If you have committed valuable time and resources into your marketing strategy, you will obviously want to be able to have a reliable way of collaborating with other team members, monitoring your success, and also seeing where you are at any given point.
There is therefore a compelling argument in favor of creating a marketing plan calendar, that will give you all of that data and a comprehensive overview, exactly when you need it.
What a marketing calendar can do for you
When you create a marketing calendar, what you are effectively doing is creating a valuable resource and a point of reference, that allows everyone within your marketing team to see precisely how their individual marketing efforts are performing.
You will most likely need to include a number of critical components when putting your calendar together. These will include using content titles covering any books published, blog titles, paid advertising, and any other details of marketing efforts such as the use of emails.
One of the best ways of getting the best out of your calendar once it has been constructed and contains all the data that you want it to, is to delegate responsibility for updating and monitoring the content to one particular person in the marketing team.
This will help to minimize the potential for any errors and should ensure that the integrity and structure of the calendar is not compromised in any way, if one person has ownership over its content.
Building a timeline
A marketing calendar provides you with the ideal tool to help you build a timeline for your marketing strategy and campaign, improving your odds of achieving a cohesive success.
Once you have created the overall strategy in the first place and know exactly where you are headed with the campaign, you have at least completed what is not just the first step in the process, but probably the most important one, as it is the foundation to your success.
Probably the next task on your agenda is to develop your messaging. This is often about collaboration with everyone involved in the task, and agreeing exactly what the overall brand message is going to be and what the chosen strategy is going to be.
The next component is where the marketing calendar definitely comes into play, as you work on building a schedule for the campaign. You can create a timeline from launch date or before and then create a clear picture of what needs to be done and when.
As well as creating all of the communications tools that you think you will need, you will almost certainly want to work on creating and defining an external communications plan. Working on a PR strategy, press release dates and other important moments in the campaign, can all be incorporated within your marketing calendar.
When you start to describe all of its uses and positive benefits, you soon start to appreciate that a marketing calendar is definitely not just for show.
Finlay North is a business consultant who works with start-ups as well as already established businesses to improve their marketing efforts and re-branding. His articles appear on small business blogs around the web.