Happy first day of spring, the season of new beginnings.
With the entire country still operating under heavy Alert Level restrictions, we are continuing our theme of working on the business this week with a look into marketing calendars.
Hopefully, by now, most of us are on the same page with regards to the importance of profitable marketing to grow your business, but how many of you are winging your social media posts and promotional emails, and how many are actually planning to impress your customers through the use of a marketing calendar? They don’t say ‘those who fail to plan, plan to fail’ for no reason.
With a lot of business owners finding themselves with a bit of extra time up their sleeves lately to plan for what operations will look like in Level 2 and beyond, we think now is a great time to consider what a marketing calendar might look like for your business.
And don’t worry, we know all business owners are time-poor, regardless of Alert Levels, so we’ve made it super simple for you all and put together a downloadable template for you to personalise.
Firstly, a bit about what a marketing calendar is…
A marketing calendar is pretty much what it says on the label; a plan of what marketing activities you intend to initiate for your target audience, when you’ll do it and what channel(s) you’ll use.
Ideally, a business planning its marketing strategy will take a quarterly, or even annual, approach to its marketing activities, mapping out the what, when and where across your term of choice. It’s important you plot out every activity you intend to run, so you can spot patterns, potential overlaps and allow your team plenty of time to plan ahead.
Crucially, a marketing plan must be flexible. We’ve all learned the hard way that plans can change, or be forced to change, so make sure you keep some freedom in the framework.
There’s no need to start from scratch
We’ve put together a sample marketing calendar, looking across a full 12 month term. This is completely editable, so you can download it for yourself and enter in your own company’s details.
Take a look at the type of information we’ve included and the level of detail required to generate a profitable ROI from your marketing investment.
To download, simply click on the link below, and type ‘download’ in the search bar at the top of the spreadsheet. From here you can click on ‘download a copy’ and save it to your desktop.
Remember to make sure everyone who needs it has access to view and input into the calendar. There’s no sense having multiple versions of the same document saved on different computers. One ‘live’ and editable marketing calendar is best.
Show me a marketing calendar in action
Here’s how you can expect to benefit from this extra layer of planning…
1. It builds discipline into your operations: Having a marketing calendar helps everyone involved ensure marketing activities are planned, executed and measured properly. It leaves no room for excuses and allows you to manage all the moving parts we juggle daily.
2. It helps you manage return on investment: It’s important that executed marketing activities are carefully tracked and evaluated. That way you can determine the ROI of each initiative and dial up, or down, as required next time.
3. Assists with future planning: A marketing calendar allows you to keep track of what worked historically and also allows you to spot patterns and new opportunities to try out in future.
We can help further
If you’d like a little more help with pulling together a highly-functional and profitable marketing calendar for your business, we can certainly help. You may even be eligible for subsidised business support.
If you’re a tourism business based in Queenstown Lakes District, Southland District; Kaikōura District, Mackenzie District, or Westland District, we have industry specific support to offer you.