A marketing calendar is a crucial tool for businesses, providing lead time for large-scale projects, facilitating campaigns, scheduling promotions and sales, and enabling partnerships with influencers or other businesses. It is time-consuming and cumbersome, but it offers more flexibility for unexpected events. Setting broad objectives and allowing for flexibility in case of unforeseen difficulties are essential components of an effective marketing calendar.
How do you use a marketing calendar?
An organization’s planned marketing efforts over a predetermined period of time are shown visually in a marketing calendar. A cycle, a quarter,a half, or a full calendar year are examples of common time frames.
Marketing calendars often list the campaigns you will run, the sales and promotions you have scheduled, the product releases you have planned, and any holidays you will be creating marketing collateral for. Bigger companies may have several marketing calendars for different areas, such as product, editorial, and social media. All marketing initiatives are frequently bundled into a single marketing calendar by smaller companies.
What makes a marketing calendar essential?
A marketing calendar allows businesses to plan ahead and focus on bigger-picture problems, allowing for more thoughtful and creative campaigns. It also allows for time to staff projects, hire influencers, and plan for collaborations that take time. Creating a marketing calendar helps businesses think through different campaigns and strategies to cut through the noise, as consumers are exposed to over 1,500 marketing messages daily. As CEO Shama Hyder of Zen Media states, running an ad and hoping potential customers see it is not enough.
How are objectives for a marketing calendar set?
To create a successful marketing calendar, start with a clear set of end goals for your business. Ecommerce expert Alex Greifeld suggests starting with the big picture, rather than starting with tactics. Many digital marketers and eCom practitioners skip this step, starting with a sales target and then writing up a list of optimizations or new technology. A strategy should not be applied interchangeably to any business, as it is not a strategy. Building a thoughtful marketing calendar based on your business goals reduces the risk of random tactics and allows for more effective allocation of time and money. This allows you to take big swings when they make sense for your business.
How do marketing calendars for small and large firms differ from one another?
Whether you manage a small or large firm, your marketing schedule will be distinct. As we previously said, larger companies probably have distinct marketing calendars for each marketing sector, such as email, social media, product, editorial (blog), and so on. These companies typically divide up marketing into distinct teams or appoint one or more specialist marketing personnel to handle each category.
A marketing calendar typically covers all marketing channels for small organizations.
How is a marketing calendar constructed?
Step 1: Choose the duration of your planning
Planning a marketing calendar a year in advance is beneficial for businesses for large-scale events and coordinating with vendors. Quarter planning provides solid lead time and allows for ongoing campaigns. One-month planning offers flexibility and nimbleness to jump on trending topics, but it can be unwieldy and risky if it leads to a tactic-led approach rather than an objective, strategic-led approach.
Step 2: Select the channels you want to use
A marketing plan is not a manual, but a roadmap to achieve the best-case scenario. It should also include an impactful marketing calendar, allowing for workflows for immediate events and a plan for campaigns that don’t go as planned. This includes adjusting and pivoting future campaigns based on previous successes, such as an email campaign that didn’t perform as expected or a sales increase that didn’t meet expectations. This approach ensures a smoother and more effective marketing strategy.
Step 4: Select the kind of campaigns you intend to launch
A marketing campaign is a series of messages centered around a central topic, ranging from simple social media posts to complex campaigns like product launches. These campaigns can include sales and promotions, holiday campaigns, content-driven campaigns, giveaways and contests, and larger-scale product launches. Planning your marketing calendar should consider these types of campaigns to effectively communicate your message and engage potential customers.
