Four calls that could have been emails, a follow-up buried three Teams threads deep, an interview transcript someone swore they’d circulate, a deliverable delayed because no one can find the latest round of edits. Everyone in marketing or communications has had weeks like that. It’s the kind of chaos that can derail even the strongest teams.
As a content agency running expert-led content programs for a long list of clients, we’ve felt that pain. For us at Every Little Word, the key to maintaining sanity is a strong operational backbone: the right systems and processes to simplify all the complexity. But truthfully, even then, we’d still be struggling without the right tools to support us.
Our tech stack has streamlined our operations, enabled remote and asynchronous work, and enabled us to lead consistent content programs, even when collaborating with busy executives and SMEs. If you’re managing multiple concurrent deadlines and competing priorities, one or more of these tools could be valuable additions to your toolkit.
1. Loom
We’ve all been in a meeting that should have been an email. Loom is how we avoid that, and, just as often, avoid the lengthy email that should have been a two-minute video.
Loom is a video messaging tool that lets you record your screen, camera, or both, with your own narration. Walking a client through a round of edits. Explaining the rationale for a structural change to an article. Showing a teammate a new workflow template. All handled by Loom in one quick video explainer, saving everyone from multiple back-and-forth emails or a 15-minute Slack discussion.
Of course, we don’t treat Loom as a replacement for client meetings, which are necessary for building and maintaining trust and rapport. But when a content asset needs more context than we can reasonably convey in writing, clients tend to appreciate receiving a Loom video instead of yet another calendar invite.
There’s a subtler benefit, too. When you work asynchronously across time zones, as we do, written communication becomes the default…but it’s not always the best way to express tone or nuance. Loom helps our team connect by putting a face and a voice to asynchronous communication.
2. Slack
Not all conversations need to happen in real time, but for those that do, Slack is an effective tool. We follow clearly defined rules and guidelines to make it useful rather than overwhelming. For example, we don’t use Slack for anything that requires a paper trail or a formal decision; email or Asana are best in those cases. Slack is primarily for quick questions and status checks.
Even still, without clear accountability, Slack becomes a place where important information goes to die. The biggest challenge is that it doesn’t assign accountability. A question asked in a channel can easily go unanswered. A decision made in a thread can get buried within 48 hours.
Our rule is simple: if you ask a question in Slack, you own the follow-through. You’re responsible for getting the answer and, if necessary, capturing that answer somewhere more permanent. This expectation prevents us from treating Slack as a substitute for actual project management or offloading accountability.
Slack also fills a role that’s easy to underestimate on a remote team. It gives us a shared space for conversation: industry articles, marketing news, and watercolor discussion. That connection is important when you’re trying to maintain a strong culture without a physical office.
3. Grain
AI notetakers are table stakes at this point. The question isn’t whether to use a transcription tool; it’s which one. Grain is the one we’ve used for years, and it’s earned its place in our tech stack.
When interviewing a subject matter expert about a complex topic, the best material often comes from follow-up questions we can only ask if we’re actively engaged. Grain lets us stay fully present during Content Conversations—no need to split attention between listening and note-taking.
Thanks to Grain, we can trust that we’ll get a full transcript and AI-generated summary of the conversation. Sometimes, that’s enough. More often than not, though, our writers want to hear exactly how someone communicated an idea or perspective. With Grain, they can move seamlessly between transcript and video (and if you’ve ever scrubbed a recording just to hear a line of commentary again, you’ll understand the value of this capability!)
Grain also enhances team efficiency in practical ways. Not every team member needs to be on every call. If a writer can review a 45-minute interview in 15 minutes by scanning the transcript and listening to flagged sections, that’s a meaningful time savings.
4. Asana
Asana is the backbone of our content operations, and we don’t say that casually. Many teams treat project management tools as glorified to-do lists. They create tasks, assign them, and hope for the best. That approach falls apart the moment you’re managing more than a handful of assets across multiple clients—which is to say, it falls apart almost immediately in an agency environment.
When you’re running an ongoing content program with five different thought leaders and shifting scopes, you can’t rely on institutional memory or good intentions. You need a system that shows you, at any given moment, where every asset stands, who’s responsible for it, and what might be blocking its completion.
We treat every piece of content as a project with its own workflow rather than a single task. A single thought leadership article moves through several distinct stages: strategic alignment, interview prep, the interview itself, first draft, internal edit, client review, revisions, QA, and final deployment. Each stage has an owner and timeline, all working toward the final asset and deadline. Asana makes all of that visible.
5. Grammarly
Grammarly has been part of our toolkit for years, and its capabilities have grown significantly—from basic spell-checking to style suggestions, clarity edits, and AI-powered rewrites.
We use it; we don’t defer to it. The distinction matters. Grammarly is excellent at catching stubborn errors and oversights: misplaced commas, run-on sentences, and awkward phrasing. It’s a useful second set of eyes, particularly when you’ve been deep in a draft and your own editorial judgment starts to blur.
But it doesn’t understand context the way a skilled editor does. It doesn’t know that a subject matter expert’s slightly unconventional phrasing is intentional, or that a longer sentence is justified because it mirrors the complexity of the idea. It will sometimes suggest edits that make a sentence more “correct” but less interesting, and if you accept those suggestions uncritically, your content starts to flatten.
Our approach: Grammarly gives us advice. Our editors make the final call. Every suggestion is evaluated against the voice, the audience, and the argument being made, because editorial judgment is one thing you can’t automate.
6. Boomerang
This one is simple, and that’s why it works. Boomerang is a Gmail plugin that brings emails back to your inbox if you haven’t received a response within a timeframe you set. That’s it. And for a team that manages multiple client relationships with overlapping review cycles, it’s indispensable.
Here’s the reality of agency work: you send a draft for client review, and then you wait. The client is busy. They have their own priorities. That’s expected and understood. But if you don’t have a system for tracking what’s outstanding, you’ll lose those threads, and the project stalls.
Boomerang does two things that matter operationally. First, it gets pending follow-ups out of our working memory, so we can focus on active work without carrying a mental backlog of “did they respond to that?” Second, it creates a lightweight accountability loop. When an email comes back after five days with no response, it’s a clear signal to follow up.
Our clients are senior leaders. They’re busy, and we respect that. Part of our role is keeping projects on track, which means we have to follow up proactively and professionally. Boomerang makes that effortless.
7. Claude
Like any modern company, we use an LLM—Claude is our favorite—but not in the ways you might expect. We don’t use it to replace the experts we interview or our editorial team members, who work hard to get experts’ great ideas out into the world. We do use it to reduce friction in certain areas:
Transcript cleanup. A raw interview transcript is messy—false starts, filler words, tangents. Claude helps us turn a transcript into a clean, usable document that a writer can navigate efficiently.
Getting started. When a writer is staring at a blank page and 4,000 words of transcript, sometimes the hardest part is getting started. Claude can generate a rough framework—a starting point that helps a writer see the shape of the piece.
Getting unstuck. When you’ve been working on a piece for days, it’s difficult to see it with fresh eyes. Claude is useful for generating alternative framings or structural approaches that help writers get out of a rut.
Internal documentation. SOPs, process guides, interview question templates—the kind of internal documentation that’s important but never urgent enough to prioritize. Claude helps us stay on top of it all. Most recently, we’ve been using it to update client records and generate meeting agendas.
Writing code for automation. We’re not software engineers, but Claude occasionally makes us feel like we are. We use it to automate tedious, repetitive tasks, like formatting documents and inserting standardized tables. We describe what we want in plain English, and Claude writes the code.
The Bigger Picture
We opened by saying these tools on their own aren’t revolutionary, and we meant it. Any of them is replaceable. Similarly, you can’t just accumulate a stack of tools and hope they’ll solve all your problems. Like everything else in content operations, the real value comes from the systems—whether it’s the workflows the tools fit into or the rules for how each tool gets used. No tool, however impressive, installs operational discipline for you.
That layer is what separates teams that consistently deliver from teams that are constantly firefighting. So as you evaluate your own toolbox, don’t think of it as a collection of distinct tools. See it for what it is: part of the much bigger picture of content operations—the backbone that keeps you on track without losing your mind.
