Why Use A Marketing Calendar?
Marketing calendars are essential tools for any business. They’re fluid but organized, there to help you manage your campaigns through a month, a year, or even longer. Whether you use Excel, Google Sheets, or another program, these turn your hours of marketing planning into a simple, coordinated resource. Here’s why you should be creating an updated, widely-used marketing calendar in your business!
Related: How To Use Your Marketing Calendar Effectively
1. Unified Messages
Creating a marketing calendar allows your team to stay on top of messages or “themes” for a particular stretch of time. You may have an overall product or service you want to push for a month or a quarter. Organizing and unifying your messages through a calendar can help your social media posts, blog posts, and advertising materials to work together on this goal.
2. Promotions
Along with promoting particular products, using a marketing calendar can synchronize your offers, like discounts and special deals. This allows you to space them out as you need for your business, rather than risking all of them becoming clumped together in one part of the year.
3. Organizing Team Members
Any given project will involve a lot of people. From project managers and content writers, to creative team members, everyone will need to stay on top of their job and what must be done to proceed with the project. Coordinate their efforts through the calendar. This helps everyone see what their tasks should be, and how they contribute to each marketing campaign or project. This is not only good for keeping track of who does what; it’s good for helping your employees feel and stay productive.
4. Accountability
You’ll also need to stay on top of all those team members’ work. Creating a marketing calendar holds each individual member accountable for their share of the tasks. Use the calendar to establish deadlines for each piece of the project as well, and you’ll be able to make sure your projects, posts, and advertisements go out on time.
5. Trends
Each marketing calendar helps you plan for the consecutive year. What worked and what didn’t? While trends come and go year by year, there will be some that resurface. For example, you might see what worked on holiday campaigns, and build on that in coming years. Using a marketing calendar can help you keep better track of how to use this to your advantage.
Related: Why Direct Mail Marketing Is Not Dead
How have you used a marketing calendar year by year? Or are you just starting? Alexander’s can help your marketing efforts succeed! Call us today or fill out the contact form below.
