Content creation, it’s the heart of any Inbound Marketing campaign. And we all want to find a way to make our content writing as easy and organized as possible. Enter GatherContent, our favorite content collaboration software here at MINDSCAPE.
Like the Beatles and fish & chips, GatherContent is brought to us courtesy of the UK, which as a lover of all things British, I think is pretty cool. GatherContent started in 2012 as a way to try and organize “content-heavy digital initiatives for the Oil & Gas industry”.
GatherContent has a lot of great of features and can be used for a number of projects like creating website content or writing a blog post. As someone who uses the tool almost every day to write blog posts I feel pretty confident saying that GatherContent is one of the best tools I’ve ever used for writing and organizing content. So, I know you’re all wondering, “What makes it so special?” I’m glad you asked!
Here are the 3 best things about GatherContent (in my opinion):
1. The Templates
Each piece of content you create starts with a template. You can either create a new template layout for each project or re-use ones you have created before. The templates can be a way to make sure your content is consistent each time and has all the pieces it needs.
The best part of the templates, each section can be clicked and dragged around. Which is really helpful at the start of a project for creating outlines and trying to organize your ideas.
2. The Comments
The ability to comment on a piece of content is extremely helpful if there are multiple people working on a project, editing and contributing their thoughts. It’s really easy to comment on things in GatherContent, just highlight a portion of the text and follow the prompt to add your comment.
I know that this is something that you can also do in Google Docs, but I prefer comment functionality in GatherContent because it has a simpler, cleaner look and feel to it. And whenever you reply to someone’s comment, it sends an email letting them know.
3. The Workflows
We all know the struggle of trying to track down the status and due date of project . Sometimes you have to go back through days (or weeks) worth of emails and talk to 7 different people to find an answer. Ok, that might be an exaggeration, but you get my point, it can be a challenge sometimes.
Well, GatherContent makes finding out all of this information a little bit easier. If you go to the “Content” tab and there is a complete list of all your organization’s projects, their status (whether they are a draft, completed, etc), the due dates, and even who is assigned to the project. Pretty cool, right?
The project statuses I just mentioned-those are something that you can create based on your organization’s needs. A project status workflow could be:
- Draft
- Ready for internal review
- Ready to be published
- Live on website
Whenever the status of a project is changed, GatherContent gives you the option to send an email to the appropriate people letting them know.
Give GatherContent a try, I’m sure you will become a fan (just like all of us here at MINDSCAPE are). And while we are on the subject of tools to make content creation easier and more efficient, take a look at our content calendar.
