How To Create Your Marketing Calendar

The New Year is upon us and it’s time to seize the upcoming days and set yourself and your organization up for success! For any business to succeed in marketing there is one sure thing you need: A Solid Marketing Calendar.

This year, create a marketing calendar that will act as a roadmap for all your marketing campaigns. It will help you visualize your plan and acquaint you with exactly when each of your marketing strategies will take place.

If you’re feeling stuck and are not sure where to start, we’ve got some tricks up our sleeves for you! Here are a few steps you should take to create a compelling marketing calendar that cuts through the noise.

Step 1: Review your marketing goals and strategies

Your marketing calendar is dependent on your marketing plan. It is an extended version which lists out each goal & strategy with exact timelines. Start with defining your goals based on your previous year’s performance. It could be gaining new leads, increasing brand exposure, improving your sales conversion or increasing your social media following. Once you have defined your goals, create strategies you would want to employ to achieve these goals. For example, if you want to increase brand recognition, your strategy could be to work on your social media following. Similarly, depending on what you want to achieve, your strategies should include a combination of any of the following activities like email marketing, social media marketing, and/or content marketing etc.

Step 2: Create a plan

Before creating a marketing calendar make sure you have your short term (30/60/90 day) and long-term (yearly) plans in place.

30/60/90 day plan

This should include short-term goals you’d want to achieve in the next 30, 60 and 90 days. A few examples include hosting and promoting an event, conducting contests, sending newsletters, reduced price promotions, PPC advertising, launching a product, and focusing on a season or seasonal products.

Yearly plan

This should include long-term goals that are focused on the “big picture” that you are trying to achieve with your marketing efforts. Long-term marketing goals are accomplished through an extended, consistent marketing strategy that includes short-term wins. A few examples for this are increasing brand recognition, focusing on SEO, lead generation, and attending relevant events.

Step 3: Shortlist relevant channels to go after

Your marketing calendar should include campaigns across all the different, but relevant, channels for your business. You can identify relevant channels based on researching where your ICP spends most of their time. Some of the common marketing channels include:

Website
Email
Blog
Social Media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest)
YouTube
Events
Trade shows
Communities
Advertisements

Step 4: Add details of campaigns you’ll run

Be clear on the types of campaigns you’ll run when you’re planning your marketing calendar. This could range from a simple series of social media posts & emails to creating a new landing page for multiple ad campaigns. Some examples of different marketing campaigns include:

Sales and promotions campaigns: This includes alerting prospects about products going on sale or tempting them to buy using a discount code.
Holiday campaigns: This includes creating a campaign that centers around a holiday. For example, Women’s Day, Christmas, etc.
Content-driven campaigns: This involves content creation around topics that you as a brand believe in.

Step 5: Decide the frequency for your content to be published

With so many different types of campaigns, a question that often comes up is how many marketing messages can/should you send in a day, month and year? The number and frequency of your marketing message depends on a variety of factors, including the industry, customer preference, and time of the year. However, looking at best practices is a good starting point. For email marketing, an email every two weeks is a good “sweet spot”. For text messages, limiting to a maximum of 1-2 text messages per week is a good idea. The general rule of thumb for posting on social media channels is to stick to a maximum of 1-2 posts a day. Here is more information on posting frequency and time for different social media channels based on Hootsuite data

Instagram: 3 – 7 times per week
Facebook: 1 – 2 times a day
Twitter: 1 – 5 Tweets a day
LinkedIn: 1 – 3 times a day

Step 6: Add the time and resources you’ll need to execute each campaign

Allot realistic time and resources for all the different campaigns you plan to run. You should also keep in mind that any campaign takes time to yield results. Research suggests that a multi-channel marketing campaign takes approximately 45 days.

Step 7: Put it all together

Your marketing calendar can have an incredible impact on the way you manage your marketing across all your channels, so it’s important that you create an efficient calendar. Define specific goals and create a realistic timeline for execution. Pick the channels based on where your audience is and create quality content to get recognized as a leading brand. Be consistent with your publishing as you continue to create content. Keep track of your key performance indicators and notice which content does better than the others.