What’s a Marketing Calendar and Why You Need One
What is a marketing calendar?
How do I use a marketing calendar?
What am I planning on my marketing calendar?
Did you start your small business as a hobby? Did you start it right away knowing you wanted it to grow into an income-producing endeavor?
Whether you began as a hobby or business, you probably recognized right away that people need to know about your product or services. Perhaps what you are unsure of is exactly how to get the word out.
We have all seen our friends start a business or project and it appears to take off quickly and easily. We have also witnessed other friends who started and stopped. People will always ask successful businesses “what’s the secret?” We want to know what worked right? It might also be worth asking others why they stopped or what didn’t work for them. There is so much to learn from both people.
On the side of success, having a manageable marketing calendar is a must. You would not start a business without a solid business model or financial statement. A marketing calendar is an absolute necessity as well.
What is a marketing calendar? A marketing calendar is a 12-month picture of your content and media engagement all mapped out. It’s a springboard for creativity for your brand or business. It can be done in quarters or any other chunk of time that you find helpful, but planning ahead is essential.
How do I use a marketing calendar? Ideally, you would be planning out at least 3 months in advance in order to provide time for content creation. For example, as of this blog post, you would be planning content for February 2021. February is a big month for a holiday, so advance planning is absolutely necessary if you intend to use that holiday to your advantage. You don’t want to get to January 20 and realize you haven’t planned to use Valentine’s Day to your advantage.
What am I planning on my marketing calendar? Ideally, you are planning all marketing content for your brand or business on your calendar. If you have a blog, and you should have a blog(!), you would plan each post with related topic on that calendar. Your calendar would include the day you write the post as well as the day the post is to be live. If you need graphics or photos with your blog post, there would be a separate item listed to create the graphic or photo.
Additionally, on this calendar, you would be calendaring and budgeting for any social media sponsored posts. This allows you to see when the sponsored posts will run and provide an idea of what you budget per day for that post.
Seeing your content planned out for a few months in advance will allow you to also see where you can boost your creativity and try something new. If you are only posting on your feed daily, maybe it’s time to try a live video or a reel for new content. There’s a great article from Influencer Marketing Hub here on how to plan every post.
Using a marketing calendar to look at analytics If you use a large 12-month calendar, you can take some time each week to look at your post reach and post engagement. Where do you see boosts in followers, click-throughs and other forms of engagement? You can mark those boosts and even dips on your calendar to get a better sense of what is actually working for your business and what’s not. There is no point in wasting time on things that aren’t creating conversions from watchers to customers.
Flywheel can help. At Flywheel we love small businesses, and we love helping them grow. We work to provide affordable and creative solutions for business owners who need help with social media marketing. We can create customized plans for your business to help you be successful or we can simply do the social media marketing for you. There are many tools available online to create marketing calendars. There are great, FREE tools here. My personal favorite content calendar is a free Google calendar that you can find easily in your Google e-mail if you use that service.
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