How to Plan a Marketing Calendar
Your marketing calendar serves as your map for how you will make decisions about your company’s promotions. An effective calendar is easy to use and offers a clear path for your marketing goals. By outlining and following the plan, you can avoid confusion, missed deadlines, and lost revenue. Here are some things to keep in mind when creating your marketing calendar.
Plan All Campaigns to Include on the Marketing Calendar
Make the calendar a way to see at a glance all your company’s marketing efforts in one place. Therefore, you won’t overlap campaigns too much or let too much time lapse between components. For instance, plan out your ad campaigns, email newsletters, social media marketing, and more.
Identify Your Goals: A Marketing Calendar Must
What does your company want to do with its marketing? Do you want to generate more leads or encourage more people to interact with your social media? Each company will have individual goals based on where the business is. If you want to grow, you may want to increase leads. However, if you already have a strong customer base, getting repeat business and referrals from your existing customers may be a better goal.
Also, incorporate into your goals whether you have seasonal marketing campaigns that you want to promote. For instance, many retailers have Christmas or other holiday promotions. Planning when to start and end these and what you want to achieve during that marketing time should be components that factor into your marketing calendar planning.
Goals will help you to determine your audience, timing, and marketing methods when creating the calendar.
Consider Creating In-Person and Online Campaigns
If you have a store or website, you may want to create specific marketing calendars for your customers to reach those that patronize your store and for reaching potential customers outside the store. If you have separate teams for marketing to those in your store and those online, you may want two separate calendars, one per team. For instance, your in-person marketing may cover in-store signage or events while the online team focuses on content marketing and social media campaigns. Having separate calendars lets each team focus on their areas of expertise. However, don’t neglect to have a universal marketing calendar that refers to both for making global marketing decisions.
Don’t Forget Automated Remarketing
Regardless of the type of planning method that you use, don’t forget to make an automated remarketing strategy part of it. In fact, with automated remarketing from Capture, you can make the most of every dollar that you put into all forms of marketing. Sign up for Capture today to get conversions of up to 15%, increasing your leads or reducing lost sales from abandoned online shopping carts.
