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Even the most creative minds can struggle for inspiration at times. Meanwhile, managing workflows and facilitating collaboration without resorting to endless planning meetings can be a challenge. We all know the pitfalls of those endless email chains.

Fear not, though, because there are several tools and resources available to help make these tasks easier. This frees up more time for the actual content creation, ensuring copy is tight, images correctly sourced and SEO on-point.

Here are five top tools all content marketing experts will be familiar with, and when you’re done here check out our guide; How to give consumers digital marketing content they want.

Gather Content 

This comprehensive app doesn’t come cheap— plans range from $12US to $20 per seat per month. One seat is one person logged in at any one time, so you don’t necessarily need a seat for every team member.

Once signed up you’ll be able to store everything from email chains to banks of assets such as images and videos. You can produce work directly into the software, allowing for feedback and amends from colleagues, and maintain ongoing schedules and to-do lists to make sure every calendar date is met.

Expert Sources Anniversaries

Speaking of calendar dates, if you’re not familiar with Expert Sources it’s worth sorting that out. The website is a goldmine for media requests— linking registered journalists with registered experts in various subject fields. It’s not all about getting comment and quotes, though.

The Anniversaries page contains a huge list of annual dates for the diary. Many are pegged on major global news and historic events, divided into chronological segments— 1 year, 2 year, 5 year and so on. As we all know, timely content can be exceptionally shareable, so this is a great way to find emotionally engaging dates to start planning content around.

Twitter UK Summer Events Guide

Another great resource for developing ideas, Twitter has just launched a  new infographic aimed solely at businesses looking to reach UK audiences. Put simply, it’s a basic run down of major British events taking place this summer.

Still not enough? Check out the network’s monthly event update listings and annual major events calendar. Both are exceptionally useful when looking to tie-in your content to what’s actually happening in the world. Ever-green is great, of course, but ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ are often catalysed by now.

Bubble.us

Bubble.us is billed as an online brainstorming tool. Without stating the obvious, it allows individuals and groups to collate ideas and visualise these.

A far more effective way to convey a concept than a simple message thread, the ability to develop mindmaps can be particularly useful. Packages are free at some levels, but increase to $59 for the full monty. Educational discounts are also available, as is custom pricing for enterprise businesses.

Google Docs

What list of online resources would be complete without some reference to Google Docs? Probably none, given how many functions this completely free software suite can perform.

In terms of content planning, Sheets can be useful for monthly calendars if you want to keep the actual Calendar free for scheduling meetings, appraisals and reviews. Docs, meanwhile, allows multiple users to edit documents, while Chat is a solid way to bounce ideas of one another.

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