Are you an e-commerce marketer feeling overwhelmed by the chaos of planning and executing your marketing strategies? You're not alone.
With the endless tasks and shifting priorities, it's easy to lose sight of the big picture.
But fear not! There's a solution that can revolutionize the way you work: a well-crafted marketing calendar.
Imagine saying goodbye to the chaos and hello to clarity and organization. No more scrambling to throw together last-minute campaigns or missing out on key opportunities.
With a solid marketing calendar in place, you can take control of your schedule, stay ahead of the game, and drive real results for your online store.
Your marketing calendar will help you immensely with staying on track with the content you plan to publish. You’ll always know what’s coming up and when you need to prepare for a campaign or seasonal moment.
In this comprehensive guide, we'll walk you through the step-by-step process of creating a marketing calendar.
From choosing a tool to planning engaging content and maximizing your marketing channels, we've got you covered.
Let's dive in!
What is a marketing calendar?
A marketing calendar serves as a strategic tool for planning and organizing all marketing activities and campaigns within a specified timeframe, typically ranging from a month to a year.
It provides a comprehensive overview of upcoming marketing initiatives, including product launches, promotional campaigns, and content distribution schedules.
By visually mapping out key dates and responsibilities, a marketing calendar helps teams stay aligned, prioritize tasks, and execute campaigns efficiently.
It acts as a central reference point for tracking progress, ensuring timely delivery of marketing materials, and optimizing resource allocation.
Ultimately, a well-designed marketing calendar enables businesses to maintain consistency, drive engagement, and achieve their marketing objectives effectively.
Why are marketing calendars important?
Organization
A marketing calendar helps to keep all marketing activities and campaigns organized in one place, making it easier for teams to stay on track and aligned with their objectives.
Strategic Planning
It allows businesses to plan their marketing initiatives in advance, enabling strategic alignment with overarching business goals and objectives.
Improved Time Management
With clear timelines and deadlines outlined in the calendar, teams can better manage their time and resources, reducing the likelihood of last-minute rushes or missed opportunities.
Consistency
By scheduling regular and consistent marketing activities, businesses can maintain a steady presence in their target audience's minds, reinforcing brand awareness and loyalty.
Efficient Resource Allocation
A marketing calendar helps to allocate resources, such as budget, manpower, and tools, more efficiently by planning and prioritizing activities based on their importance and impact.
Enhanced Collaboration
It facilitates collaboration among team members by providing visibility into everyone's tasks and responsibilities, promoting teamwork and accountability.
Adaptability
While providing a structured framework, a marketing calendar also allows for flexibility and adaptation to changing market conditions, emerging trends, or unexpected circumstances.
Performance Tracking
Businesses can track the performance of their marketing initiatives more effectively by correlating planned activities with actual results, enabling data-driven decision-making and continuous improvement.
Optimized Communication
By centralizing all marketing plans and updates in one place, a marketing calendar streamlines communication channels, reducing the risk of miscommunication or duplication of efforts.
Increased Productivity
Overall, having a marketing calendar leads to increased productivity as teams can work more efficiently, focus on high-priority tasks, and minimize time spent on ad-hoc planning or firefighting.
What to include in a marketing calendar?
Basic Details and Logistics
Include all the juicy tidbits that team members need to know to get the job done right.
This could include copywriting guidelines, design specifications, target audience personas, and any other relevant information that will help ensure that your campaign hits the mark.
Tasks
Break down each campaign or initiative into actionable tasks that need to be completed.
This could include everything from drafting social media posts and designing email newsletters to scheduling ad campaigns and updating product pages.
Be as specific as possible about what needs to be done and when it needs to be completed.
Task Owners
Who's responsible for making sure each task gets done?
Whether it's your trusty social media guru, your email marketing expert, or your graphic designer, make sure everyone knows what they're responsible for and that there's no confusion about who's doing what.
Dates
Dates are the backbone of your marketing calendar—they provide structure and ensure that everyone is working towards the same deadlines.
Include important dates such as campaign launch dates, content publication dates, milestone checkpoints, and any other deadlines that are critical to the success of your marketing initiatives.
Links
Don't forget about Links! Include links to any assets or resources team members might need to access to complete their tasks.
This could include Google Drive folders, design templates, stock photo libraries, or project management tools. Make it easy for everyone to find what they need, when they need it.
Notes
Think of notes as little snippets of wisdom, reminders, or additional information that provide context or guidance for specific tasks or milestones.
These could include brainstorming ideas, important insights from customer research, reminders about upcoming deadlines, or anything else that might be helpful for your team to know as they work on their tasks.
How to Create a Marketing Calendar: A Step-by-Step Guide for E-Commerce Marketers
1. Choose a tool for your marketing calendar
To get your whole team aligned with your marketing strategy, you need to use one tool for your marketing calendar. There are many options, from a good old spreadsheet to more sophisticated software made for marketing teams.
Ensure that everyone is comfortable with the tool you’ve picked. Otherwise, your calendar will be left in the dust, making your efforts null and void.
2. Develop a plan
You need a solid strategy before implementing a marketing calendar.
Ask yourself:
- What do I want to achieve? What are my marketing goals (e.g. reduce churn, spread awareness, get new leads)?
- What marketing channels will I use?
- What types of content will I publish?
It can also help to go over your company’s existing marketing strategy before formulating a new strategy. Afterward, you can make a plan that will direct you toward achieving your objectives.
Break down the plan into marketing activities, which you can then use to populate your marketing calendar.
3. Identify milestones, tasks, and deadlines
Next, set deadlines and milestones for your marketing activities and determine the tasks needed to achieve those activities.
You can then assign tasks to team members, all while making sure your timeline is realistic. Having a member in charge of each task will help them take ownership and achieve the task.
Make sure to note down co-dependencies or people whose assistance is needed to complete the task, aside from the key member in charge.
4. Brainstorm content ideas and plan content in advance
Your marketing calendar will help you immensely with staying on track with the content you plan to publish. You’ll always know what’s coming up and when you need to prepare for a campaign or seasonal moment.
However, you still need to come up with ideas for posts, articles, ebooks, and other content pieces you want to disseminate to your audience.
When you’re stuck, look to other brands or your competitors for inspiration. Whether it’s for New Year, Black Friday, or Thanksgiving, you can find inspiration on Panoramata’s wide database of emails, ads, SMS, and landing pages.
For email inspiration, go to Emails Search and type in a keyword or brand you want to see.
Similarly, for ads, go to Ads Search and look for any holiday, event, brand or keyword you need inspiration for.
Landings, SMS, and flow search engines serve a similar function but are dedicated to landing pages, SMS campaigns, and email flows, in that order.
Brainstorming content to fill your marketing calendar is that simple. Plus, you can save any ad, email, and other content pieces on the platform to personal lists that you can share with anyone, even those without a Panoramata account.
Another useful feature on Panoramata is Calendar Search. This feature lets you know when your competitors mention a certain keyword in their emails or ads.
Do you ever find yourself wondering when they start to publish content related to summer, winter, Black Friday, and the like? With Calendar Search, you’ll get your answer quickly.
Here’s how to use this for planning your content.
- Type in a brand name in the search bar. It can be a competitor or any brand you want to take inspiration from.
- Click on the brand.
- Go to the Calendar tab to have a calendar view of their post history.
- Type in a search term (e.g. back to school) to filter the calendar view.
5. Update the calendar regularly
Finally, after you’ve put your calendar in action and created the content, you should keep it up-to-date and accurate. Don’t let your prior efforts go to waste and ensure that the calendar is organized and easy-to-understand.
You can have a member of your team in charge of updating the calendar and assigning tasks and set a frequency for how many times in a month or year you’ll update the calendar.
When implemented correctly, a marketing calendar will enhance, not impede, your workflow. In time, you’ll be wondering how you managed to survive without it!
By now, you know how to create a marketing calendar, great!
Let's take it to the next level.
What does spying on your competitor’s calendar sound like? Don't be guilty of the word "spying" because finding out what your competitors have been doing is legal to efficiently assess how you stack up against them.
Monitoring your competitors' content calendar is part of the game.
Let’s begin.
Steps on How to Spy the Content Calendar of Your Competitors
Content is king - a popular saying that when applied efficiently will yield great results for your brand's overall marketing performance.
1. Go to the Calendar Tab on Panoramata to get an overview
On your Panoramata dashboard, go to Brands Search to look for a competitor's brand profile. Let's take Dose as an example.
Once you get to the Brand Page, click on the Calendar tab. Here, you will see an organized calendar view of the email newsletters sent by the brand as well as the ads they published.
At a glance, you'll be able to see how active the brand is in terms of its email marketing and advertising efforts. When you hover your mouse over a specific date, it will show the activity on that chosen date. The green color shows the ads published while the light green color shows the newsletters sent by the brand on that particular day.
2. Filter by Emails and Ads
You can use the drop-down arrow at the right side of the screen to filter by Emails and Ads.
3. Search for any keyword to see specific content and campaign
You can use the Search feature to find any campaign your competitor might have marketed. Simply type in a keyword or phrase on the search bar to reveal the assets (i.e. emails and ads) where these keywords were mentioned. You can also filter out emails and ads to refine your search. Let's say you want to know when your competitor started mentioning the word "autumn" in their emails and ads.
You can also click on the preview to go to that specific email or ad campaign where you can see the entire asset including the subject line and preheader, metrics like email score, and more related emails. Here's where you can also download it, save it to your list, or tag a teammate and comment.
You can search for practically any keyword or campaign like Black Friday, summer season, Olympics, back-to-school, etc. to view your competitors' related content and their calendar.
How to Analyze the Content Strategies of Your Competitors
The real power of being able to view your competitor's content calendar lies in the ability to analyze their strategy. Uncovering and examining the content strategies of your competitor brands will let you translate them into actions to improve your own efforts.
When do they promote a sale? How frequently do they launch a product or a collection?
When do they start campaigning about Black Friday, Thanksgiving, Mother's Day, Father's Day, and all the important holidays in the region? How long do these campaigns last?
What are the types of content they publish - promotional, informative, relational?
Are they utilizing emails more than ads, or ads more than emails?
You might have seen a pattern each year in their content publishing that you might want to adapt to develop or improve your own scheduling.
These types of questions can be answered directly from their marketing calendar.
Knowing these details and other important marketing moves you might think of is an essential aspect of your competitive analysis and should not be missed.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the elements of a marketing calendar?
A marketing calendar usually consists of important dates, campaigns, promotions, and content themes mapped out over a specific period, like a month or a year.
How do you organize a marketing schedule?
To organize a marketing schedule, start by setting clear goals and understanding your target audience's preferences and behaviors.
Then, create a timeline outlining key milestones, campaigns, and content releases, making sure to allocate resources and tasks efficiently among team members.
Regularly review and adjust the schedule based on performance metrics and market trends to stay agile and effective.
What should be included in a marketing content calendar?
A marketing content calendar should include details such as content topics, publication dates, platforms, keywords, and any relevant visuals or links.
