Market like you mean it.

Start marketing with real intent.

Working day and night, putting in grueling hours, tap-tap-tapping away at your keyboard—it’s all for naught if you’re not working for something real, tangible and meaningful.

After all, productivity isn’t just about how much you get done.

It’s about being efficient without sacrificing the quality of your work.

I had to learn this the hard way on my own entrepreneurial journey.

Now, I’m here to recommend some powerful content management software that’s all about marketing with intent, and staying productive along the way.

It’s called Mintent. While this software is relatively unknown, it’s a serious little diamond in the rough. It helps you get to the root of your customers’ needs, desires and goals. And it’s well worth your time to take a look at its features, pros, cons, plans and pricing.

Don’t go anywhere—I’ve got all of that information for you right here!

Mintent Review: How to Market Like You Mean It

Marketing is about managing a ton of different moving pieces to achieve measurable results.

I’ve often compared it to a juggling routine or a plate-spinning act.

That’s why, before we think of results, we need to think about how to manage those moving pieces. You need to make sure you can manage your team, keep projects organized, delegate tasks in a simple way and track your results.

Mintent aims to help you accomplish all of that in one convenient place. So, I took their free 14-day trial for a spin to see what it’s really capable of. From my testing, with the perspective of a seasoned content marketer, I’ve come to some interesting conclusions that I think you’ll enjoy hearing about.

The Mintent User Experience

The Intent of Mintent

Mintent isn’t designed for small fries. It’s designed for people who are running hundreds or thousands of content projects each year.

With Mintent, you can:

• brainstorm ideas
• create buyer personas
• create and set workflows
• assign tasks
• write and edit posts within the platform
• schedule posts
• publish across multiple platforms
• view metrics to see which pieces of content are working and which aren’t
• communicate with team members

And when you’re taking the above actions for any piece of content in Mintent, you and your team members will be prompted to designate the theme, buyer persona and theme-cycle stage. Not a single piece will pass through the pipeline without being looked at in relation to your audience and marketing goals.

Simple Interface

When I first logged into the admin area of Mintent, I wasn’t expecting what I ended up seeing.

This whole platform struck me as spotless and minimalist right off the bat—what a pleasant surprise.

Most content management tools come with lots of shiny, “special” features that end up cluttering your screen and not doing you too much good in the long run. Instead, on Mintent I was instantly greeted with a friendly admin area, an easy-to-navigate menu and a host of quick actions I could take with a mere click.

Nice!

There’s a permanent menu on the left-hand side that gives you one-click access to every major section of the platform. Your Calendar area has its own tab, as do your Assets, Reports, Strategy, Reporting and Settings sections.

Kudos for ease of use and a neat, clean appearance.

I’m going to walk you through each of the major sections and subsections you see above, so you’ll get an excellent feel for how this platform operates.

It all starts with the editorial calendar.

Meet the Mintent Editorial Calendar

The editorial calendar doesn’t look like anything special at a first glance. It isn’t too much different from CoSchedule’s calendar or even from your run-of-the-mill editorial calendar plugin for WordPress.

But you need to go a little deeper to see why it’s different from the rest.

What makes it unique is the organization of it. The editorial calendar can have events like:

• Social posts
• Blog posts
• Articles
• E-books
• Emails
• Landing page publishing
• Website page publishing
• Resource completion

It doesn’t stop there—which just shows how organized and laser-focused it is. When you’re adding new content to keep track of, you can also pick the purpose of the content. As with everything in this platform, it’s always going back to the intent.

You’ll be prompted to set the theme (campaign), buyer persona and theme-cycle stage for the content in the Creative Brief. Then you can assign this to writers or other team members, knowing all the key information framing the content will be there for them to see.

Each content type is a different color, making it easy to see social posts or blog posts at a glance.

Project Management

The project management and administration features mainly fall within the calendar, and they are:

• editorial calendar and ability to customize it
• workflow and ability to customize it
• ability to assign things to teammates
• integrations

It seems like you’ll have a lot of power, and like you’ll have to manage a lot of little details, but it’s all set up in a very smart way.

You’ll be prompted to fill out more than you would in another project management tool, perhaps, when setting up things like content entries and tasks. On the other hand, you’ll spend just one measly minute making sure that team members have the proper framework to complete work with buyer intent in mind.

You can also set up your own workflows for certain types of content, so you and your team members will always know what the next steps are when setting out on a new project or content creation process.

All in all, these factors in play will help to minimize micromanaging the team. You keep everyone in the know at every stage of content creation, so you won’t need to poke, prod, remind and revise later on when the content doesn’t meet your website’s needs.

Over the past years, I’ve spent a lot of time setting things up inadequately that I won’t get back. A lot of time spent making corrections and requesting changes. I’m glad I found a platform that incorporates guiding information in an organized way.

Customizable Workflows

This brings us right into the workflows we just briefly mentioned in passing above. These go along with the tasks and contents in this platform.

What makes this workflow feature nice is that it helps to eliminate the use of another third-party tool. You don’t need to have your editorial calendar, project management tool, content creation tool and publication platform separate—it all gets integrated in Mintent, and you can direct it all with your workflows.

So, how does the workflow work?

After you complete your content’s Creative Brief and hit save, you’ll see something like this:

Yup, there’s a default workflow that you can use and even tweak as needed.

What if you wanted something more customized? Mintent makes it straightforward to create your own Workflows.

The ability to create your own custom workflows is especially important for those of us who’ve already developed a good system to get work done with our team—and we want to continue doing things our way.

Your workflows may all be different, specialized for different post types and objectives—luckily, it’s possible to set up a variety of customized workflows based on different factors.

This feature alone got me seeing this as one of the best content management tools for teams, particularly those that manage a wider array of content types.

It can be a headache jumping from Trello to your editorial calendar to WordPress and then over to Slack just to get through the workflow for a project and communicate with team members about your progress. This has always seemed to make my team more distracted and less productive. Not to mention, when you have lots of different steps across different platforms, things tend to slip through the cracks or not get completed properly. Somebody always forgets to click the save button somewhere.

With the workflow feature in Mintent, I think the distraction of jumping from one tool to the next will be virtually eliminated. Say it with me: “Consolidation, baby!”

As far as customization goes—on a scale of 1 to 10, I would say Mintent earns itself a solid 9 overall. I don’t think you could get much closer to perfect customizability unless you created the platform yourself.

With the customization ability in the workflow and beyond—in everything from content areas and editorial calendar to integrations—sure, Mintent could fit your team like a glove.

Content Creation and Publication

Yes, you can create the content itself right in Mintent. No need to jump out to WordPress or set writers up with whatever CMS you’re using.

After you’ve created your Creative Brief and assigned it to a writer, they just need to click the Draft tab to be taken to a screen with a text editor field. They can write the content directly there, and there’s even a space to the right of the text where you can chat about the content.

Your writers will probably be much happier here than in WordPress or another similar CMS, too. The text editor is a lot more flexible, with many more options to fine-tune text and fewer weird formatting quirks.

After that, you can mark the draft as “completed” and it will be saved to your Assets for later reference. You can publish directly to social media (Facebook, Twitter), integrate your CMS to upload/publish directly or copy-paste the text into your CMS.

Store Your Assets in Mintent

Your interest was piqued when I mentioned storing assets, no? It’s an incredibly valuable feature to have on hand, but it’s also very simple.

Mintent will stash any “Completed” text draft from your Creative Briefs in this area. It will also save all the attachments that have been added to your various briefs and other tasks around the platform. It’s unexpectedly awesome to have them all stored in one separate space.

Another point for Mintent. Now, on to all of those content strategy tools we keep bringing up.

Devise Your Content Strategy in Mintent

In the Strategy tab, you’ll finally have a dedicated space to figure out your target audience and what they’re looking for.

You’ll have a place to create an incredibly in-depth buyer persona for each demographic of customer who visits your site and takes whatever action you want them to take (like buying an item, signing up for your mailing list or downloading an e-book).

You’ll be able to keep track of themes, which are any and all types of marketing campaigns and objectives you might have. Theme cycles keep track of these within specified timelines.

Add Integrations as Needed

Once I was all set up with everything, the integrations were my last stop. You can have your analytics with Bit.ly and Google Analytics.

There are CMS integration options for Drupal and WordPress. Marketing automation can be done here by integrating Act-on, HubSpot, Marketo and Pardot. 

It doesn’t end there! They also have social media integration, of course, though they’re more limited than other sharing-oriented tools which can sync with 20+ different social media platforms. Here, you can integrate and schedule social posts for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Get Robust Reporting and Marketing Statistics

Mintent breaks the analytics up into two different areas. The first area is content analytics, which I find quite convenient and organized. I prefer to see only my content marketing details at one time, nice and clean, with no interruptions. That’s some of the most important data I deal with these days.

Then the second area is reports. This is where you can pull up a more detailed report for different types of projects, tasks and contents. The data can be filtered by pretty much any category within Mintent, from theme-cycle and buyer persona to campaign or even current workflow stage.

My favorite thing to do so far is pull down all the buyer stages in the reports to check out sales process in a more granular way—which customers are at which stages? Who’s converting to sales? Who’s hovering around buying but not quite there yet? This lets me leverage what’s working and improve what’s not.

These types of stats are great. It’s great to have all of your analytics for content and project completion in one place, rather than scattered across multiple analytics tools.

When you want a neat report of all this data to send out to someone or print, you can quickly do a report export.

Turn to Your Customer Success Manager

I have to take my hat off to Mintent in the customer success category.

Here, you’ve always got someone whose sole purpose is to make sure the tool is set up properly and really working well for your team.

They always seem to be online (during daytime working hours in the US) and a quick entry in their chat box yields fast, thorough responses.

Review Mintent’s Plans and Pricing

The pricing for Mintent is indeed a bit of a mystery. Once upon a time, they had a pricing page which outlined estimated costs for different sizes of teams.

Now, they like to have a little more interaction with their customers first. The most they’ll tell you upfront is that pricing starts at $500 per month for five team members.

If you contact their sales team via email, they’ll be able to talk to you about your team, budget and product needs—and they’re likely to offer you a lower annual rate if you pay by year rather than on a monthly basis.

So, that pretty much means the tool is only for small and mid-sized teams, even better for larger teams. And if you’re on a tight budget, it may not be the right option—again, you’ve really got to shoot them a message to know what’s possible for you and your team.

Given the features they provide, such as the many integrations and the highly customizable workflows, it’s worth spending a little extra time to try out this tool and talk to the sales team.

Who wouldn’t want to consolidate all of the content strategy, content creation, publishing, promotion, analytics, reporting, documentation and communication in one place? Few other tools can do that for you.

Final Thoughts on Mintent

Pros

• Very malleable workflow feature.

• Content strategy worked into every step of the process.

• Content creation, publishing and promotion can all be done in one place.

• Customizable workflows.

• Works with many different types of content.

• Ability to customize and edit content areas, plus add new items.

• Has a slick editorial calendar.

• Has the essential integrations that most content marketing teams rely on.

Cons

• Lack of social integration for scheduling social media posts compared to other, more social-oriented options like CoSchedule.

• Minimalist. (This allows for customization, but means that the platform lacks teeth in some places.)

• Not for individual bloggers or teams with a small budget.

• Lack of instant communication built in for the team. (You’ll still have to use a third-party communication tool like Slack.)

Where Can Mintent Improve?

Mintent is a great tool, but no tool is perfect. I hope that Mintent will improve in these areas:

• Adding a communication feature, and building it into each task/workflow, rather than relying on comments or a separate messaging tab for the team.

• Adding more integrations for social media scheduling. Right now they only have Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Adding at least Pinterest and Instagram would be a major plus.

Who Is Mintent Right For?

This tool is ideal for content marketing teams that have:

• A medium or higher budget to spend on tools.

• A collection of tools and are looking to consolidate everything in one place.

• A team of at least five people.

• A need for customizable workflows.

• More of a focus on content marketing than social media.

All in all, I strongly recommend Mintent for anyone who’s nodding their head at the above bullet points.

But no matter what, you should still take on their 14-day free trial to make sure it’s 100% right for you and your team—even if I’ve totally convinced you here.