Why You Need a Marketing Calendar

Posted By Larry ~ 15th August 2012

When I talk about marketing campaigns to my clients, they’re often focused on specific tools or tactics designed to increase their bottom line.

But those individual tools and tactics only work if they’re in sync with a bigger, more complete plan… and that plan begins with a marketing calendar.

Your marketing calendar is the outline of things to come… it tells you when new promotions will start and which campaigns you’ll launch when. Think of your marketing plan much like you do your personal calendar – by itself, it isn’t much… but when you start using it, everything else seems to fall into place.

And if that’s not enough to convince you that you need a marketing calendar, here are a few more good reasons:

It Helps Widen Your View

A marketing calendar provides you with a long range view of all the moving pieces that make up your marketing strategy enabling you to coordinate and control this part of your business. Business owners often keep all the details, ideas, and information about marketing their business in their head, which makes it difficult to see conflicts, obstacles, and challenges far enough in advance to mitigate them. When you are looking at your marketing as both an everyday on-going activity and as a long term program, you have more visibility and can act rather than react.

It Helps Keep You on Track

As a business owner, you constantly have to shift priorities, move things around, and take on tasks you weren’t planning to do. This can result in key marketing tasks going undone. Using a marketing calendar can help keep your marketing tasks in perspective when that reprioritizing is happening. It also makes it easier to hold yourself accountable for completing, delegating, or monitoring key marketing activities to ensure they remain on track.

It Keeps You On Budget

This is true on several fronts. Understanding where you plan to spend marketing dollars over the course of the year can help you formulate your overall business budget and ensure you have the cash on hand to fund that great promotion later in the year. It can also help you manage your marketing budget. First, creating the calendar and estimating costs for each area of marketing can give you a realistic view of how much your plan is going to cost to implement. Looking at it this way, as opposed to simply estimating from your marketing plan, can reveal hidden costs and increase the accuracy of your estimates.

It Allows You To Measure

Having a marketing calendar makes it very easy to compare sales and expenses from month-to-month and account for any deviations from your expected results. It also allows you to measure your marketing campaigns and determine their effectiveness.

It Helps You Navigate

I’m a stickler for knowing where I want to go before I head off in any given direction. Your marketing calendar is the navigation tool for your marketing campaigns. It shows you at-a-glance what you’ll be doing two months, six months and even ten months from now, ensuring that you’re always headed in the right direction and focused on the right things.