Is Your Business Equipped with a Marketing Calendar? Learn Why?
It's 2024, and we have stepped into a new year, encouraging us to set new goals and aspirations, achieve them, and grow brand value with loyal customers. As a marketer, you must be overwhelmed with new targets, deadlines, changing variables, and coordinating efforts in the most productive manner. It's where the marketing calendar comes to the rescue.
A marketing calendar helps you sail through the hurdles of delays, demotivation, and unexpected issues. It gives you the foresight to manage tasks, teams, and campaigns and enough time to deal with possible complexities.
Without further ado, let’s delve into the blog and learn how the marketing calendar can help you!
What Exactly is A Marketing Calendar?
A marketing calendar is a blueprint of activities that will take place in the upcoming year or at least quarter. It accommodates the dates and deadlines of the project or campaign and gives visibility to team members before and during the tasks.
A good marketing calendar should be flexible so that it can incorporate changes that may occur during the project or campaign.
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Why should You Create a Marketing Calendar?
Strategic planning: First and foremost, the significance of a marketing calendar is that it gives you visibility into the campaigns.
It helps you stay focused on important aspects of campaigns that have a potential impact on the success of the project or campaign.
Consistency and timing: Marking is all about being consistent, and a calendar is the best tool you can have to maintain it.
Using the calendar, you can engage users across channels, ensuring that you have a presence where your users are. It helps you run campaigns, send notifications, and spread your voice evenly across all channels.
Moreover, you can schedule notifications or campaigns for the holiday season, events, or festivals effortlessly.
Resources allocation: A marketing calendar enables efficient resource allocation, covering budget, manpower, and creative assets.
By visualising upcoming activities, you can ensure proper distribution of resources, prevent team overload during busy periods, and ensure everyone is aligned with their responsibilities.
Omnichannel communication: Many businesses run their marketing campaigns on multiple channels, such as social media, email, mobile notifications, app messaging, and advertising.
With a marketing calendar, it becomes easy to coordinate through these channels, ensuring cohesive and consistent campaigning.
Measurement and analysis: A marketing calendar allows you to measure the performance of your marketing campaigns.
Having a clear marketing plan for when you start different projects helps you connect those activities to changes in important measurements.
This makes it easier to see what's working and what's not. With this understanding, you can improve your plans over time and make future projects even better.
Types of Marketing Calendars
Different marketing calendars have specific roles and add to the overall organisation and effectiveness of a marketing strategy. Using these calendars together ensures a comprehensive and well-coordinated approach to marketing activities across various channels and campaigns.
Content/Editorial Calendar
Do you post blogs or any new content on your website regularly? Then, you must have a content calendar. It can help you set deadlines and manage your content on various platforms and in a content database without any hassle.
Further, such a calendar will not only help in publishing content but also in making it on time. For example, you can schedule push notifications every time you publish a blog.
Apart from this, you can use a marketing calendar for email newsletters and marketing campaigns.
Social Media Marketing Calendar
There are several social media platforms, so first you should identify the ideal platform for your business.
Considering your target audience, you can plan your social media posts and content using a marketing calendar. It can include details such as the types of content to be posted, posting frequency, timing, and key messages.
To utilise the campaign calendar, you can also include copy, images, links, or hashtags, which will save you time and make it more efficient for your team.
Email Marketing
An email marketing calendar can have scheduled emails relating to your products, specific events, occasions, or holidays. In this calendar, you can include essential details such as email subject lines, CTAs, the timing of email sends, the content of each email, target audience segments, and specific goals for each campaign.
Here, we will suggest you try Notifly, an automated messaging tool that lets you send both scheduled and real-time notifications across multiple channels.
This calendar ensures the coordination and alignment of email marketing efforts with other marketing activities.
Campaign Calendar
A campaign calendar offers a snapshot of planned marketing campaigns.
Here you can outline objectives, target audience, key messages, and channels (e.g., social media, email, advertising) and specify timelines to keep your team aligned and on track.
Holiday Calendar
A holiday calendar spotlights significant dates and events, including public holidays, cultural celebrations, and notable industry occasions.
It plays a crucial role in strategizing marketing campaigns aligned with specific seasons and events, leveraging consumer behaviour during holidays, and adapting marketing strategies to suit the unique context of these special occasions.
Final Words
There are several options available for marketing calendars; some of them are: Google Clander, Hubspot Marketing Calendar, Outlook Calendar, and more. Pick the one that suits what you need and what you can afford the most. Additionally, platforms like Google Sheets or Excel can also be used to create a simple marketing calendar if you prefer a more manual approach.
Find the best marketing calendar for you and start creating marketing calendars for 2024.
