How to Create a Marketing Calendar You’ll Actually Use

It doesn’t matter what kind of enterprise I’ve labored for over time, my staff has all the time pressured the significance of a advertising and marketing calendar — after which by no means made one.

A marketing calendar is crucial to preserving a staff organized and productive, however creating and sustaining one may be intimidating with out the precise steerage. So, if you happen to’re studying this hanging your head in disgrace, don’t fear; this can be a secure house. And at this time, we’re breaking the cycle.

Let’s unpack the way to create a advertising and marketing calendar you’ll truly use.

What’s a advertising and marketing calendar?

 

A advertising and marketing calendar is a schedule of your upcoming advertising and marketing actions and essential dates. It covers a month, quarter, and even yr and paperwork product launches, social media posts, weblog articles, gross sales, and stay occasions. Social media calendars, content material calendars, and occasion calendars are additionally examples of sorts of advertising and marketing calendars.

At its core, a advertising and marketing calendar is fairly easy. It’s only a schedule of your staff’s upcoming advertising and marketing actions and essential dates. Consider it like a trip itinerary however with fewer excursions and extra weblog articles — that are far more enjoyable anyway, proper?

Some firms might go for a single advertising and marketing calendar, which supplies them a high-level overview of every little thing scheduled in a given month, quarter, or yr, whereas others want a number of advertising and marketing calendars devoted to particular actions, like a social media or editorial calendar.

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Any complexity with a advertising and marketing calendar (like a trip itinerary) relies on how detailed your staff needs to get and the way you propose to make use of it, however extra on that shortly.

What ought to a advertising and marketing calendar embrace?

Whatever the finer nuances of your advertising and marketing calendar, there are a number of “huge ticket” milestones you must account for it doesn’t matter what. These embrace:

• Campaigns
• Product Launches
• Gross sales
• Webinars/Reside Occasions
• Trade Conferences
• Content material Publication
• Emails
• Holidays
• Experiments/Checks

These milestones can dramatically influence purchaser conduct. Noting them on a advertising and marketing calendar will assist you to plan and reply accordingly.

Relying in your staff’s wants and workflows, you might also need to embrace particulars just like the platform or channel, challenge description, assignees, deadlines, standing, and useful resource hyperlinks in your advertising and marketing calendar — however the kind of advertising and marketing calendar usually dictates this.

Forms of Advertising Calendars

In my expertise, many groups profit from activity-specific advertising and marketing calendars fairly than only one basic calendar.

With the entire actions that fall below advertising and marketing, activity-specific calendars filter noise so you may give attention to the precise info on the proper time. Having various kinds of advertising and marketing calendars additionally provides accountable groups extra freedom to customise the calendar as wanted.

For instance, my advertising and marketing 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 revealed 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 optimisation pointers, publish dates, URLs, draft deadlines, assigned writers, and campaigns.

Because the month progressed, I reviewed this calendar every day to know what was developing, what was full, and what was up subsequent. It was one of the best ways to maintain my work organized, supply transparency, talk with my writers and stakeholders, and preserve the corporate’s weblog operating easily.

However this is only one kind of selling calendar it’s possible you’ll discover useful.

Another widespread advertising and marketing calendars embrace:

• Marketing campaign Calendar: This high-level calendar exhibits each main marketing campaign you’re operating throughout a particular interval. Campaigns could possibly be centered on the launch of a brand new product, a vacation, or perhaps a content material supply. The objects on this calendar will seemingly decide milestones in your activity-specific calendars (i.e., If you happen to’re launching a brand new analysis report, it’s possible 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 numerous 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 Workforce has its personal occasions calendar, the HubSpot Weblog Workforce additionally has INBOUND-related content material we monitor on our editorial calendar.
• E mail Calendar: E mail advertising and marketing is way 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 embrace the ship dates and instances, audiences, and campaigns connected to every e-mail. Tapping our INBOUND instance once more, that is the calendar that may ensure that we aren’t hitting contacts with a gross sales pitch too steadily.
• Editorial or Content Calendar: It is a schedule of the content material you publish, seemingly your weblog. Like mine, I’d suggest it embrace publish dates, draft deadlines, authors, and marketing campaign info. Relying in your technique, you might have considered trying one thing comparable for podcasts and movies.
• Social Media Calendar: It is a schedule of what you’re publishing on social media and when. In case your quantity is excessive, it’s possible you’ll need to get much more granular, with calendars particular to Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and so on. This makes it simpler to see precisely what’s happening every platform to keep away from over-posting.

Professional tip: HubSpot has a social media calendar template to get you began, or you may attempt these social media calendar tools.

Why use a advertising and marketing calendar?

According to CoSchedule, entrepreneurs who’re proactive planners are thrice extra prone to report success than those that aren’t. As a planner, this is sufficient to get me on board with utilizing a advertising and marketing calendar, however some groups want extra convincing. Fortunately, advertising and marketing calendars include many advantages:

Figuring out Priorities

Unsure what to work on? Advertising calendars are one of many best methods to establish work priorities.

Once you’re caught, simply take a peek at your advertising and marketing calendar to see what’s on the horizon (I’d suggest wanting one to 2 weeks forward). This will provide you with a greater thought of what duties are time-sensitive and have to be completed to remain on monitor.

For example, let’s say it’s the final week of November and what you are promoting normally runs an enormous sale for the vacation season. Noting the sale in your advertising and marketing 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 be aware, a advertising and marketing calendar may help your staff keep proactive. When one thing is famous on a advertising and marketing calendar, it’s much less prone to “sneak up on you.” You’ll see it usually and be inspired to work forward, house out duties to satisfy your deadlines, and keep away from engaged on one thing final minute.

Workforce Alignment

With so many transferring items, it may be troublesome for advertising and marketing groups to remain on the identical web page. A advertising and marketing calendar creates one supply of fact to your most essential info and priorities.

If the product staff is releasing a brand new function to your providing, for example, having the launch in your advertising and marketing calendar will flag it as one thing essential everybody ought to pay attention to. It additionally lets the staff know help could also be wanted from content material or social media to hit this milestone.

We just lately went via this at HubSpot with the launch of Spotlight. Highlight is HubSpot’s bi-annual product showcase, which brings collectively our newest improvements throughout the shopper platform into one visually participating internet expertise for our viewers.

With its inaugural launch in April 2024, the product staff developed a complete advertising and marketing plan to faucet different groups, however they tracked progress on their very own calendar.

Group

Maybe this goes with out saying, however the largest cause to make use of a advertising and marketing 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 and marketing calendar, essential duties could also be extra prone to be forgotten or completed haphazardly.

The right way to Create a Advertising Calendar

Okay, right here’s the arduous half: Truly creating your marketing calendar.

Creating a advertising and marketing calendar takes time and cautious consideration to ensure nothing essential is missed. To make this rather less intimidating, I’ve damaged down 5 steps that will help you get began.

Whereas it might not be potential to forecast all actions a yr forward, I counsel beginning with the massive image after which zooming in on the following quarter and month.

Mapping out advertising and marketing plans month-to-month or quarterly gives extra flexibility and flexibility for issues the world may not 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.

In fact, step one in creating your advertising and marketing calendar is deciding what ought to be included.

Advertising handles so many alternative duties it’s simple 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 and marketing departments about what must go in your advertising and marketing calendar (e.g., product advertising and marketing, comarketing, or partnerships). Be aware of the objects we mentioned earlier, together with product launches, holidays, trade occasions, gross sales, and different important situations that may influence your advertising and marketing campaigns.

For this step, I like to recommend masking huge milestones already decided for your complete yr. Firstly of every quarter and month, you may revisit and refine occasions as wanted.

2. Set your purposeful objectives.

Along with your landmarks locked in, ask your self what you hope to get out of your advertising and marketing 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 ought to be included in your advertising and marketing calendars and the way refined they need to be.

Purposeful objectives could also be issues like having the ability to:

• Tag assignees
• View assignments that haven’t been accomplished but
• Click on out to view stay posts
• Share hyperlinks to repeat and belongings 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 know their objectives. They’ll use your advertising and marketing calendar most steadily, so that you need it to be helpful to them. Speak to your writers, video producers, social media managers, occasion planners, designers, and anybody else getting their palms soiled.

What may this seem like? Effectively, let’s say your social media staff would love a advertising and marketing calendar that paperwork all of their content material and tracks what’s gone out. Realizing this, you’ll create a devoted social media calendar that features particulars on the platform, assignee, inventive, copy, and even hyperlinks to revealed items.

3. Break down your key dates into touchpoints/wants.

Now we’re entering 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 preserving timelines brief will assist preserve them lifelike.

Ask your self what every of your upcoming milestones will entail. What promotional belongings will they want? What groups will you could faucet?

In fact, you gained’t know precisely what your advertising and marketing push will seem like — heck, possibly there can be some new, funky development you’ll need to check out — however having a obscure thought of the workload can be useful in making a timeline.

For example, 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 and marketing, promoting, video advertising and marketing, and different frequent levers you pull in giant campaigns. Jot these down for every of your milestones.

4. Set up tough timelines and schedules.

You will have 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 tasks. Even when one thing is famous prematurely, that doesn’t imply your staff will magically have the ability to do double the work.

If you end up dealing with a ton of overlap, be aware that you could deal with and resolve the bandwidth difficulty when these timelines start.

5. Doc your schedule within the software of your alternative.

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 and marketing calendar is getting the entire key dates and particulars enter into the software of your alternative. This could possibly be as primary as a paper calendar. However for simple sharing, accessibility, and updating (all components you must search for in a calendar software), it’s greatest to go digital.

In our subsequent part, we’ll assessment some examples and my private suggestions.

Advertising Calendar Examples

There are a lot of choices for formally documenting, sharing, and sustaining your advertising and marketing calendar, with various complexity. To assist information you, I’ll stroll via some widespread options and my suggestions.

Easy Spreadsheet

Suppose you’re on the lookout for a easy, low-budget possibility. In that case, you may create your advertising and marketing 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 take a look at an instance from the combination software Zapier:

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On this easy, no-frills design for a content material advertising and marketing calendar, you’ll see columns for:

• Month
• Content material kind
• Matter/Title
• Creator
• Publish date
• Promotion channels
• Key metrics
• Notes
• Hyperlinks

It’s simple to search out and replace the knowledge you want with out being too technical. One thing like that is nice for getting began and will simply be tailored to your wants.

Be aware: Whereas not a standard 30-day calendar view, you may type the “publish date” column chronologically to make sure you view issues so as.

HubSpot presents comparable spreadsheet templates for a social media calendar and editorial calendar. Test them out!

HubSpot Calendar

Talking of HubSpot, you are one fortunate marketer if you happen to’re a HubSpot Skilled or Enterprise consumer. In your HubSpot portal, you’ll discover my favourite software for making a advertising and marketing calendar utilizing HubSpot Calendar.

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HubSpot Calendar is an easy-to-use digital advertising and marketing calendar you’ll discover in your Portal (Advertising > Campaigns).

With it, you may 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 completed.

This advertising and marketing calendar may be seen by day, week, month, and even as a chronological checklist. It shows objects color-coded by marketing campaign and completely different icons, so it’s a breeze to know what’s occurring at a look.

For my part, if most of your advertising and marketing actions are completed via HubSpot, HubSpot Calendar is essentially the most environment friendly and handy possibility for creating your advertising and marketing calendar.

Why? Not solely are you able to create duties to your commonest actions, however you may mechanically view different actions accomplished on the platform, like social media advertisements and web site pages.

Not like different calendar instruments the place your actions are seemingly being accomplished on exterior platforms, HubSpot provides you a really holistic view of all of your efforts. You too can simply entry the finished belongings from the calendar.

Third-Celebration Apps

If you happen to’re not a HubSpot consumer, and a spreadsheet isn’t your fashion, loads of different calendar instruments can get the job completed.

Prior to now, I’ve used ClickUp and Trello (one other favourite), however Asana and Monday are additionally widespread choices.

If you happen to’re utilizing a third-party app or software program to your advertising and marketing 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 resolution you select, make it possible for it’s:

• Straightforward to make use of/replace
• Shareable
• Accomplishes all your purposeful objectives

Schedule and keep it up!

It’s not sufficient simply to make a advertising and marketing calendar; you’ve obtained to keep it up.

A advertising and marketing calendar is not any “set and neglect.” It’s a residing and respiration doc that should be reviewed and up to date usually to truly be helpful.

So, I’ll go away you with two essential ideas for sustaining a advertising and marketing calendar:

1. Make reviewing/updating your advertising and marketing calendar part of your routine.

In my expertise, your staff ought to all the time assessment your advertising and marketing calendar initially of the quarter, initially 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 focus on adjustments.

2. Go away room for flexibility.

Let’s face it, life occurs. Priorities change, as do ways, social climates, purchaser behaviors, and lots of different issues. So, go away room for flexibility in your advertising and marketing calendar.

Simply because one thing was placed on the schedule a number of months in the past doesn’t imply it’s nonetheless transfer at this time. Have common conversations about what’s in your advertising and marketing calendar, and be prepared and keen to pivot. Agility is essential.

With these reminders and the steps outlined above, your staff ought to be able to usher in a brand new period of group and productiveness with a advertising and marketing calendar. I do know I’m!