Last updated on September 15, 2021 The marketing calendar is a crucial part of your marketing plan. It helps list down all your marketing activities in an organized fashion. In this article, we shed some light on what marketing calendars are and the different types of them, why they are important, and how you can create them.
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What is a Marketing Calendar?
A marketing calendar acts as a roadmap for all of your marketing activities. It helps you visualize each and every task that you have planned. You can even assign a priority and date to each, so you can map out the timeline of all the marketing activities. It is basically an actionable tool that helps you achieve your goals within a certain timeframe. This timeframe can be of a year, month, or even a week.
The calendar offers you a strategic overview of all of your marketing strategies, that you can amend as you go along. The key feature of a marketing calendar is that it is adaptable. It is a dynamic document that changes over time.
Why is a Marketing Calendar Important?
Besides being a guide for all your marketing efforts, there are a number of other reasons why a marketing calendar is important. It adds to the efficiency of your marketing team and keeps things running smoothly. Listed below are some of the reasons why a marketing calendar is important:
- It helps you measure your marketing efforts
There are a number of marketing strategies and tools that we use. From website marketing to social media, marketing efforts are spread throughout multiple channels. A marketing calendar keeps track of all these efforts so that you can measure the success of each one of them. You can make a separate column and define some KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for each marketing campaign to see which one is performing well so you can invest more in it and which one is not working out so you can approach that marketing campaign in a different way.
- Track your marketing cost
Each marketing campaign requires resources. You can add a column in which you can mention the cost of each marketing activity. It will help you use your marketing calendar in a more efficient way. It will also help you keep track of your cost and ensure that the marketing budget is kept in mind while planning and carrying out any marketing activity.
- Improve your marketing efforts
Since the marketing calendar offers you an insight on how a marketing activity is performing, this way it helps you understand which of your efforts are working out and which ones are not. It helps you understand what appeals to your customers more so you can modify your marketing plans accordingly.
Different Types of Marketing Calendars
A marketing calendar is not just a document with a bunch of activities thrown in and dates assigned to each activity. It basically mentions all the information that you would need to carry out marketing activity. Although there can be a number of different types of marketing calendars, we are going to mention 4 of the most popular marketing calendars known in the digital marketing world.
- Content Marketing Calendar
A content marketing calendar is a tool that helps you plan and execute your content marketing strategy. Content creation is done by several different people, there are a number of content marketers involved. This tool offers those people a guide for how they should go about everything.
This calendar offers you a view of how your content will be laid out over a given time period. The content can include an article, a social media post, or a new landing page. A content calendar will help you organize your content and drive results from it.
- Blog Calendar
The blog calendar helps you keep track of all your blog posts and articles. You can mention the titles of each blog post and even mention some important keywords that you are going to target in the content of that particular blog post. In the second column of the calendar, you can mention the name of the content writer that’s going to write that blog post and in another column, you can mention the deadline.
Once the blog posts start going live, you can add another column for the KPIs that you are going to use to measure the success of a post. The indicators can be the traffic generated, the time spent by the user, and the bounce rate of each post.
- Social Media Marketing Calendar
Social media marketing calendars are used to schedule social media posts in advance. They are used to plan what type of posts will go up and when they will go up. It helps track deadlines and manages different social media campaigns. It also helps you take into account important dates and events and ensures you use the right content mix. You can have one social media calendar for all the social media platforms or you can create one for each platform.
- Email Marketing Calendar
An email marketing calendar shows when and what you’re going to send to your subscribers. It helps you execute your email marketing strategy successfully and defines the metrics that you’ll use to assess the performance of each email marketing campaign. Marketers normally use email marketing to retain old customers. They already have a mailing list of old customers to whom they send out newsletters. An email marketing calendar maps out what emails you will be sending to your customers over the course of a month or a year. It helps keep your team informed and develop an email marketing campaign in advance. Just like every marketing calendar, this one is also highly flexible. If you see an opportunity that you can take advantage of, you can adjust your email marketing calendar accordingly.
How to Create Your Marketing Calendar?
If you finally understand why a marketing calendar is important, get ready to create it using these 6 simple steps:
Choose Your Marketing Calendar Template Tool or Software
Start by choosing a marketing calendar tool or software. There are a number of online tools that you can use to create your calendar. The online tools include Coschedule, TruNorth, Curate, and more. There are different social media planning tools as well like Hootsuite and Buffer. You can even create your own calendar in a sheet format using the Google Sheets calendar template or the Excel calendar template. You’ll want to choose which option you think works best for your company.
Identify Marketing Calendar Roles and Responsibilities
Before defining any other part of your calendar, identify the roles and responsibilities within it. Every member of your marketing team has a defined job title that entails some duties and responsibilities. Based on those responsibilities determine the tasks of each team member in your marketing calendar. For example, a web content writer would be working on the content for blog posts, articles, and new landing pages, an SEO expert will be responsible for link building and a social media coordinator will work on all the social media content. You can use different calendars for each of them. For example, a social media calendar for everyone who’s managing the social media platforms, or you can create a single calendar for all your marketing activities and define the roles of each team member in it.
Brainstorming Content Ideas
Once you have defined who’s going to do what, work on what type of content needs to go up on each media platform. Brainstorm the content ideas for blog posts, articles, newsletters, social media posts, and ad campaigns. Decide the titles of each type of content and mention them on the marketing calendar
Plan Content For a Week or Month
Plan ahead. Always plan ahead but be mindful of any new opportunities that you can take advantage of and adjust your calendar accordingly. You can plan the content for a month or a week. A month is usually more suitable. You can even the set frequency for publishing content for example how many blog posts would go up in a month and would be the frequency of the social media posts
Plan Metrics To Be Tracked
After you have decided everything, define what performance metrics you will use to measure the success of each marketing activity. For example for blog posts the performance can be measured by the traffic generated and bounce rate, for social media posts, the indicators can be the number of likes, comments, shares, and the increase in the number of followers. With the help of these performance metrics, you can see which marketing activities are working out okay and which are not.
Create a Marketing Calendar
Finally, create the marketing calendar! Your marketing calendar will tell you and your team what to focus on each week and day. You can even set priorities on a few tasks to let the team members know what they need to get done first. The team would be able to see the deadlines, dependencies and approvals, team members involved in an activity, format, and channels, and the current status of each task.
Planning a marketing calendar is a multi-step process. Before you start implementing it, it needs to be approved by the superiors. Be mindful of the fact that you would need to update the calendar constantly as you go along
What Features Should a Marketing Calendar Have?
A marketing calendar is more than just a promotional calendar that is shareable and just lists down all the content that needs to go up. There are certain features that a marketing calendar must possess like:
- High functionality
- Syncable
- Filterable categories
- Multiple customizable calendar views
- Easy to use
Conclusion
A marketing calendar is an important tool. It helps guide a marketing team and provides a synchronized road map to everyone involved in the marketing process. No matter how easy it seems, you need the working knowledge of marketing processes and tools to develop a marketing calendar. Our team of expert marketers can help you develop a calendar that fits your requirements and will help you achieve your marketing goals.