Jul 26, 2017
Marketing calendars are created to address the specific needs of business functions. A successful marketing calendar incorporates all the marketing activities along with details broken out week by week for each quarter.
Some features of an efficient calendar are:
Specific
Listing out specific promotions or events
Including the marketing cost for each event
Results derived from such events
One can also list out the following to have a clearer vision of their company:
Advertising Campaigns
Events
Content Pieces
Public Relations / Media Relations
Social Media Campaigns
Email Marketing
Point of Purchase Displays or Signage Efforts
This provides an easy view, if the events and strategies were productive and on target. Also, it contributes to the planning the marketing of the firm in the future.
Some ways for helping individuals to take charge of the sales and marketing by creating a calendar are:
1.Start with a blank 12-month calendar and chart the selling cycle and seasonality of the products and or services that you offer. Doing this will help to build the foundation to create messaging that centers around your target market and ensure that you are promoting during the keys times that prospective customers are looking for what you offer.
2.Finding the right tool is one essentiality which contributes to effective organization. A complex marketing needs appropriate marketing calendar software.
3.Breaking down the marketing calendar by the month, week or day can also prove helpful. It also ensures if marketing is taking place on a regular basis or not.
4.Further fragmenting the activities in more details depending on the need of the firm provides a quick and easy vision of the activities to be performed. One can understand the same in just a glace, and need not read a detailed document for the task.
5.Also taking the reference and planning promotions around major holidays and national observances or according to the requirement of the season is a pretty obvious, yet a clever technique to have a strong sales and marketing department. These transition stages can be a great opportunity to help boost slower business periods or maximize exposure to new content and products etc for the season.
6.Consolidating all separate calendars into one, instead of maintain more than one calendar for similar events saves time as well as efforts. This can be managed by the following ways-
Help everyone use and access the calendar at any given time
Give them the right permissions to view or add things.
Set up filters to see what you need to see.
7.One needs to follow certain tricks to maintain a calendar which can be put to good use.
Consolidate every calendar you have into one tool.organising: tasks, workflow, blogging, social media, events, and comments.
Delete every other calendar you have so you and your team literally cannot keep on with the status quo.
Remind yourself and your team
Make it a daily routine to use your editorial calendar to build a new habit.
Give yourself—and your team—a reward for building the new habit. Remember, change is hard, so celebrate even your smallest victories.
8.Having a good content also motivates individuals to build a calendar and to use it in times of need. For a good content of a calendar, certain tips are as follows:
Topics. This one is the easiest trend to notice.
Value propositions. Look for trends in the angles you take in your content.
Headline types. How-to, numbered list posts and questions typically get the most traction for us.
Authors. Some authors are just rock stars. If that’s the case, have them write more posts. If they were a guest author, ask them to write for you again.
Date published. If you optimized your content for search engines, it’s possible that your audience is finding your old posts and sharing them again. So… that’s also something you should do. But it could be that in specific months, certain content will perform better.
Visuals. Content that is highly visual is typically shared way more than content without visuals. That could be something to consider in your upcoming content.
Post length. Long-form content on a highly-targeted topic and angle generally performs the best
By doing this, you are able to build consistency in your planning. This helps in preventing marketing lapses that causes the "feast and famine" effect that many businesses experience.
They key to you a marketing calendar is to create one that works for you and your team. Be flexible with it and don't be afraid to customize it to your needs. Your marketing calendar should enable you to coordinate all your marketing efforts and done correctly it will assist you in budgeting your strategy and tactics. It should serve as a helpful tool and not a tedious burden to complete.