How one can create a advertising and marketing calendar that you need to use to optimize your campaigns

If you've ever led a marketing team you know it is easy to get overwhelmed with tasks and plans.

Numerous blog posts, social media marketing campaigns, and emails fill your pipeline. But distractions and urgent problems are bothering you, and hours have passed by when you look at your watch.

It happens all the time: you miss a deadline and you end up missing out more. The result is a half-hearted campaign that doesn't achieve your goals.

Without a specific timetable, this becomes an inevitable cycle.

Use a marketing calendar to help solve this problem.

Why use a marketing calendar?

In my experience, you need a marketing calendar to have a complete view of your team's results, deadlines, and tasks.

Recent research in an Evinex article found that marketers who record their strategies are 538% more likely to get things done on time. Also consider goal setting, as 81% of people who set goals achieve them.

I've worked on numerous marketing campaigns and I can tell you that it is easier to achieve your goals when you can streamline your tasks and manage deadlines.

Today I'm going to show you how to create your marketing calendar.

Step 1: understand your customers

Every task on your marketing calendar should be about attracting your target audience. The ultimate purpose of your marketing efforts is to reach the most customers and get them down the sales funnel.

For example, if you offer video games to high school students, you might want to launch aggressive marketing campaigns during the school holidays. If you're targeting working adults, you'll want to post content during normal breaks, after work, and / or on weekends.

When planning the activities on your marketing calendar, consider the following questions:

What does my audience need?
What are your interests?
When is the best time to get in touch with them?
How will they interact with my content?
Are they more likely to sign up for your program or service during a certain period or time of year?

You need to think long term in order to reach the most consumers for your marketing campaigns.

Step 2: Identify Marketing Calendar Responsibilities

Every member of your marketing team has a role to play. Their responsibilities are often based on their skills, which determine their roles on your marketing calendar.

Here are some typical marketing roles:

Marketing specialist
Social media manager
Specialist in search engine optimization
Email Marketing Manager
Web content writer
Web producer
product manager
Market researcher
Advertising coordinator

Here is an example of how it works for you.

Web content writer: Works on blog posts, guest posts, social media copies, and landing pages.
Social Media Manager: Responds to social media messages, schedules posts, and plans social media marketing campaigns.
Email Marketing Manager: builds customer segments, monitors email marketing campaigns and develops contact strategies.

Since most of the marketers on your team work on different types or areas of content, you may want to organize their tasks through other marketing calendars and templates.

Here are some common types of marketing calendars to consider:

Content Marketing Calendar: This all-purpose calendar gives you a complete picture of your entire marketing strategy. This calendar contains your team's marketing functions, content marketing campaigns, podcast series, SEO tasks, etc.
Editorial calendar:: Use this option to streamline your blog or article production and publication schedule.
Social media calendar: If your company is active on multiple social media platforms, you want to schedule posts and organize tasks. This calendar will help you keep track of high performing posts and find the best post times during the week.
Email Marketing Calendar: Use this option to plan, organize, and schedule the content that you will share with your subscribers.

The specific goal of each calendar is to organize and plan your marketing initiatives.

Unlike your marketing plan, which lists your results, a marketing calendar shows when your team can expect work on a task. Marketers can use different types of calendars to keep track of related activity on a document.

Step 3: Determine the amount of marketing calendar and the frequency of publication

Most successful websites have a certain amount and frequency of content posting.

It is best to record the content that you need to create each week or month. Once you've established how often you want to advertise, consider your marketing budget and the skills of your team.

The types of content you can post per week include:

Blog posts
Case studies
Videos
Podcasts
Social media posts

A good tip is to do a consistent number of accomplishments each week.

For example, you can host a podcast episode on Tuesdays and post a long blog post every Thursday. In the meantime, you can summarize the results of your social media campaigns every Friday.

Yes, different types of marketing content can be difficult to plan and execute. However, having a consistent weekly schedule allows your team to set a routine and get things done consistently.

Step 4: Identify Marketing Calendar Topics

For B2C retailers, the core themes of marketing campaigns revolve around specific seasons or dates. A millennial fashion brand could be promoting back-to-school outfits on a regular basis towards the end of summer.

In contrast, B2B brands could focus on the opportunities and challenges of their industry. Due to the pandemic, some companies may want to cover topics such as “digital transformation”, “future of work” and “long term effects of a recession”.

Now, get a table and list possible topics specific to your industry. Schedule a meeting and invite your team to brainstorm on topics relevant to your target market.

Now use Ubersuggest to find out the search volume of each keyword. Topics with a high search volume are likely relevant topics that your target audience is looking for.

In this example, I used Ubersuggest to explore the term “digital transformation”.

I've found the topic to have a pretty high search volume and moderate SEO difficulty. Hence, it is a good topic to keep an eye on.

I strongly recommend covering different topics and themes each month, especially for brands that serve different buyer personalities.

In the long run, this will help you build diversity and keep the posts fresh.

Step 5: Create a Marketing Calendar Backlog

Next, it's time to create a marketing calendar backlog.

Think about content projects and marketing results. As you go through the process, you may find that some tasks are more suitable for later.

With a content backlog you can document all ideas for your next campaigns, podcasts or blog posts.

Here is an example in Google Sheets of creating a backlog of content. However, you can use other software and apps as well.

The document should include the type of content, subject or heading, priority level and deadline for each content idea.

Coschedule has a useful marketing project prioritization matrix that you can use to identify tasks that will have the greatest impact on your marketing goals.

They suggest using a "10x versus 10% framework" that looks like this:

10x ideas are relevant to a significant proportion of your target consumers. These ideas are likely to increase your results by at least 10x.
10% of the ideas Reference projects with minimal or almost no impact on your marketing results.

Let's see how you can put this theory into action:

Step 1: Create an X / Y chart and place "Value" on the vertical Y-axis and "Audience" on the horizontal X-axis.
Step 2: Write each idea on a note and place it on the X / Y diagram. The most valuable projects are at the top, while projects that are relevant to most people are on the right.

The most prioritized content should be in the top right corner of the chart.

Step 6: create a marketing calendar

Although there are many calendar tools and software in the market, we'll use Trello as an example for this article.

A Trello Kanban board is usually made up of tasks organized in lists.

However, Trello also has a calendar view that gives users a complete picture of their tasks and deadlines per month.

This is how it works:

First, create a Trello board.

Hover over the menu bar and click on "Power-Ups".

In the Basic Power-Ups section, add Calendar to view Trello cards in a calendar format.

To create a task, click on a date and select the "Add Card" button.

Then enter the name, deadline and task description.

You can reopen the tool and fill in the following fields:

Card description: provides more detailed information about the task.
Remarks: gives feedback to team members. You can @mention your team member to receive a notification.
Add members: Allows users to assign tasks to members of the Trello board.
Add checklist: Adds subtasks for activities that require multiple phases to complete.
Add due date: adds deadlines to the cards.
Add attachments: Attaches files from Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and Box.

Trello calendars provide a complete picture of your marketing team's activities and deadlines. By monitoring deadlines, marketers can prioritize and pinpoint the amount of time it takes to get each task done.

Note: Mark vacations and public holidays. These events can affect the timing of your marketing content.

Step 7: Update Your Marketing Calendar

Planning your marketing initiatives is often a multi-step process. Most marketing content begins with a draft and requires managerial review prior to publication.

Here's how it works in Trello with a sample account.

First, a result is written to the content backlog of your Google Sheet. High priority content is assigned to an author first. When a content creator claims a task, the status of the delivery item becomes "In progress".

Next, go back to Trello and create a card for the task. Add a due date, description, and comments and assign it to a member of your team.

Trello lets you sort cards into "lists". The title of each list can be based on the current status of the task, including:

To open: A task still needs a deadline, description, due date, and other additional information before it is assigned.
In processing: A task has been assigned and your colleague is working on it.
In retrospect: A task has been completed but has yet to be reviewed by your company's manager.
Completed: The job is done.

If your colleague is working on the task, set the status to "In progress".

After you've submitted the draft, you can classify it as "Under Review".

At this stage, a manager reviews the item to make changes or to request changes. If there are significant changes, the card will return to the "In Process" column with a new due date.

Once the task has been approved, the card can be transferred to the "Closed" column.

You can also clutter the Trello board by archiving the cards after the post is published. This will remove them from the list.

Step 8: plan ahead

After you've started a marketing calendar, you can start planning your projects for the coming weeks or months.

Planning vacation marketing campaigns takes months or weeks.

For example, the entire bundle of year-end holidays includes Hanukkah, Thanksgiving, Cyber Monday, Black Friday, and Christmas. Many marketers may start vacation planning as early as August to prepare for the influx of customers during their busiest time.

It is not yet necessary to create specific content for publication. Just be aware of the most important marketing campaigns and tweak the plan as you see fit.

In addition to preparing for upcoming campaigns, a calendar will help you set a realistic number of projects. You can create content weeks in advance to meet your marketing goals during peak sales time. Your team won't be stressed out by a convenient schedule or forced to downsize the campaign due to missed deadlines.

Conclusion

If you want to create a marketing campaign, you need a detailed plan to be successful.

A marketing calendar can help you determine how far in advance you need to start your marketing campaigns and how much time you need to run them. Setting up tasks and deadlines is the only way to streamline your campaigns and make sure your team is on track to meet their goals.

How are you going to use your marketing calendar?