Calendars help you keep track of everything your marketing team is producing and publishing. In order to be useful, a marketing calendar needs to contain several key pieces of information.
Marketing is a creative field that involves things like crafting clever social media content, writing compelling copy, designing eye-catching infographics, and more.
However, marketing also requires organizational skills. That’s where having a robust marketing calendar comes in handy.
Calendars help you keep track of everything your marketing team is producing and publishing. In order to be useful, a marketing calendar needs to contain several key pieces of information.
A marketing calendar is a calendar that helps you plan and execute your brand’s marketing strategy. A practical calendar displays both campaign overviews and more detailed information about projects, such as who is responsible for them, what progress has been made, and when tasks will be completed.
Your team should use an overarching calendar to display all of its initiatives, as well as granular calendars for specific campaigns or media, like a social media marketing calendar, advertising calendar, or editorial calendar for your content marketing activities.
Shared digital calendars are more useful than paper or whiteboard calendars because they allow for greater visibility and collaboration. Although you can build a calendar in a spreadsheet, it’s best to find a solution that integrates with the rest of your marketing tools to streamline processes.
A marketing calendar can help your team increase accountability, alignment, and visibility, meet goals, prevent overlapping efforts, and stay on budget.
A calendar is an essential project management tool that helps you execute your marketing plan and meet deadlines. When you know when a LinkedIn post will go up or who needs to provide approvals for a newsletter, your team can go ahead and just do the work.
When you follow through with your plans, you can meet your marketing goals more easily. A calendar helps you stay on target so that no task gets left behind.
A calendar can keep your team aligned on projects that are planned and in progress. When everyone knows who is working on what, you can manage expectations and bandwidth more easily.
Calendars help your team avoid an overlap in efforts. A social media calendar, for example, can help prevent accidental double posts from team members who work on different campaigns but manage the same accounts.
Calendars can also give external stakeholders insight into the inner workings of your team. Your calendar should serve as a single source of truth to ensure clients, bosses, and investors are in the know about upcoming and in-progress projects.
When you’re aware of everything that’s going on within your team, you can better control your marketing budget. That includes managing your freelance budget, understanding your entire team’s bandwidth, and knowing when you need and have the resources to add people to your team.
Your team doesn’t need to work off of just one marketing calendar. In fact, it’s best to have a comprehensive calendar that lets you quickly see which blog posts are in the works and what ad creative is going live at any time, and several content-specific calendars to help the team members assigned to these projects stay focused.
So, in addition to a main timeline, you may also want to consider creating calendars for each of your marketing channels, including a(n):
Let’s take a deeper dive into three major types of marketing calendars you may want to use:
This is the mother of all planning calendars, from a marketing perspective. This will include everything in your marketing plan.
Your marketing plan calendar moves beyond just content creation. It also includes project timelines, major milestones, and expected dates of completion for the campaign in general.
This is the resource your team members will look at when they need to remember any dates involved in your marketing plan, be those content or task-related.
An editorial calendar is a calendar you’ll use to organize all of your content thematically throughout the duration of your campaign. This is where you’ll include themes, topics, and dates for various content types as well as other important dates to remember during the campaign.
Here’s an example: let’s say you’re a flower shop planning your editorial calendar for the year. You may want to highlight dates such as Christmas or Mother’s Day (high volume periods) as particularly important time frames in your content planning approach.
An editorial calendar encompasses all your content, whereas a social media calendar only captures your social media platforms. This content may be a part of your editorial calendar, but only social content will be included in your social media calendar.
This is particularly helpful if you have a robust, multi-channel social media presence. If you’re active on several channels, having a calendar strictly for your social media marketing efforts will prove invaluable.
In order for these different types of marketing calendars to work together (and work for you), each calendar should include:
These features and organizational tactics help your team stay on track of marketing campaigns and facilitate your workflow.
There are lots of marketing calendar solutions out there. While creating something in Google Sheets or Docs can help get the job done, a more sophisticated tool can help empower your team’s best work and increase efficiency.
When comparing tools, look for one that:
Don’t settle for a calendar that doesn’t come with these capabilities.
There’s a thin difference between a good calendar template and a great marketing calendar.
That said, marketers who document their strategies are 313% more likely to succeed.
An editorial calendar is the logical foundation of your content strategy. That’s why you need an effective content calendar.
Some of its qualities include:
What was the reason behind that decision to have social media posts each Friday, or similarly the sending of emails each morning?
It could be because your team members are burnt out, your customers show more social media engagement on weekends, or that you just like posting on Fridays?
An effective editorial calendar should always have the customer at the center. If you’re posting on Fridays, it should be because the customer is more active on Fridays.
Instances in the calendar should use metrics to discover:
Goal definition is one of the most crucial aspects of an effective marketing strategy.
What are your marketing efforts set to achieve? It could be:
Customer retention and brand loyalty
For lead generation, a marketing campaign calendar will mostly lean on blogs and email marketing. For thought leadership, on the other hand, long-form content such as white papers should have more prominence.
An occasional podcast on the content marketing strategy will be great for building a knowledge base, brand loyalty, and customer retention.
One thing we can all agree on is that all leads and prospects are not the same. That said, the journey of conversion should reflect on your content calendar since the development of leads is not linear but an arc.
Your content marketing strategy should map out the top-funnel lead, middle funnel, and bottom-funnel lead. Always see to it that:
Content ideas and planning should happen in the context of a lot of research and metrics. There should be a statistic or metric behind each instance in your content calendar.
While creating your integrated marketing calendar, ensure to:
Your content calendar should also consider the amount of workload your team members can handle at a time.
To streamline workflows, it should also equally distribute tasks across teams, departments, and stakeholders to ensure that no single person is overburdened by the work.
The following Content Marketing Platform tools come in handy:
Well, why spend time on a marketing calendar template?
Marketers have better things to do on Fridays, beer included. Excel spreadsheets are also cheap, and your marketing is probably doing fine.
Benefits of content calendars include:
Though many marketers may not admit it initially, content marketing is hard. Subsequently, many large and small businesses run on almost ineffective marketing strategies.
Social media posts go unnoticed, public relations are in dire straits, and email campaigns are a disaster where prospects unsubscribe unceremoniously.
This is often due to the lack of a plan in marketing activities, something a content marketing template is here to fix.
A well-documented marketing plan will enable you to strategize on tomorrow’s marketing today. No shocks and surprises again.
You don’t want a situation where it’s the 4th of July, when prospects always respond best to your marketing efforts, but you already spent your budget on other marketing activities.
Show me your marketing team, and I’ll tell you how successful your marketing strategy is. Is your team running around with ancient and outdated marketing tools?
Do they use sticky notes and spreadsheets with no plan whatsoever while missing due dates and deadlines?
If so, then, Houston, we have more than a problem.
A marketing calendar template empowers your marketing team. It takes their productivity and marketing efforts and puts it to the best use.
Eventually, you end up with:
As noted above, your social media calendar will look slightly different from an editorial calendar or even your marketing plan calendar. It only covers your social assets.
A typical social media calendar will contain the following information:
Here’s how a hypothetical week of social content may look:
Note: these aren’t necessarily best practices for the number of posts or which platforms to use. This is just an example to show you how your calendar may look after you’ve selected the social networks you’d like to use.
So what will a successful marketing calendar template look like? Some of the basics include clearly listing the campaign the calendar belongs to as well as the responsible team members for each task/content format.
Your calendar should match the length of the campaign. In other words, don’t include months/weeks falling outside the campaign’s range – that’s useless data your team doesn’t need.
When it comes to the actual calendar part of the template, here are some of the features you’ll want to include:
Different members of your team may be responsible for each aspect of your marketing plan. Still, it’s good to have all this information in one place.
View your marketing plan as an ecosystem, with all parts interrelated. Your calendar enables your team members to understand how these pieces will function together and when they will occur. That way, there’s less confusion and clutter.
There is no perfect way to create an editorial calendar. However, the following steps are a constant in almost all effective calendar templates:
Before you begin, you have to choose a content marketing calendar tool. Some marketing management software like Content Marketing Platform offer free marketing calendar templates that you can customize to your functionality.
However, for a simple and non-complex marketing plan, you can use free tools like:
Role definition goes a long way to streamline the workflows in your marketing campaign. This is something that should spill even into your content calendar.
In so doing, each instance of your marketing template should answer the question “by who?” Ensure to:
Now that all stakeholders have defined roles, what’s left is to define your audiences. Remember, you can attract different audiences for different marketing channels.
Your elderly prospects are not likely to be on Instagram. Similarly, your teenage leads are probably now discovering LinkedIn.
Customers like relevant and personalized content. That’s why vague and non-personalized content has 88% lower response rates than personalized content. For successful content mapping, ensure you have:
After defining your target audience, what your content calendar template needs is content ideas. At this stage, your stakeholders not only brainstorm the content creation and ideation but also:
With this vision in mind, a marketing team can then go ahead and plan current and future content for their marketing strategy. Ensure to:
What good is a marketing plan if you can’t tell whether it’s working? This is where the key performance indicators (KPIs) come in.
These are metrics that help you measure your marketing campaign’s progress and discover whether your marketing efforts are paying off. Key marketing metrics include ROI, SEO, engagement, and time on site, among others. Ensure to:
With all that as a foundation, what’s left and probably the most crucial is scheduling. This is determining when to disseminate the content to your target audience.
Remember, content creation is nothing without timely content distribution. To achieve your marketing goals, you have to ensure:
With the wealth of insight and information, the second last step before content creation is filing your content marketing template. If it was a social media calendar, fill it with the social media content relevant to your marketing plan.
Looking for a calendar template? Look no further than Content Marketing Platform.
Our marketing orchestration platform comes with a calendar that has all of the must-have features listed above. The best part is, you can access our calendar template with a free Content Marketing Platform account.
Here’s how to use Content Marketing Platform’s marketing calendar feature:
Content Marketing Platform’s calendar has all the features you need to keep campaigns moving along seamlessly.
At the end of the day, a calendar shouldn’t be the focus of your work. It should be a helpful resource and project management tool that sits in the background and empowers you to do your best work.
Content Marketing Platform’s all-in-one marketing orchestration platform has all the tools you need to plan, execute, and measure the success of your marketing efforts.