Over the last year marketing and creative teams have stepped up and taken on a significant role in helping their organizations achieve their objectives by taking on bigger roles, more responsibilities, and providing creative solutions for unprecedented problems. Keeping track of all that work is critical. Here are 7 types of calendars that marketing and creative teams can use to organize all their work.
Content Calendar
A central content calendar is an important tool for managing your content production. Content calendars are a one-stop-shop to quickly see the production and publishing schedule for the month. One useful strategy is to make multiple content calendars. For example, one with only publish dates, so you know exactly when everything is going live. You could also build content calendars for specific content projects, like an eBook, to help visualize key milestones for that content piece. It’s also a good idea to break out certain types of content, like blogs and social media, into their own calendars.
Blog Calendar
It can be very beneficial to have a blog calendar separated out from the general content calendar because blogs tend to be so active. Common blog publishing schedules range from once a week to every day – so it’s important to keep track of what is being published and when. Use a dedicated blog calendar to regulate and optimize your blog publishing schedule.
Social Media Calendar
As with blog calendars, dedicated social media calendars make it easy to manage a high volume of posting social media posting. Cross reference your Blog and Content calendars to plan when content will be posted to social. This is also helpful for visualizing the distribution of your social posts throughout the month and optimize performance. Also consider building a calendar for each platform you post to (e.g. Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook) to take a deeper dive into your social strategy.
Campaign Calendar
This is a great high-level calendar that shows you what campaigns are happening during any given month. You can then click into the individual campaigns to get more details. You can further customize this view by narrowing the view to only show campaigns that certain people are working on. For example, you could set up a view to see only your own campaigns, or if you have direct reports you could make a view for each direct report to see the campaigns each of them are working on.
Organizational Goal Tracking
One of the biggest challenges that marketing and creative teams face is showing the business how they directly contribute to organizational objectives. One way to effectively showcase your team’s contribution to the organization is to create a calendar that tracks all the work done by the team that rolls up to a specific objective. For example, if the organization has a goal to increase engagement with customers via a virtual user conference, the creative team could tag all the work they do to support that conference and aggregate it in a calendar view. You can create a calendar for each organizational objective that your team works on.
Email Marketing Calendar
Email is one of the most powerful tools in the marketing team’s arsenal. However, it can become complex to track the send date, content, and audience of all the emails being sent. Of course, it’s critical to keep all this information organized for your emails so that you don’t over-email your audience, effectively spamming them, or, on the other end of the spectrum, neglect a segment of your audience and fail to engage them properly. Build calendars for planned emails by tagging based on audience segments.
Customer Communications Calendar
Keeping tabs on customer-focused communication is essential. We don’t want to over-communicate or send duplicate communications and be disrespectful of our customer’s time and attention. Additionally, it is important to target messaging based on important customer segments, like which product they subscribe to, the size of the team, or if they have opted into an early-adopter program for new features. Tag all your customer communications to bring them together in one calendar to coordinate your customer outreach.
Learn more about how you can build these marketing and creative calendars in inMotion ignite by scheduling a demo today.
Elise Hauser is a product and content marketer with a passion for telling brand stories. She has produced inMotionNow’s annual Creative Management Report for 4 years, webinars, content sessions for major industry events reaching audiences of 11,000+, and of course, countless blog posts. When Elise isn’t writing about the marketing and creative industry at inMotionNow she is teaching economics and hanging out with her cat, Tucker, at her home in Raleigh, NC.