In our previous blog post we spoke about Spring Cleaning Your Marketing, so we thought the next best thing to follow on from that would be…dun dun dun…Your Marketing Calendar.
So for example, now would be a good time – if you haven’t done so already – to plan ahead for the upcoming silly season with relevant content, holiday promotions and deals.
So What is a Marketing Calendar?
A Marketing Calendar, which can sometimes be referred to as a Content Calendar, is essentially a calendar that allows you to plan, manage, organise, and create structure around your marketing activities for the year ahead. It can be broken down further, where you plan month to month, or on a week to week basis.
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Your marketing calendar helps identify what sort of content you will create, the message you want to convey, what channels you will use to distribute that message, frequency of posts and the person responsible for each project.
Things to Consider When Creating Your Marketing Calendar
Obviously you can’t just go ahead and start planning things without a clear idea of what the actual goal is, so you need to have a marketing strategy in place and to consider some of the following points:
What is your overall goal? Sales, leads, awareness? Knowing what the actual goal is will help you to market better according to the desired outcome.
Who is your target market?In some instances there may be more than one type of audience, so you may need to split your market up into defined groups, which will each have their own version of content on specific, relevant platforms.
What is your budget? Besides time, it is also a good idea to invest money into your marketing strategies. Do you need to outsource work, can it be done in-house?
Distribution. There is no point in having all this really great content but no distribution plan. It’s like talking to a brick wall. Create valuable, interesting content according to your target market and decide which channel will be best suited according to various goals. Eg. Newsletter, Blog Posts, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube.
As you can see it is quite important to have a Marketing Calendar in place. It helps you to market efficiently and give you an overview of what’s to come. Having a plan in place helps you know what to do, when to do it, how to do it and who is responsible. Pretty nifty!
This may seem like a tedious task, but it will be well worth all your time and effort in the end and at least give you some sort of peace of mind that there is a plan in place. There is no right or wrong way when it comes to creating a Marketing Calendar, it is just to help you with planning, so decide what works best for you!
Bibliography:
Big Commerce – What is a marketing calendar and why is it important?
The Balance Small Business – Learn to create and use a marketing calendar
