Your business needs marketing in order to thrive and continue expanding. Marketing requires expertise in advertising, SEO, campaigning strategies, and overall marketing knowledge. Creating a marketing calendar can keep you and your team ahead of the competition through well-thought-out marketing plans and goals. Likewise, a marketing calendar will help your team stay organized and remain consistent in your marketing efforts. It will help you prevent shooting from the hip and guessing the amount of work you need to do to make your business succeed.
Here’s a guide to building your own marketing calendar.
Choose where to host your calendar.
One of the first things you’re going to want to do is choose where you’ll project your marketing calendar. This can be anything like a Google Sheet, a Word document, or a software program that’s specifically designed for marketing calendars such as Welcome. Welcome’s integrated marketing software program can take the guesswork out and pains of building a marketing calendar. Its comprehensive design and tools make it easy to coordinate marketing activities with seamless collaboration.
Additionally, it helps provide shared visibility for stakeholders so everyone can see the progress on planned and upcoming marketing initiatives. You can create Gantt charts and timelines of your marketing plans as well as apply filters like yearly or quarterly visuals and activity rollups. Welcome allows your team to access several calendars from different departments such as editorial, content, social media, and email calendars. With Welcome, you can help your team stay on track of their marketing projects with status updates, progress tracking, and different calendar views.
Find out who your target audience is.
Once you’ve created your marketing calendar on Welcome, you can go ahead and establish who your target audience is. This will help you create content that’s attractive to a specific audience. You may want to identify your audience through age, geolocations, genders, buying habits, hobbies, socioeconomic statuses, and interests, among other attributes. These common characteristics can help you mold marketing campaigns that are best suited to your supporters and future clients.
Define your marketing milestones.
When diving into the details of your marketing calendar, you’re going to have to clearly identify your goals. This can be anything like gaining new leads, increasing your brand exposure or awareness, increasing sales, and other things related to the improvement of your business. Setting these goals will make it easier for you and your team to work together to develop marketing strategies your clients will love.
Identify the marketing strategies you’ll use.
Next, identify the types of marketing strategies you’re going to use. For instance, you can use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, which is a form of paid advertisement that appears at the very top of a search engine’s result page (SERP). They will usually be identified with an “Ad” tag. You can also use email marketing and social media marketing to spread the word about your business and goals. Likewise, you can use content marketing, which involves creating content for your audiences such as blog posts, articles, videos, and other types of content.
Make note of special and important dates.
Lastly, you will want to identify any important dates in your marketing calendar. These dates can be holidays, milestones, new product launch dates, company events, and other special occasions. You can create content around these dates so people can identify with them and see what you have to offer. You can launch special offers during these dates, discounts, giveaways, and more.
Knowing your audience is one of the biggest parts that will influence how you put your marketing calendar together, so ensure you create the right use cases prior to coming up with campaigns.
