How to Create a Marketing Calendar to Simplify Your Marketing Process

To effectively market a business, you need to manage several moving components. Once a company becomes larger, those moving parts multiply, and before you know it, you’ve got sticky notes all over the place and a daily planner filled to the brim. With the help of a marketing calendar, it keeps track of all of those moving parts efficiently, ensuring that you meet every deadline and guaranteeing your team and company progress throughout the year.

What is a Marketing Calendar?

It outlines your business marketing activities. It shows the planning and completion dates of your marketing strategies. To be more specific, it is a method to achieve your marketing goals within a deadline. Your marketing calendar is a list of all the marketing activities you plan on doing over the year. Creating this will require some time and resources. But it will be worth it in the long run.

How to Create a Marketing Calendar?

Your marketing campaigns must have a concrete schedule. It will allow you to set goals and check whether you have met them. They are essential for keeping track of tasks, deadlines, and accomplishments. So, how can you create one for your business?

#1 Choose Your Platform

First, decide where you want to host your calendar. A marketing calendar goes beyond a simple shared calendar. It goes way beyond something as simple as a calendar. It should be capable of syncing between teams and programs and integrating automatic email updates.

There are plenty of different platforms to build your calendar. You can use MS Excel, Google Sheets, or other software like Asana. In Marketing Leap, we have a client planner in Google Sheets, and we also have a calendar in Basecamp. Here’s a quick guide to help you decide which platform to choose:

• Ease of use, especially for non-techy business owners.
• It has customisable calendar views (daily, weekly, monthly) to check all deadlines.
• Filter categories to help you stay organised with the content of the calendar.

#2 Define Your Goals

Defining your goals is just as important as creating a marketing plan. SMART goals allow you to clarify your ideas, focus your efforts, use your time and resources efficiently, and increase your chances of achieving what you desire. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.

Here’s a quick explanation about SMART goals:

Specific

You cannot concentrate on your efforts or feel truly motivated to reach your goal if your goal isn’t clear and specific. As you draft your goals, try to answer these questions:

• What am I trying to accomplish?
• Why is this important to me?
• Who is involved?

Measurable

Tracking your progress and staying motivated depends on having measurable goals. Keeping track of progress will help you stay on track, meet your deadlines, and feel the excitement as you get closer to reaching your goal.

Achievable

Success also depends on your goal being realistic and attainable. You should push your abilities but remain achievable at the same time. Setting an achievable goal may help you discover previously overlooked resources and opportunities that can bring you closer to your goal.

Realistic

Make sure your goal is important to you and that it also aligns with other important objectives. All of us need support and help to accomplish our goals, but we should also remain in control of our actions. Thus, make sure your plans motivate everyone while keeping a close eye on your progress.

Timely

To focus on and work towards a goal, you must have a deadline. To keep your short-term goals in focus, this part of the SMART goal criteria helps to prevent everyday tasks from taking precedence over your long-term goals.

The reason you want to do this is to help you create a more efficient plan for all your marketing activities. I mentioned in my previous blog that when you are not setting your goals, you will feel overwhelmed because you are not clear about what you want to achieve.

#3 Identify Marketing Strategies

Another thing you should do before creating your marketing calendar is to have a concrete marketing plan. Having a marketing calendar means knowing what strategies you’ll be placing on it. You can watch my videos “What is a Marketing Strategy?” and “Top 5 Marketing Trends for 2022: Ideas to Grow Your Business” where I explain how you can create a marketing plan.

#4 Chart Your Marketing Cycle

The good thing about having a calendar, you can easily map out how often you would like to post on your social media channels and other marketing activities. Like sending out your newsletters, publish your blogs and videos.

Since you have a visual roadmap of your activities, it will allow you to stay consistent in showing up in front of your target audiences. Also, it helps you to focus on creating more quality content for your business.

#5 Identify Important Dates

Plan in special events, holidays, and marketing moments throughout the year, like company milestones and product/service launches. It is crucial to decide which promotions will be most effective for your business, and it should make your decision in line with your goals. It is easy to ruin your KPIs by choosing the wrong promotional strategy.

To help you in planning, here’s a quick tip that you can follow:

1. Give your customers a heads up about what’s coming and how they can benefit before the actual date.
2. Make your biggest sales push via email and take advantage of social media buzzes.
3. Follow up after the main event with those who converted to get their feedback on the process or offer additional products or services.

Marketing can be a daunting task, and you can easily get overwhelmed. By creating a marketing calendar, you’ll avoid losing track of important marketing activities. To remain competitive, create and periodically evaluate a marketing calendar. Although planning campaigns in advance can be a time-consuming process and require a great deal of forethought, a marketing department needs to do so proactively.

Whether you have any questions or simply want to chat, drop a comment below! We offer a full range of done for you realistic, practical marketing solutions for your business that deliver results and hit the spot with your customers. You can check out what we do here.

Don’t forget to Check out our library of FREE Resources & Downloads to help you grow your business!

If you want to learn how to implement different marketing elements in your own business, I have a series of Online Digital Success courses focusing on different marketing elements. These are self-paced courses, so you don’t miss out on the learning! You can learn all about those here.

Prefer structured mentoring? I also offer a 12 week 1to1 mentoring program designed to Give You Clarity, Generate leads & STOP DROWNING IN THE OVERWHELM!

There are also 2 hours Strategy Sessions available. If it’s time to get a Clear Action Plan, Digital Strategy Map & Checklists, you can check out the details here!

Regardless of what you need when it comes to online marketing, take the Leap … we are your springboard to success!