How to Create an Effective Marketing Calendar
Once you’ve done the strategic work of identifying your marketing goals and developing a plan, a marketing calendar can help you organize, schedule and integrate all your marketing activities.
The key to getting the most out of this planning tool is to use a calendar that’s tailored to your business and easy to maintain. Here’s what you need to know to create a marketing calendar for maximum impact.
What’s the purpose a marketing calendar?
It’s a schedule for all your marketing activities over a specific period of time, usually one year.
Why use a marketing calendar?
- Brings together all your marketing activities in one place
- Ensures your marketing efforts align with key dates, holidays and seasons
- Improves your planning and budgeting process
How to create a marketing calendar:
- Design your own format, find a template online or use a calendar or spreadsheet software.
- Determine whether you want to organize activities by day, week, month or season.
- Add holidays and any national awareness days that are relevant to your business and customers.
- Enter dates for your planned marketing activities, including paid advertising, mailers, email campaigns, live events, social media, etc.
- For each entry, consider including: Target Audience, Number of Potential Customers Reached, Budget, Actual Cost, and Results
Using a customized marketing calendar will help ensure you carry out all your marketing plans and don’t miss out on any opportunities to deliver offers and messages to your customers.
YOUR CHALLENGE: Review your marketing activities and summarize the details, timing and content into a marketing calendar.
If you would like to learn more about how this might apply to your business, let’s talk:
