It doesn’t matter what kind of enterprise I’ve labored for over time, my staff has all the time careworn the significance of a advertising calendar — after which by no means made one.
A marketing calendar is important to protecting a staff organized and productive, however creating and sustaining one may be intimidating with out the correct steering. So, in the event you’re studying this hanging your head in disgrace, don’t fear; this can be a protected house. And right this moment, we’re breaking the cycle.
Let’s unpack tips on how to create a advertising calendar you’ll truly use.
What’s a advertising calendar?
What’s a advertising calendar?
A advertising calendar is a schedule of your upcoming advertising actions and necessary dates. It covers a month, quarter, and even 12 months and paperwork product launches, social media posts, weblog articles, gross sales, and reside occasions. Social media calendars, content material calendars, and occasion calendars are additionally examples of forms of advertising calendars.
A advertising calendar is a schedule of your upcoming advertising actions and necessary dates. It covers a month, quarter, and even 12 months and paperwork product launches, social media posts, weblog articles, gross sales, and reside occasions. Social media calendars, content material calendars, and occasion calendars are additionally examples of forms of advertising calendars.
At its core, a advertising calendar is fairly easy. It’s only a schedule of your staff’s upcoming advertising actions and necessary dates. Consider it like a trip itinerary however with fewer excursions and extra weblog articles — that are far more enjoyable anyway, proper?
Some firms could go for a single advertising calendar, which provides them a high-level overview of every part scheduled in a given month, quarter, or 12 months, whereas others want a number of advertising calendars devoted to particular actions, like a social media or editorial calendar.
Any complexity with a advertising calendar (like a trip itinerary) depends upon how detailed your staff needs to get and the way you intend to make use of it, however extra on that shortly.
What ought to a advertising calendar embody?
Whatever the finer nuances of your advertising calendar, there are a number of “large ticket” milestones you must account for it doesn’t matter what. These embody:
- Campaigns
- Product Launches
- Gross sales
- Webinars/Dwell Occasions
- Trade Conferences
- Content material Publication
- Emails
- Holidays
- Experiments/Checks
These milestones can dramatically impression purchaser habits. Noting them on a advertising calendar will allow you to plan and reply accordingly.
Relying in your staff’s wants and workflows, you may additionally need to embody particulars just like the platform or channel, challenge description, assignees, deadlines, standing, and useful resource hyperlinks in your advertising calendar — however the kind of advertising calendar usually dictates this.
Forms of Advertising and marketing Calendars
Forms of Advertising and marketing Calendars
- Marketing campaign Calendar
- Occasions Calendar
- E mail Calendar
- Editorial or Content material Calendar
- Social Media Calendar
In my expertise, many groups profit from activity-specific advertising calendars slightly than only one basic calendar.
With all the actions that fall below advertising, activity-specific calendars filter out noise so you possibly can concentrate on the correct info on the proper time. Having several types of advertising calendars additionally provides accountable groups extra freedom to customise the calendar as wanted.
For instance, my advertising profession has virtually all the time revolved round an editorial or content material calendar. “Sorry, can’t do lunch. I’ve to schedule an article for tomorrow,” was a standard sound chew for me.
A peek at my content material calendar in HubSpot circa 2017. Image Source
Each month, I printed 15-20 weblog articles per week, so a devoted editorial calendar was a should. I created a calendar with the upcoming titles and their editorial/search engine marketing pointers, publish dates, URLs, draft deadlines, assigned writers, and campaigns.
Because the month progressed, I reviewed this calendar day by day to know what was developing, what was full, and what was up subsequent. It was one of the simplest ways to maintain my work organized, supply transparency, talk with my writers and stakeholders, and preserve the corporate’s weblog working easily.
However this is only one kind of selling calendar chances are you’ll discover invaluable.
Another well-liked advertising calendars embody:
- Marketing campaign Calendar: This high-level calendar exhibits each main marketing campaign you’re working throughout a selected interval. Campaigns might be centered on the launch of a brand new product, a vacation, or perhaps a content material supply. The objects on this calendar will possible decide milestones in your activity-specific calendars (i.e., When you’re launching a brand new analysis report, chances are you’ll put a associated weblog article in your editorial calendar or a promotional e-mail in your e-mail calendar).
- Occasions Calendar: Do you host plenty of webinars? How about in-person occasions? That is the place for them. Like your campaigns, occasions usually have associated actions that present up in your different calendars. Take HubSpot’s INBOUND event. Whereas the INBOUND Staff has its personal occasions calendar, the HubSpot Weblog Staff additionally has INBOUND-related content material we monitor on our editorial calendar.
- E mail Calendar: E mail advertising is much from lifeless. With this calendar, you’ll see what emails you’re sending and when to keep away from spamming your viewers. This calendar ought to embody the ship dates and instances, audiences, and campaigns hooked up to every e-mail. Tapping our INBOUND instance once more, that is the calendar that may make sure that we aren’t hitting contacts with a gross sales pitch too continuously.
- Editorial or Content Calendar: This can be a schedule of the content material you publish, possible your weblog. Like mine, I’d advocate it embody publish dates, draft deadlines, authors, and marketing campaign info. Relying in your technique, you might have considered trying one thing related for podcasts and movies.
- Social Media Calendar: This can be a schedule of what you’re publishing on social media and when. In case your quantity is excessive, chances are you’ll need to get much more granular, with calendars particular to Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and so forth. This makes it simpler to see precisely what’s occurring every platform to keep away from over-posting.
Professional tip: HubSpot has a social media calendar template to get you began, or you possibly can strive these social media calendar tools.
Why use a advertising calendar?
According to CoSchedule, entrepreneurs who’re proactive planners are 3 times extra more likely to report success than those that aren’t. As a planner, this is sufficient to get me on board with utilizing a advertising calendar, however some groups want extra convincing. Fortunately, advertising calendars include many advantages:
Figuring out Priorities
Unsure what to work on? Advertising and marketing calendars are one of many best methods to establish work priorities.
If you’re caught, simply take a peek at your advertising calendar to see what’s on the horizon (I’d advocate trying one to 2 weeks forward). This offers you a greater concept of what duties are time-sensitive and must be executed to remain on monitor.
For example, let’s say it’s the final week of November and your enterprise often runs an enormous sale for the vacation season. Noting the sale in your advertising calendar reminds you to prioritize e-mail promotion, social media posts, and every other actions main as much as the December launch.
Encourages Proactivity
On a associated notice, a advertising calendar will help your staff keep proactive. When one thing is famous on a advertising calendar, it’s much less more likely to “sneak up on you.” You’ll see it frequently and be inspired to work forward, house out duties to satisfy your deadlines, and keep away from engaged on one thing final minute.
Staff Alignment
With so many transferring items, it may be tough for advertising groups to remain on the identical web page. A advertising calendar creates one supply of reality to your most necessary info and priorities.
If the product staff is releasing a brand new function to your providing, as an illustration, having the launch in your advertising calendar will flag it as one thing necessary everybody ought to pay attention to. It additionally lets the staff know assist could also be wanted from content material or social media to hit this milestone.
We lately went by means of this at HubSpot with the launch of Spotlight. Highlight is HubSpot’s bi-annual product showcase, which brings collectively our newest improvements throughout the client platform into one visually participating internet expertise for our viewers.
With its inaugural launch in April 2024, the product staff developed a complete advertising plan to faucet different groups, however they tracked progress on their very own calendar.
Group
Maybe this goes with out saying, however the greatest motive to make use of a advertising calendar is to maintain you organized. It brings collectively your most significant info in a transparent, easy-to-understand format and communicates priorities at a look.
With out an up-to-date advertising calendar, essential duties could also be extra more likely to be forgotten or executed haphazardly.
How you can Create a Advertising and marketing Calendar
How you can Create a Advertising and marketing Calendar
- Determine your key dates and milestones.
- Set your useful targets.
- Break down your key dates.
- Set up tough timelines and a schedule.
- Doc the schedule utilizing a software of your selection.
Okay, right here’s the arduous half: Really creating your marketing calendar.
Growing a advertising calendar takes time and cautious consideration to ensure nothing necessary is missed. To make this rather less intimidating, I’ve damaged down 5 steps that can assist you get began.
Whereas it will not be doable to forecast all actions a 12 months forward, I recommend beginning with the massive image after which zooming in on the subsequent quarter and month.
Mapping out advertising plans month-to-month or quarterly supplies extra flexibility and adaptableness for issues the world won’t see coming. (Like oh, I don’t know, the COVID-19 pandemic.)
Let’s begin from the highest.
1. Determine your key dates and milestones.
After all, step one in creating your advertising calendar is deciding what must be included.
Advertising and marketing handles so many various duties it’s straightforward to neglect one thing, so don’t do that in a vacuum.
Seek the advice of with stakeholders and representatives out of your main advertising departments about what must go in your advertising calendar (e.g., product advertising, comarketing, or partnerships). Pay attention to the objects we mentioned earlier, together with product launches, holidays, trade occasions, gross sales, and different vital situations that may impression your advertising campaigns.
For this step, I like to recommend overlaying large milestones already decided for your complete 12 months. In the beginning of every quarter and month, you possibly can revisit and refine occasions as wanted.
2. Set your useful targets.
Together with your landmarks locked in, ask your self what you hope to get out of your advertising calendar. What do you need to accomplish with it? What would you like it to do for you?
Your solutions to those questions will dictate what must be included in your advertising calendars and the way refined they need to be.
Useful targets could also be issues like with the ability to:
- Tag assignees
- View assignments that haven’t been accomplished but
- Click on out to view reside posts
- Share hyperlinks to repeat and property that go together with a calendar merchandise
The HubSpot Weblog Editorial Calendar on Asana permits our staff to see these particulars and lots of extra.
It’s good to seek the advice of different leaders and implementors to grasp their targets. They’ll use your advertising calendar most continuously, so that you need it to be helpful to them. Discuss to your writers, video producers, social media managers, occasion planners, designers, and anybody else getting their fingers soiled.
What would possibly this appear to be? Nicely, let’s say your social media staff would love a advertising calendar that paperwork all of their content material and tracks what’s gone out. Figuring out this, you’ll create a devoted social media calendar that features particulars on the platform, assignee, inventive, copy, and even hyperlinks to printed items.
3. Break down your key dates into touchpoints/wants.
Now we’re stepping into the nitty gritty with ways. I like to recommend zooming in to your nearest quarter and even month. Getting granular with one thing greater than three months away is a little bit of a attain, so protecting timelines quick will assist preserve them lifelike.
Ask your self what every of your upcoming milestones will entail. What promotional property will they want? What groups will it is advisable to faucet?
After all, you gained’t know precisely what your advertising push will appear to be — heck, possibly there shall be some new, funky development you’ll need to check out — however having a obscure concept of the workload shall be useful in making a timeline.
As an illustration, throughout HubSpot’s Highlight launch, our product staff had a complete content material plan main as much as the massive day, together with movies and emails.
Highlight promotion included movies like this on LinkedIn that includes HubSpot Head of Product Andrew Pitre.
The staff additionally created a complete social media equipment to assist others at HubSpot unfold the phrase.
Take into consideration social media, running a blog, e-mail advertising, promoting, video advertising, and different frequent levers you pull in massive campaigns. Jot these down for every of your milestones.
4. Set up tough timelines and schedules.
You’ve your key dates and potential to-dos, now it’s time to truly get them on a schedule!
Contemplating the common time it takes to plan and create deliverables, develop a tough timeline for every key date, and map them for the weeks and months forward.
Be aware of staff bandwidth and keep away from overloading or overlapping a number of initiatives. Even when one thing is famous upfront, that doesn’t imply your staff will magically be capable to do double the work.
If you end up going through a ton of overlap, notice that it is advisable to deal with and clear up the bandwidth situation when these timelines start.
5. Doc your schedule within the software of your selection.
Excellent news: All of the arduous stuff is behind you. Congrats!
Now, you’ve simply obtained to make it official.
The ultimate step in creating your advertising calendar is getting all the key dates and particulars enter into the software of your selection. This might be as primary as a paper calendar. However for straightforward sharing, accessibility, and updating (all elements you must search for in a calendar software), it’s finest to go digital.
In our subsequent part, we’ll evaluation some examples and my private suggestions.
Advertising and marketing Calendar Examples
There are numerous choices for formally documenting, sharing, and sustaining your advertising calendar, with various complexity. To assist information you, I’ll stroll by means of some well-liked options and my suggestions.
Easy Spreadsheet
Suppose you’re searching for a easy, low-budget choice. In that case, you possibly can create your advertising calendar in a easy spreadsheet utilizing Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets (The HubSpot Weblog used G-Cal as their editorial calendar for an embarrasingly very long time).
Let’s have a look at an instance from the mixing software Zapier:
On this easy, no-frills design for a content material advertising calendar, you’ll see columns for:
- Month
- Content material kind
- Matter/Title
- Writer
- Publish date
- Promotion channels
- Key metrics
- Notes
- Hyperlinks
It’s straightforward to seek out and replace the data you want with out being too technical. One thing like that is nice for getting began and will simply be tailored to your wants.
Word: Whereas not a standard 30-day calendar view, you possibly can type the “publish date” column chronologically to make sure you view issues so as.
HubSpot provides related spreadsheet templates for a social media calendar and editorial calendar. Verify them out!
HubSpot Calendar
Talking of HubSpot, you are one fortunate marketer in the event you’re a HubSpot Skilled or Enterprise person. In your HubSpot portal, you’ll discover my favourite software for making a advertising calendar utilizing HubSpot Calendar.
HubSpot Calendar is an easy-to-use digital advertising calendar you’ll discover in your Portal (Advertising and marketing > Campaigns).
With it, you possibly can add duties for weblog articles (like I did again in my day), emails, touchdown pages, or customized wants and simply mark them full after they’re executed.
This advertising calendar may be seen by day, week, month, and even as a chronological record. It shows objects color-coded by marketing campaign and totally different icons, so it’s a breeze to know what’s occurring at a look.
For my part, if most of your advertising actions are executed by means of HubSpot, HubSpot Calendar is essentially the most environment friendly and handy choice for creating your advertising calendar.
Why? Not solely are you able to create duties to your commonest actions, however you possibly can routinely view different actions accomplished on the platform, like social media adverts and web site pages.
In contrast to different calendar instruments the place your actions are possible being accomplished on exterior platforms, HubSpot provides you a really holistic view of all of your efforts. You may also simply entry the finished property from the calendar.
Third-Occasion Apps
When you’re not a HubSpot person, and a spreadsheet isn’t your type, loads of different calendar instruments can get the job executed.
Previously, I’ve used ClickUp and Trello (one other favourite), however Asana and Monday are additionally well-liked choices.
When you’re utilizing a third-party app or software program to your advertising duties, there’s additionally likelihood it has a built-in calendar software to assist preserve you organized. Sprout Social, for instance, has a built-in social media calendar for its customers.
Whatever the answer you select, ensure that it’s:
- Straightforward to make use of/replace
- Shareable
- Accomplishes all your useful targets
Schedule and keep it up!
It’s not sufficient simply to make a advertising calendar; you’ve obtained to keep it up.
A advertising calendar is not any “set and neglect.” It’s a dwelling and respiration doc that should be reviewed and up to date frequently to truly be helpful.
So, I’ll depart you with two necessary ideas for sustaining a advertising calendar:
1. Make reviewing/updating your advertising calendar part of your routine.
In my expertise, your staff ought to all the time evaluation your advertising calendar firstly of the quarter, firstly of every month, after which each week. So, work this into your current conferences and stand-ups.
This routine ensures everyone seems to be on the identical web page about priorities and what they need to work on. It additionally permits your staff to boost flags, ask questions, or talk about adjustments.
2. Depart room for flexibility.
Let’s face it, life occurs. Priorities change, as do ways, social climates, purchaser behaviors, and lots of different issues. So, depart room for flexibility in your advertising calendar.
Simply because one thing was placed on the schedule a number of months in the past doesn’t imply it’s nonetheless transfer right this moment. Have common conversations about what’s in your advertising calendar, and be prepared and keen to pivot. Agility is vital.
With these reminders and the steps outlined above, your staff must be able to usher in a brand new period of group and productiveness with a advertising calendar. I do know I’m!