If a digital marketing strategy is the ‘what’ of your business’ online activity, then a marketing calendar is the ‘when’ and ‘where’ – a document that makes any actions you’ve got planned for the future clear and accessible.

Big or small, a marketing calendar is something every business needs. Over the course of this blog, we’ll show you why – as well as what you need to include in yours, how to create a marketing calendar from scratch and your own marketing calendar template to download. Let’s take a look.

Quick Links

• What is a Marketing Calendar?
• Why You Need a Marketing Calendar
• What Should a Marketing Calendar Include?
• How to Build a Marketing Calendar
• Download Our Free Marketing Calendar Template
• How to Use Your Marketing Calendar

What is a Marketing Calendar?

A marketing calendar schedules all your planned marketing activity (detailed in your strategy) for the foreseeable future. As such they’re planned well in advance – sometimes as long as a year – and should also consider cultural events that happen from month to month.

Marketing calendars will also make clear any start and end dates for social media campaigns, publishing dates for blog posts and anything planned to promote product launches.

Why You Need a Marketing Calendar

Marketing calendars are important for a whole bunch of different reasons. Here are a few of why we use them in our work.

They keep you organised

A marketing calendar takes the scattershot approach out of your activity. If you’ve been using post-it notes to keep track of things, then take our advice: just don’t. With a marketing calendar, you’ll have everything in one place that you can refer to quickly as and when you need to.

They keep teams up to date

Since everyone can access them, marketing calendars keep everyone on the team aware of what’s going live and when – so everyone stays on the same page, every single month.

They provide helpful campaign overviews

Certain processes can become more and more complex as they progress. A marketing calendar streamlines things instead, giving you and your team a more holistic overview of projects and campaigns, allowing you to coordinate with other teams – improving teamwork across the business, too.

The top-line overview helps you quickly understand what content types are being posed, any assets they include and publication dates. Through this information, you can track content performance – and make any changes you need to so you can improve things too.

They keep content consistent

Without a marketing calendar, it’s easy to let ideas, plans, and activity slip through the cracks. When that happens, achieving your goals becomes a struggle. Planning out your content gives you a schedule that makes it easy to stick to, ensuring content goes out on a regular basis.

What Should a Marketing Calendar Include?

In our opinion, these are the most important elements you should stock up your future marketing calendars with.

Months, dates and quarters

Keeping track of key dates won’t just let you know about things like product launches, busy periods and sales. It’ll map out any holidays, events, or awareness days you can use to great effect throughout the year like Christmas, cultural holidays or things like Mental Health Awareness week that might be dear to your brand’s values.

Having an overview of the next 12 months highlights timing and relevance, letting you align messaging and content to things that resonate with your audience over the course of the calendar year. And it’s through this alignment that you’ll be able to optimise reach and engagement.

Overarching themes and campaigns

Your marketing calendar should make upcoming themes and campaigns clear. When you begin populating yours, make sure any content that’s part of a particular campaign is signposted for the benefit of everyone on your team.

In other words, be sure to include the campaign name, relevant tasks or deliverables, who’s responsible for completing them, the campaign’s status and any deadlines. This helps with organisation, letting everyone in the team stay on the same page when it comes to each respective campaign.

A colour key can show which content belongs to which campaign, so make sure to include a key that leaves no room for confusion. You might also decide to use colours to signpost the status of each campaign’s progress, so make sure that’s flagged up for team members, too.

Channel-by-channel activity

Aka ‘the meat and potatoes’ of your calendar: the social posts, the emails, the copy, and the assets that are going to put your strategy into action – broken down by each channel.

You and your team should plan and determine in advance which channels will be the most effective for reaching your target audience. Once those have been decided, you can start planning the activity itself, weighing up your audience’s preferences and behaviours, then tailoring the content accordingly. And of course, you’ll want to make sure your content aligns to your overall campaign and business goals to maximise effectiveness.

How to Build a Marketing Calendar

Highlight Key Milestones

Are customers more likely to purchase items or use your services at certain times of the year? Does December get busy for you? Or are there any other times of the year you can capitalise on by running a knockout campaign that’s going to do numbers?

Think about the year ahead and start populating your calendar with milestones like product launches, trade shows and industry events – or anything else throughout the year that would make for great content.

Focus on Collaboration

Don’t try to go it alone on this. Gather a team of people whose skills you can rely on for producing and posting the content – or anything you might need to delegate to other people. Don’t forget to make sure everyone’s clear on what they’re accountable for – leaving a name beside each item on the calendar itself can help with this.

Clearly communicating deadlines, expectations and ideal outcomes will allow each team member to plan and prioritise their work, and give them room to collaborate. Team members should also feel empowered to communicate with others, so that ideas and feedback flow more freely – and create more successful marketing campaigns.

Begin to Assemble an Overarching Timeline

Certain campaign ideas will need more time to carry out than others. Large-scale campaigns can take up entire years or quarters, whereas certain tasks will be carried out weekly and will need far less time to plan out.

Depending on your campaign ideas, you’ll want to weigh up the amount of time you need to plan and create deliverables in advance, so that everything is properly prepared and ready to go live on the agreed dates. Just be mindful of your team members’ individual schedules so that people don’t get snowed under with overlapping tasks.

Build out your calendar

Now you’re ready to actually populate your calendar with campaigns and content. What you opt to go with is entirely up to you, whether it’s something as simple as a spreadsheet or a dedicated tool like Asana or Hubspot. Whatever you go with, be sure to weigh up how easy it is to collaborate with your tool of choice, whether it’s easy to use and that you can include the key information your teams need to complete their tasks with.

Download our free marketing calendar template

Ready to get started on filling in your own marketing calendar? You supply the ideas, and we’ll supply you with this ace (and free) marketing calendar template for you to download. Sounds like a fair trade to us!

How to use your marketing calendar

A marketing calendar isn’t just a way to stay up-to-date with what’s going on month to month. Get more out of your marketing calendar by putting it to use with the following…

Lead Campaign Meetings 

Before your campaigns get going, holding meetings ahead of time – with your marketing calendar in tow – is a great idea. If the calendar’s been populated, then you’ll have a top-level overview of your content, its requirements and who’s responsible for delivery, ensuring that everyone’s on the same page before campaign activity starts.

And if the calendar hasn’t been populated, then the meeting is an excellent place to start doing so. Use your time to assign tasks like copy and asset creation to relevant colleagues, and then add these details into your calendar during the meeting itself.

Brainstorm Content

It’s well worth making a separate tab for future ideas and potential content themes. By brainstorming themes, you’ll have a bank of ideas you can revisit, flesh out and keep your content fresh with.

Try getting your team together and give them ten minutes to jot down ideas. Once the ten minutes are over, have everyone pick out the ideas they like most, and then discuss what content, headlines and angles you can create based on them. Remember to keep things judgment-free: no idea is a bad idea in this context. 

Plan Channel Activity

Once you’ve decided on your content and themes, you can start planning out what channels you’ll post on and when. How far in advance you plan your content is up to you, but stick to your plan. It’s always better to plan two weeks in advance and stick to it, rather than planning months in advance and then letting your activity fall by the wayside.

And of course, make sure you’re planning to post on channels that you know your audience love to congregate so you can maximise engagement and impressions.

Assign Responsibilities

As well as making it clear who’s responsible for managing the actual marketing calendar and populating it with content, the calendar itself should also clarify the owners of every task and piece of content featured in it. From designing creative assets to posting the content in question, your teams’ responsibilities should be clear to everyone who uses your calendar to avoid confusion.

Set Clear Deadlines

Likewise, any deadlines should be clearly highlighted so that everyone knows when their work is required, and no important dates end up getting missed. Colours and symbols can help out here, with completed tasks being indicate in green, for example, or red indicating any outstanding tasks coming up that week.

We hope this blog has helped with how to build a marketing calendar. But if you still need a steer on a few things, we’d be happy to talk it through with you. Our branding team can level up your online presence to connect with your people. Head here or give us a call on 0345 459 0558 for more info.