more than once, it’s happened too often. That’s where CoSchedule’s approval processes come in.

Task Approvals are built into your task templates and allow managers and editors to approve your team member’s work.

To set task approvals,, go back to your template and select the task that needs approval. In the drop-down menu, there should be a space that says Requires Approval By. Choose the manager that needs to approve the content:

When a task requires an approval, the initial click will produce a flat line instead of a check:

Managers will see an additional box that allows them to approve or reject that step

Once the step is approved, the task will be marked as complete:

Don’t Lose Another Piece of Your Project With Marketing Campaigns

Marketing Campaigns is CoSchedule’s ultimate organization feature. This feature allows your team to create, organize, and document all of the moving parts of your project.

[Marketing projects video]

Using Marketing Campaigns in your CoSchedule calendar is simple and worth the 20 minutes of time it takes to set them up. Go to your calendar and select Marketing Campaign. Give your project a title and select the date range:

CoSchedule will then craft a view of your marketing campaign inside your calendar which allows you to see the moving parts that are related to that project:

You can begin to add parts of your project into this selected calendar view by clicking the + button in the upper left-hand corner. You can select the content type, due dates, and more:

As you add tasks to the moving parts of your project, you’ll see a status bar appear in the upper right-hand corner:

The  more tasks you complete, the more the bar will move:

The Possibilities of CoSchedule Are Limitless

CoSchedule is only limited by the imagination of your team. Meaning that any content or project that your team creates can follow the above processes.

Manage Social Media Marketing With CoSchedule and Engage Your Audience

Before CoSchedule, your team could only post to social media when they found the time. Or maybe you have a social tool that isn’t as easy to use as you would have hoped.

By using CoSchedule your team will be able to create the consistent content that you need to stay ahead and engage with your audience.

So how does this work?

Connect to Your Social Media Networks

The first step in utilizing CoSchedule is to connect your social profiles. Head to your settings menu and click on Social Profiles and Connect a Social Profile:

A secondary screen will surface asking what type of profile you want to connect. Once you select a channel another window will appear asking you to authorize CoSchedule to post to your account:

Once authorized you should see the new account in your social profiles list:

Pre-Schedule Your Single Social Messages

Standalone social media messages are a simple way to build your social media presence. They can also cause a bit of panic if they are crafted at the last minute. CoSchedule helps you avoid this by allowing your team to schedule social posts in advance.

To create a single social message, click the + in the upper right-hand corner on your calendar and select Social Message in the lower left-hand corner. You can also add content by clicking the + in the day that you want your content to publish on:

Select your channel and create your content:

Schedule your content by choosing the day and time you want your post to go out. You also have the option of sending your messages at the best time using Best Time Scheduling:

Make It 10x Easier to Craft Your Social Campaigns

If your team has a massive social media campaign, scheduling a single post at a time is down right annoying. Social campaigns allow your team to bulk schedule your social posts around themes, content and more.

To create a social campaign, go to your content menu and select Social Campaign. It will ask you to name your campaign and set your dates:

The next part of your process is creating a series of templates that will help you automate the social campaign creation process. Go to the upper left-hand corner and select + New Template:

Title your social template and begin to add in the social messages that will be sent out every time you add this template to a campaign. This saves your team from having to re-enter your posting schedule every time you create a new campaign:

You can automate your process even more using text and image helpers. To set up text helpers scroll back to the top and hit +Text Helper:

Enter a code for your text helper that lets your team know which social messages this helper should attach to, i.e. {Twitter-1} but do not add your content:

Add image helpers by going back to your menu and selecting +Image Helper:

Like text helpers you need to title your image helpers so that they correspond to the social message they should be attached to but do not add your photos yet:

Go back to each social message and enter the tag for the text helper that you want to assign:

Do the same for your image helpers by click Add Image and selecting the helper you wish to add:

Save your template and go back to your original social campaign. Apply the new template:

This is when you’ll be able to add text and images to your helpers. These will automatically populate posts with the matching code:

If you go back to your calendar view you’ll be able to see your full campaign:

The social features that are built into your CoSchedule calendar will make it that much easier to create, and publish content to engage with your audience.

Prove Your Results With Data-Driven Reports

Gathering data for your marketing team used to be a painstaking process. Your team had to spend a day or more going through social analytics, digging through Google reports and more to find what you needed.

Your team can get all that time back with three of CoSchedule’s data-driven reports.

Easily Find Your Top Content With Top Content Reports

Your team works hard creating all sorts of content, and you want to be able to know what’s connecting with your audience. That usually meant digging through a series of metrics or even guessing at what went over well.

With CoSchedule’s Top Content Report, we take away the guesswork and pull all the data for you. To find this report, click Analytics on the left-hand side toolbar and select Top Content:

In the report, you’ll be able to navigate through your content and sort by content type, author, and it’s publish date.

Towards the right-hand side of the report, you’ll see a total social shares count. It’s important to note that Twitter is not included in this data display since the removed access to their API about two years ago:

Don’t Waste Time Manually Search For Social Metrics, Use The Social Engagement Report

The Social Engagement Report breaks down the social messages you’ve sent by gathering information on everything from engagement rates to amount of shares a post receives. This report eliminates the need to comb through the in-app analytics.

This report is located in the same spot as your Top Content Report. Once you click the report the first section you will see breaks down the engagement rate for your social channels:

The second part of the report is going to showcase network performance and individual accounts that are connected to your CoSchedule calendar:

The final section will show you your top messages overall and breaks them down per channel:

You can adjust the dates that the report pulls from in the upper left-hand corner:

You can also export your reports and schedule a time for new reports to be sent to your inbox. In the upper right-hand corner, you’ll see Export. After clicking that you can either export the report or click Schedule to set up a recurring report email:

Enter in the frequency, and the recipients of the report and CoSchedule will take care of the rest:

See How Your Team is Doing With The Team Performance Report

The final report in your arsenal of data-driven knowledge is a Team Performance Report. The Team Performance Report breaks down how often your co-workers are completing tasks on time, past their due date and late,

Like the other two reports, the Team Performance Report is located in the same analytics section of CoSchedule. The first part of the report will break down your total completion rate and the tasks that were completed versus when they are due:

The second part of the report will break down (by team member) who is completing their tasks on time, past due and late:

Like the Social Engagement Report, the Team Performance Report dates that the data is collected from can be adjusted in the upper left-hand corner and exported in the upper right-hand corner:

Data doesn’t lie and being able to back up what projects you’re working on with metrics that prove a positive result is impossible to ignore. What used to take your team a day to complete is now going to take a maximum of an hour, giving you the time you need to keep publishing.

Pitch CoSchedule to Your Team With Confidence

By now you should feel confident in pitching CoSchedule to your boss and your team. You have all your talking points and a killer presentation to back it all up.

If you want even more information on the features that CoSchedule offers, check out these landing pages:

• Marketing Campaigns
• Marketing Calendar
• ReQueue
• Workflow Management
• Mobile App
• Integrations

If your team needs even more convincing talk about how CoSchedule is used by trusted brands of all sizes:

Then, drive the point home with this quote from Gear Patrol’s Matt Ankeny:

The last part of your presentation should recap everything that CoSchedule can do:

That’s how you pitch CoSchedule. Be informed, thorough and prepared to answer any question that comes your way. If you want to hit a homerun sign up for a trial and transfer some of your content into CoSchedule so your boss can see how it works.

November 9, 2017