Eliminate Wasted Effort with CoSchedule: An All-in-One Marketing Powerhouse Conveniently Hosted in the Cloud

TL; DR: CoSchedule is a comprehensive marketing platform that offers everything you need to plan, organize, and schedule projects under one roof. The management suite, hosted in the cloud, helps businesses of all sizes execute their marketing strategies from start to finish via powerful collaboration tools, robust analytics, and centralized collaboration. With its new Headline Studio, CoSchedule is helping marketers dive even deeper into driving website traffic through the sheer power of words.

Few products facilitate human ingenuity as powerfully as duct tape. Over the years, the silvery-gray adhesive has become essential in the art of improvisation, helping users patch, protect, and repair objects in a pinch.

But duct tape hacks are just that: crude fixes, sufficient for the time being but certainly not the long run. Entry-level marketers know this concept all too well. Cobbling together a collection of tools — a sticky note here, a Word doc or Excel sheet there — may work temporarily. But they won’t hold over time.

“We call it makeshift marketing,” said Kelly Yanke Deltener, Head of Product at CoSchedule. “The typical marketer is handling several tasks — planning, managing social media, blogging, email campaigns — and has to use several disconnected tools to get the job done.”

With CoSchedule, marketers no longer have to depend on a mashup of single-purpose software. The platform unifies all tools and team members in one central hub that integrates seamlessly with popular marketing apps.

“It’s everything you need to plan your marketing efforts in one place, where all of your team is also working,” Kelly told us. “With one destination for all things marketing, you’re able to complete more work and improve communication.”

CoSchedule now helps more than 45,000 marketers streamline their workflows and consolidate their technology stacks. The cloud-hosted solution currently covers everything from calendar, content, and asset organizers to real-time project visualization and management tools.

The company’s continuous focus on enabling productivity for marketers has earned it a designation as one of the fastest-growing marketing software providers on the Inc. 5000 list in 2020. CoSchedule has also been featured in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms and the Gartner Marketing Guide for Marketing Work Management Platforms.

CoSchedule’s history goes back to 2013, when the company’s minimum viable project (MVP), a calendar-based product, was in its ideation phase.

“We launched with a basic MVP calendar that helped people organize, schedule, and publish content,” Kelly said. “We saw a big opportunity in helping people understand how to standardize some of the more complex marketing concepts.”

At the time, most marketers used a combination of planning tools that weren’t necessarily built for the industry. CoSchedule, on the other hand, helped users move beyond basic content scheduling to build out long-term campaigns, marketing road maps, and workflows through the power of cloud hosting.

“The market was just developing and in its exploration phase,” Kelly said. “We were able to give people — even if they didn’t identify themselves as marketers — something that allowed them to work more in that headspace.”

The company launched its official CoSchedule calendar on September 23, 2013. By April 2014, CoSchedule received its first round of seed funding, and by August of the following year, the company had upwards of 5,000 customers.

CoSchedule continued to build its product through the opening of a second location in 2015 and a second round of seed funding in 2017. Since then, the team members behind the product continue to challenge themselves to constantly think outside the box.

“In the startup world, our founding in 2013 seems like a lifetime away,” Kelly said. “We now have a very mature app that serves multiple segments of the market.”

In 2019, the CoSchedule team surveyed nearly 3,600 marketers from more than 100 countries to discover what sets the most successful teams apart from the rest. The research revealed multiple factors that commonly result in industry achievement.

Specifically, the survey found that organized marketers were almost four times more likely to report success. Similar results were seen with those who set goals, documented their strategies, proactively planned projects, and leveraged agile project management processes.

On the flip side, marketers who fail to implement organizational structure pay the price in lost time. Studies have shown that the average professional spends 150 hours each year hunting down lost information, underscoring the need for a single source of truth for marketing programs.

CoSchedule’s Marketing Suite features a family of agile products designed to coordinate teams, projects, and processes. It enables users to manage marketing requests, automate team workflows, sort calendars by team, store assets and files, and track team progress, among other capabilities.

“Everything we do is to enable better workflows, provide better organization, enable collaboration for teams, and improve processes and planning capabilities,” Kelly said.

The suite is appropriate for entrepreneurs, SMBs, and enterprises.

“Our target customer is anybody who has that goal of reaching their own target user or audience with their content or products,” Kelly said. “That could be one person or an entire team spread across several continents. We’ve built the app to scale to meet that need.”

CoSchedule’s marketing tools have a clear and multifaceted value proposition, whether for a small business or a team member within the marketing department in a large enterprise. Ease of use, streamlined workflows, and dollars and hours saved are all part of that story.

In fact, according to the CoSchedule website, the suite can save marketing teams an average of $50,000 every year. With the company’s ROI calculator, marketing agencies and users from the finance, healthcare, higher education, hospitality, and tech industry can find out how CoSchedule helps save money and complete more work on time.

“We try to make it easy for folks because we know that people who find us and are trying to solve problems aren’t always the final decision-makers,” Kelly told us.

From a companywide perspective, CoSchedule’s ability to facilitate collaboration can be a serious time-saver in itself.

“If you are working on things that require decision-making not only within your team but outside of your team, CoSchedule allows you to send out read-only links,” Kelly said. “You can say, ‘Hey, check this out quickly. Do you like the verbiage on this?’ We also have note-taking and discussion capabilities within our applications to allow for a contextual stream of thought.”

Of course, ROI is also a matter of speeding up the workflow process. “When your velocity improves, you’re able to get more done,” Kelly told us. “We provide insights into how well the team is working so leadership has visibility and insights into whether people are struggling.”

The CoSchedule team recently unveiled Headline Studio, a new product designed to improve SEO.

“We took what we used to call our headline analyzer and said, ‘Let’s high-octane this sucker and make a full app out of it,’” Kelly told us.

The tool is available via a free version and a paid edition for those who want to dive deeper into headline optimization.

“We feel it dovetails very well within our family of products and fits with our core mission of helping people take the mystery out of developing and publishing content,” she said.