Your business is a well-oiled machine that’s being fed by your marketing efforts. Each prospect and opportunity generated by marketers becomes the veritable gas moving the business forward. The quality of the prospects and opportunities, however, are closely tied to how well your campaigns are orchestrated. Better executed marketing campaigns equal better prospects for the overall business, and that’s a simple fact. Considering how much of an impact marketing execution can have on your bottom line begs the question, ‘Why isn’t your business using a marketing calendar?’
We live in an multi-channel world where your customers have the power to choose how to engage your organization and brand. As customers are increasingly difficult to reach, alignment and consistency of a marketing strategy across channels have become more important than ever before. Organizations need to carry a consistent message across their digital, media, and physical retail spaces.
A marketing calendar can help pull together strategic goals and tactical initiatives while presenting them in a way that the whole organization can digest and rally around. In our experience we’ve found that overlaying strategic goals on top of tactical initiatives in a gantt chart view is generally the clearest way to visualize the overlapping priorities.
Putting together an amazing marketing plan is a great first step, but that plan needs seamless execution to succeed. Marketers that need to drive visibility and adoption throughout their business can use a centralized marketing calendar to expand their reach. The calendar can be made available online so all your employees can access and update it in real-time.
In the same interface, marketers can establish customizable views: each part of the business can focus on the marketing activity that’s relative to them. That means your web team can have an overview of upcoming banners and call-to-actions without seeing clutter from the social media team. If your business units have access to this level of visibility, you’ll notice more cohesive decision-making and streamlined execution across your organization.
And, the calendar makes it a lot easier to assess the effectiveness of your marketing strategy. You can track the business’ performance against the plan by overlaying metrics and KPIs. With this layered visibility, you’ll be better equipped to make real time decisions and help the business achieve it’s targets by using the correct levers. Whether that’s adding an additional Adword campaign or decreasing your print circulation for a particular week, you’ll be able to monitor performance in real-time.
To learn more about building a marketing calendar checkout our free eBook!
