8 Ways to Build a Marketing Calendar

A marketing calendar can be useful for almost any business. A brand’s marketing plan may involve many different activities, all of which need to be planned carefully and strategically.

As your company grows, it is essential that you schedule every little thing that pertains to your marketing strategy. And what better way to do so than to create an effective marketing calendar that will help you and your marketing team keep track of every detail concerning future events, promotions, and campaigns?

As a result, you make sure all team members meet their deadlines, while also finding out alternative options to engage with your audience.

With that said, let's look at 8 tips for building a marketing calendar:

1. Opt for an effective and easy-to-use marketing calendar template

Having a standard marketing calendar template will help you and your team build on something existing. Simultaneously, it also allows you to readjust it according to your needs without having to create one over and over again.

By doing so, you have a tool used consistently, helping everyone on your team know how to interpret it. So, instead of building a brand new calendar from scratch in the new year, or duplicating an old one and forgetting to erase data that are currently irrelevant, you can simply start from your template.

Keep in mind that a user-friendly marketing calendar template is always preferable, making it easier for your entire team to handle. If it isn’t simple, with a user interface that your team members can understand and use without putting too much effort, it won’t be practical for your business.

Wondering about which details to focus on?

Here are some of the most essential elements a marketing calendar should include:

campaign names and goals
social media marketing events
product releases
responsible team members
target audience
content themes for all different types of marketing efforts and different channels
tests to perform
delivery dates

2. Invest in statistics and reports

Using valuable knowledge from previous campaign statistics to improve future campaign performance is a beneficial habit that all successful marketers must adopt. A well-organised calendar can help you learn from past projects easily.

When targeting buyers who have already expressed interest in your products or services in the past, audience engagement is increased and a stronger relationship is created, thus leading to more sales in the future.

Preview your open rates, recipients’ activity, top locations, email score, unsubscribes, etc., and turn them into success stories. Make sure that you also review all kinds of website data, form submissions, social media engagement, and other analytics to help you define your prospects and their expressed needs.

By tracking customer behaviour through their purchase patterns and reviewing it in correlation with various communication channels from your company, you can make certain that what they are getting from your marketing feedback is what they would like to look at.

3. Define your goals

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Build a clear agenda regarding the desired goals, add time-frames for each campaign and make sure you stick to it in order to hit the target. A well-put-together marketing calendar will include all scheduled activities around seasons and holidays, as well as delivery dates for sending out social media campaigns, publishing blog posts, and arranging promotional events.

Without an overall calendar, the marketing schedule of future events might result in inconsistency, preventing companies from attracting, converting, and retaining customers effectively. For instance, if your marketing team hasn’t dictated the scheduled dates for blog posts, they might instead be published whenever a member of the team decides to do so, leading to an ineffective method of reaching customers.

A detailed marketing calendar is critical in order for a marketing department to gain control over its goals and set out the strategy of its brand.

4. Setting up the recurrence of your newsletters

Ensure you send your newsletters regularly enough, but at the same time don’t overwhelm your recipients with too many emails.

Check out the best-performing day and time and stay consistent with when and how often you send out your email campaigns. When and how often you mail your prospects will critically affect your open rate and click-through rates.

Your email rate should be such that your audience won’t get irritated by unnecessary or irrelevant information. On the other hand, staying in touch is essential for your customers not to actually forget about your business.

All these aspects should be outlined in your email marketing strategy and represented in your email calendar. It is always a good idea to choose between some of the best email marketing platforms to have the job done for you without having to worry or spend valuable time on it.

5. New Year’s Resolution

Have you ever thought of taking advantage of the Christmas holiday season to focus on the most important holidays of the following year? If not, now is the time to schedule holiday campaigns as part of your New Year’s marketing resolution.

Staying a step ahead with a marketing calendar enables you to plan all relevant activities during the next quarter or the whole year, taking into account different aspects of your marketing strategy and various cultural events that are expected throughout this particular period.

Remember not to lose sight of all the holidays of the time frame that you set since they are the perfect time to convert one-time buyers into loyal customers, re-engage inactive subscribers, and generate some useful reports from your main audience.

Start thinking outside the box, not sticking only to New Year’s Day or Black Friday, but also taking advantage of every special date that could help you boost your sales. This could also prove to be the perfect time for you to personalise your customers’ experience, taking advantage of their location and corresponding holidays.

6. Establish your target audience

In the marketing industry, you simply have to consider email marketing lists as a guide for all other marketing activities. An email marketing list puts people who share similar interests together and allows you to interact with them in a specific way.

Therefore, building your email lists carefully is considered the first milestone to a brand’s email marketing strategy. It is important to remember that communication with customers needs to be interactive and productive. There is no reason to waste your time creating content for prospects that see no relevance in what you are sending. You may end up turning them away from your brand altogether.

Source: shutterstock/Song_about_summer

No better time to check your email marketing lists and create the appropriate list segments for even more targeted campaigns. Being able to effectively communicate with your customers means personalising their experience. Once the audience is decided, it becomes easier to tailor your content to their profiles and market according to their patterns and schedules.

You want your emails to focus on what interests them since these emails will provide them with all the necessary information regarding new product releases or events your business has planned.

7. Decide on the writing and content strategy

Time to get to work! With your calendar in place, the final step is to bring your marketing strategy to life.

Your marketing calendar will tell you and your team what to focus on each week and every day, containing details like content themes, corresponding campaigns, responsible team members, formats and channels, deadlines, approvals, etc.

Eye-catching content is always the starting point; making sure you personalise it according to your customers’ habits and preferences is what should come up next.

Create some amazing content that depicts each and every one of your prospects’ needs; then, you can start promoting it on different marketing channels while also making sure it is adjusted to suit the potential of each medium.

Last but not least, remember that assigning the right content to the right person inside your team is what gets tasks perfectly organised and delivers the best possible outcome.

8. Having a clear view of what your competitors are doing can do no harm

When you are aware of what leading companies in your industry are going for, it becomes easier for you to plan your marketing strategy and decide how you are going to stand out.

One of the ways you can achieve that is by knowing exactly what leading brands and your competitors are up to. Study their campaign or product release schedules, figure out how often and exactly when they contact their prospects, when and how they run promotions, if they offer discounts, take a look at their newsletters or social media promotions and use all these valuable metrics to create or revise your own marketing plan.

And don’t forget; right there you will not only find patterns to get inspired, but also the ones that don’t seem to work, and avoid them if topping the marketing world is what you are truly aiming at.