It’s January and by this time, most businesses either have a marketing strategy, or even a marketing calendar in place for 2022. Or if not, their marketing calendar is in some stage of completion, whether that’s conception or scheduling.
The difference between a marketing strategy and marketing calendar
Creating a marketing strategy and creating a schedule, or marketing calendar, for it are two different things. Your marketing strategy is your idea and overall approach to your marketing for the year. It includes your messaging and how that will be communicated to your various target audiences. The ideas are usually brainstormed on a whiteboard, written up in a proposal and then approved.
A marketing calendar, on the other hand, is an exact schedule of when marketing activities within the strategy should take place.
What is a marketing calendar?
Your marketing calendar provides a roadmap for a company’s marketing activities for the entire year. In our arsenal of marketing tools to help our clients implement marketing strategies, the calendar is indispensable at JJR marketing.
This unassuming little template helps everyone on our team as well as our clients achieve marketing success. For the businesses we serve, it gives them a birdseye view of what to expect in their next year of marketing with us. Inside our team it is invaluable for planning our work flow.
When to create a marketing calendar
We begin working on the marketing calendar the minute our client approves our recommended marketing strategy. We have a template we fill in (offered to you below!) and the resulting calendar tells clients what progress to expect by next week, next month, and the end of the year.
Typically, we put together a calendar that covers the length of our engagement with the client, whether that’s three months, six months, or ongoing. Once it’s completed, we present the calendar to the client and once it’s approved, we get to work!
How to use a marketing calendar
While we use more complicated project management software to manage our day-to-day collaboration and progress on behalf of our clients, it is our single, attractively striped, brightly colored table-formatted marketing calendar that our clients keep close for reference as we move through the year. At a glance, our marketing calendar employs an easy-to-read format that is created on Excel. Exact due dates or approximate times that certain marketing activities must be completed are indicated by shaded-in cells.
The beauty of our marketing calendar (besides its appealing, yet practical color coding) is how easy it is to see when marketing initiatives overlap or affect the overall critical path. For example, the calendar may clearly show how the monthly blog should be completed by a certain date so that it can be shared on social media a few days later.
What to include in a marketing calendar
You can use any format you want for your calendar, with any kind of software, as long as it includes the following information:
- Categories of marketing initiatives (ex. Eblasts, Blogs, Trade Shows, etc.)
- Individual marketing initiatives listed within each category
- Editorial calendar specifics, such as the topic of each monthly blog or main message of each eblast
- Clearly marked months, weeks or days (depending on your format) to determine dates or weekly periods when work is expected to be completed
- Personnel/teams assigned to each task (if not clearly understood)
- Holidays (These provide time markers and create opportunities around marketing initiatives)
Now that you have some marketing calendar know-how, remember it’s never too late to put together your marketing calendar. If you’re running late, prepare one for Q2, Q3, etc.
On behalf of all of us, good luck with your 2022 marketing plan. And if you can ever use the help of an energetic, award-winning, innovative marketing team to jumpstart your efforts, give us a call!