Planning Your Marketing Calendar (And How I Do It)
The last two years have been somewhat “tumultuous” for a lot of us in marketing. From pandemic shutdowns to last-minute event changes and supply chain dilemmas to inflation, trying to plan campaigns for the next 6 or 12 months has often felt like the challenge of Sisyphus. And humbling though it may be, we know that without planning it’s impossible to make progress, and lack of planning will drive up your marketing costs in both expense and lost opportunities.
So if you’ve never put together a marketing plan before, congratulations…now is both the most difficult time to do so, and yet also the most necessary. In this article, I’ll give you a little insight on what you should (and shouldn’t) include in your plan, some tools to use and hopefully some inspiration to start planning for next year now, so you can improve your overall program.
What To Include In Your Marketing Plan
Marketing plans can vary a lot in detail depending on many factors. I’ve built out plans that include line item budgets down to the dollar, and others that are more of a skeleton for riffing ideas for each month or season. There is no one standard format that you must follow, the right plan is the one that works for your organization. That said, there are several elements you should include in every plan to be successful:
Audiences
Themes
Timing/target dates
Channels
Goals
Deliverables
If you’re a little old school, you might quickly recognize this as the “who, what, when, where, why and how” that many of us were taught as the foundation of story writing. Here’s a secret, marketing is all about content and all good content creators (whether written word, images or video) follow these guidelines to achieve great results.
As you look to next year or season, be sure to consider each of those elements to make certain your program is set up for success.
What You Should Avoid In Your Marketing Plan
As a type-A personality planner, I love a deeply thought-out plan. Marketing plans can be very detailed, and if you thrive on a well-developed plan, don’t let me stop you. For some organizations this detail helps to ensure that every department and team can work in concert effectively. But in the last two years we’ve had to cope with a lot of changes, often in rapid succession, and that can make your most well-thought-out plans utterly useless.
The biggest problem with an ineffective marketing plan, outside the waste of time and resources to create it, is that it often leaves an organization flat-footed and scrambling when things fall apart. To avoid that, try not to include these in your plan:
Concepts that are so rigid that they can’t evolve or be replaced if changes happen
Requirement of uncontrolled factors, like resources or deliverables that might not be available
Timing that could be challenging in a less-than-perfect scenario
No backup options
The most important takeaway here is flexibility. Accept right here and now that some, if not all, of your plans could fall apart at any time. If you didn’t already experience this in 2020, your business or marketing plan probably didn’t exist yet. Your plan should be flexible enough to ebb and flow with changes that might happen.
Suggested Marketing Planning Tools
When it comes to mapping your thoughts and ideas into a structure to share with your team, the best tool is always the tool that everyone is most comfortable with. There are a lot of options, but here are the ones I use and recommend you consider:
Your Project Management system: From Asana to Basecamp to Clickup, project management software has a structure in place to facilitate planning. Our go-to internally for planning is Airtable (*referral link) which offers great templates for content and social media planning, and is completely customizable for each of our clients’ needs.
Spreadsheets: Nothing beats the simplicity and directness of a good spreadsheet. I prefer Google Sheets, so that we can easily share and update the live document internally and with our clients. This makes certain everyone is looking at the same version of the plan at any given time.
Live Docs: If spreadsheet cells make you dizzy, or you really prefer spellcheck to autocorrect your typos, a document-based solution is perfectly fine to use. I suggest using a live, shared doc like Google Docs or Dropbox Paper so that you can benefit from the real-time collaboration offered by these systems.
So now that you’re armed with information and tools…start planning! If you’re still not sure where to start, consider having a marketing audit performed to assess where you can make the most improvements in your program before delving too deep. We offer email marketing audits starting at just $499, as well as more comprehensive reviews of your entire digital marketing program. Just reach out if you have questions or would like to schedule an audit this week.
Hey there…
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