Easy methods to Create a Advertising Calendar You’ll Really Use

It doesn’t matter what sort of enterprise I’ve labored for through the years, my staff has all the time pressured the significance of a advertising calendar — after which by no means made one.

A advertising calendar is important to retaining a staff organized and productive, however creating and sustaining one may be intimidating with out the appropriate steering. So, if you happen to’re studying this hanging your head in disgrace, don’t fear; it is a protected area. And immediately, we’re breaking the cycle.

Let’s unpack the best way to create a advertising calendar you’ll truly use.

What’s a advertising calendar?

A advertising calendar is a schedule of your upcoming advertising actions and necessary dates. It covers a month, quarter, and even 12 months and paperwork product launches, social media posts, weblog articles, gross sales, and reside occasions. Social media calendars, content material calendars, and occasion calendars are additionally examples of forms of advertising calendars.

At its core, a advertising calendar is fairly easy. It’s only a schedule of your staff’s upcoming advertising actions and necessary dates. Consider it like a trip itinerary however with fewer excursions and extra weblog articles — that are far more enjoyable anyway, proper?

Some corporations might go for a single advertising calendar, which supplies them a high-level overview of every little thing scheduled in a given month, quarter, or 12 months, whereas others favor a number of advertising calendars devoted to particular actions, like a social media or editorial calendar.

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Any complexity with a advertising calendar (like a trip itinerary) relies on how detailed your staff needs to get and the way you propose to make use of it, however extra on that shortly.

What ought to a advertising calendar embody?

Whatever the finer nuances of your advertising calendar, there are a number of “huge ticket” milestones you must account for it doesn’t matter what. These embody:

• Campaigns
• Product Launches
• Gross sales
• Webinars/Stay Occasions
• Trade Conferences
• Content material Publication
• Emails
• Holidays
• Experiments/Exams

These milestones can dramatically affect purchaser conduct. Noting them on a advertising calendar will assist you to plan and reply accordingly.

Relying in your staff’s wants and workflows, you may additionally wish to embody particulars just like the platform or channel, challenge description, assignees, deadlines, standing, and useful resource hyperlinks in your advertising calendar — however the kind of advertising calendar typically dictates this.

Kinds of Advertising Calendars

In my expertise, many groups profit from activity-specific advertising calendars slightly than only one common calendar.

With all the actions that fall below advertising, activity-specific calendars filter noise so you may give attention to the appropriate info on the proper time. Having several types of advertising calendars additionally offers accountable groups extra freedom to customise the calendar as wanted.

For instance, my advertising profession has virtually all the time revolved round an editorial or content material calendar. “Sorry, can’t do lunch. I’ve to schedule an article for tomorrow,” was a typical sound chunk for me.

A peek at my content material calendar in HubSpot circa 2017. Picture Supply

Each month, I revealed 15-20 weblog articles per week, so a devoted editorial calendar was a should. I created a calendar with the upcoming titles and their editorial/web optimization tips, publish dates, URLs, draft deadlines, assigned writers, and campaigns.

Because the month progressed, I reviewed this calendar every day to know what was arising, what was full, and what was up subsequent. It was the easiest way to maintain my work organized, provide transparency, talk with my writers and stakeholders, and maintain the corporate’s weblog operating easily.

However this is only one sort of promoting calendar it’s possible you’ll discover helpful.

Another standard advertising calendars embody:

• Marketing campaign Calendar: This high-level calendar reveals each main marketing campaign you’re operating throughout a selected interval. Campaigns might be centered on the launch of a brand new product, a vacation, or perhaps a content material provide. The gadgets on this calendar will possible decide milestones in your activity-specific calendars (i.e., In case you’re launching a brand new analysis report, it’s possible you’ll put a associated weblog article in your editorial calendar or a promotional e mail in your e mail calendar).
• Occasions Calendar: Do you host quite a lot of webinars? How about in-person occasions? That is the place for them. Like your campaigns, occasions typically have associated actions that present up in your different calendars. Take HubSpot’s INBOUND occasion. Whereas the INBOUND Crew has its personal occasions calendar, the HubSpot Weblog Crew additionally has INBOUND-related content material we monitor on our editorial calendar.
• Electronic mail Calendar: Electronic mail advertising is much from useless. With this calendar, you’ll see what emails you’re sending and when to keep away from spamming your viewers. This calendar ought to embody the ship dates and instances, audiences, and campaigns hooked up to every e mail. Tapping our INBOUND instance once more, that is the calendar that may ensure we aren’t hitting contacts with a gross sales pitch too incessantly.
• Editorial or Content material Calendar: It is a schedule of the content material you publish, possible your weblog. Like mine, I’d advocate it embody publish dates, draft deadlines, authors, and marketing campaign info. Relying in your technique, you might have considered trying one thing related for podcasts and movies.
• Social Media Calendar: It is a schedule of what you’re publishing on social media and when. In case your quantity is excessive, it’s possible you’ll wish to get much more granular, with calendars particular to Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and so forth. This makes it simpler to see precisely what’s occurring every platform to keep away from over-posting.

Professional tip: HubSpot has a social media calendar template to get you began, or you may attempt these social media calendar instruments.

Why use a advertising calendar?

In line with CoSchedule, entrepreneurs who’re proactive planners are 3 times extra prone to report success than those that aren’t. As a planner, this is sufficient to get me on board with utilizing a advertising calendar, however some groups want extra convincing. Fortunately, advertising calendars include many advantages:

Figuring out Priorities

Undecided what to work on? Advertising calendars are one of many best methods to determine work priorities.

If you’re caught, simply take a peek at your advertising calendar to see what’s on the horizon (I’d advocate wanting one to 2 weeks forward). This gives you a greater concept of what duties are time-sensitive and should be completed to remain on monitor.

For instance, let’s say it’s the final week of November and your small business often runs an enormous sale for the vacation season. Noting the sale in your advertising calendar reminds you to prioritize e mail promotion, social media posts, and every other actions main as much as the December launch.

Encourages Proactivity

On a associated word, a advertising calendar might help your staff keep proactive. When one thing is famous on a advertising calendar, it’s much less prone to “sneak up on you.” You’ll see it commonly and be inspired to work forward, area out duties to fulfill your deadlines, and keep away from engaged on one thing final minute.

Crew Alignment

With so many shifting items, it may be troublesome for advertising groups to remain on the identical web page. A advertising calendar creates one supply of fact to your most necessary info and priorities.

If the product staff is releasing a brand new function to your providing, as an example, having the launch in your advertising calendar will flag it as one thing necessary everybody ought to concentrate on. It additionally lets the staff know assist could also be wanted from content material or social media to hit this milestone.

We not too long ago went by way of this at HubSpot with the launch of Highlight. Highlight is HubSpot’s bi-annual product showcase, which brings collectively our newest improvements throughout the shopper platform into one visually participating net expertise for our viewers.

With its inaugural launch in April 2024, the product staff developed a complete advertising plan to faucet different groups, however they tracked progress on their very own calendar.

Group

Maybe this goes with out saying, however the greatest cause to make use of a advertising calendar is to maintain you organized. It brings collectively your most important info in a transparent, easy-to-understand format and communicates priorities at a look.

With out an up-to-date advertising calendar, essential duties could also be extra prone to be forgotten or completed haphazardly.

Easy methods to Create a Advertising Calendar

Okay, right here’s the laborious half: Really creating your advertising calendar.

Growing a advertising calendar takes time and cautious consideration to ensure nothing necessary is missed. To make this rather less intimidating, I’ve damaged down 5 steps that can assist you get began.

Whereas it might not be potential to forecast all actions a 12 months forward, I counsel beginning with the massive image after which zooming in on the subsequent quarter and month.

Mapping out advertising plans month-to-month or quarterly gives extra flexibility and flexibility for issues the world won’t see coming. (Like oh, I don’t know, the COVID-19 pandemic.)

Let’s begin from the highest.

1. Establish your key dates and milestones.

After all, step one in creating your advertising calendar is deciding what must be included.

Advertising handles so many various duties it’s straightforward to neglect one thing, so don’t do that in a vacuum.

Seek the advice of with stakeholders and representatives out of your main advertising departments about what must go in your advertising calendar (e.g., product advertising, comarketing, or partnerships). Pay attention to the gadgets we mentioned earlier, together with product launches, holidays, business occasions, gross sales, and different important cases that may affect your advertising campaigns.

For this step, I like to recommend protecting huge milestones already decided for the whole 12 months. In the beginning of every quarter and month, you may revisit and refine occasions as wanted.

2. Set your useful objectives.

Together with your landmarks locked in, ask your self what you hope to get out of your advertising calendar. What do you wish to accomplish with it? What would you like it to do for you?

Your solutions to those questions will dictate what must be included in your advertising calendars and the way refined they need to be.

Useful objectives could also be issues like having the ability to:

• Tag assignees
• View assignments that haven’t been accomplished but
• Click on out to view reside posts
• Share hyperlinks to repeat and property that associate with a calendar merchandise

The HubSpot Weblog Editorial Calendar on Asana permits our staff to see these particulars and plenty of extra.

It’s sensible to seek the advice of different leaders and implementors to know their objectives. They’ll use your advertising calendar most incessantly, so that you need it to be helpful to them. Speak to your writers, video producers, social media managers, occasion planners, designers, and anybody else getting their palms soiled.

What may this appear to be? Effectively, let’s say your social media staff would love a advertising calendar that paperwork all of their content material and tracks what’s gone out. Realizing this, you’ll create a devoted social media calendar that features particulars on the platform, assignee, artistic, copy, and even hyperlinks to revealed items.

3. Break down your key dates into touchpoints/wants.

Now we’re entering into the nitty gritty with ways. I like to recommend zooming in to your nearest quarter and even month. Getting granular with one thing greater than three months away is a little bit of a attain, so retaining timelines brief will assist maintain them real looking.

Ask your self what every of your upcoming milestones will entail. What promotional property will they want? What groups will it’s worthwhile to faucet?

After all, you gained’t know precisely what your advertising push will appear to be — heck, possibly there will likely be some new, funky development you’ll wish to check out — however having a imprecise concept of the workload will likely be useful in making a timeline.

As an illustration, throughout HubSpot’s Highlight launch, our product staff had a complete content material plan main as much as the massive day, together with movies and emails.

Highlight promotion included movies like this on LinkedIn that includes HubSpot Head of Product Andrew Pitre.

The staff additionally created a complete social media equipment to assist others at HubSpot unfold the phrase.

Take into consideration social media, running a blog, e mail advertising, promoting, video advertising, and different frequent levers you pull in massive campaigns. Jot these down for every of your milestones.

4. Set up tough timelines and schedules.

You might have your key dates and potential to-dos, now it’s time to really get them on a schedule!

Contemplating the common time it takes to plan and create deliverables, develop a tough timeline for every key date, and map them for the weeks and months forward.

Be conscious of staff bandwidth and keep away from overloading or overlapping a number of tasks. Even when one thing is famous prematurely, that doesn’t imply your staff will magically have the ability to do double the work.

If you end up going through a ton of overlap, word that it’s worthwhile to deal with and remedy the bandwidth difficulty when these timelines start.

5. Doc your schedule within the software of your selection.

Excellent news: All of the laborious stuff is behind you. Congrats!

Now, you’ve simply acquired to make it official.

The ultimate step in creating your advertising calendar is getting all the key dates and particulars enter into the software of your selection. This might be as primary as a paper calendar. However for straightforward sharing, accessibility, and updating (all elements you must search for in a calendar software), it’s finest to go digital.

In our subsequent part, we’ll evaluation some examples and my private suggestions.

Advertising Calendar Examples

There are various choices for formally documenting, sharing, and sustaining your advertising calendar, with various complexity. To assist information you, I’ll stroll by way of some standard options and my suggestions.

Easy Spreadsheet

Suppose you’re on the lookout for a easy, low-budget possibility. In that case, you may create your advertising calendar in a easy spreadsheet utilizing Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets (The HubSpot Weblog used G-Cal as their editorial calendar for an embarrasingly very long time).

Let’s have a look at an instance from the combination software Zapier:

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On this simple, no-frills design for a content material advertising calendar, you’ll see columns for:

• Month
• Content material sort
• Subject/Title
• Creator
• Publish date
• Promotion channels
• Key metrics
• Notes
• Hyperlinks

It’s straightforward to seek out and replace the data you want with out being too technical. One thing like that is nice for getting began and will simply be tailored to your wants.

Notice: Whereas not a standard 30-day calendar view, you may type the “publish date” column chronologically to make sure you view issues so as.

HubSpot provides related spreadsheet templates for a social media calendar and editorial calendar. Examine them out!

HubSpot Calendar

Talking of HubSpot, you are one fortunate marketer if you happen to’re a HubSpot Skilled or Enterprise person. In your HubSpot portal, you’ll discover my favourite software for making a advertising calendar utilizing HubSpot Calendar.

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HubSpot Calendar is an easy-to-use digital advertising calendar you’ll discover in your Portal (Advertising > Campaigns).

With it, you may add duties for weblog articles (like I did again in my day), emails, touchdown pages, or customized wants and simply mark them full after they’re completed.

This advertising calendar may be considered by day, week, month, and even as a chronological record. It shows gadgets color-coded by marketing campaign and completely different icons, so it’s a breeze to know what’s occurring at a look.

For my part, if most of your advertising actions are completed by way of HubSpot, HubSpot Calendar is probably the most environment friendly and handy possibility for creating your advertising calendar.

Why? Not solely are you able to create duties to your most typical actions, however you may routinely view different actions accomplished on the platform, like social media adverts and web site pages.

Not like different calendar instruments the place your actions are possible being accomplished on exterior platforms, HubSpot offers you a very holistic view of all of your efforts. It’s also possible to simply entry the finished property from the calendar.

Third-Celebration Apps

In case you’re not a HubSpot person, and a spreadsheet isn’t your fashion, loads of different calendar instruments can get the job completed.

Previously, I’ve used ClickUp and Trello (one other favourite), however Asana and Monday are additionally standard choices.

In case you’re utilizing a third-party app or software program to your advertising duties, there’s additionally a superb likelihood it has a built-in calendar software to assist maintain you organized. Sprout Social, for instance, has a built-in social media calendar for its customers.

Whatever the answer you select, ensure that it’s:

• Straightforward to make use of/replace
• Shareable
• Accomplishes your entire useful objectives

Schedule and keep it up!

It’s not sufficient simply to make a advertising calendar; you’ve acquired to keep it up.

A advertising calendar isn’t any “set and neglect.” It’s a residing and respiratory doc that have to be reviewed and up to date commonly to really be helpful.

So, I’ll depart you with two necessary ideas for sustaining a advertising calendar:

1. Make reviewing/updating your advertising calendar part of your routine.

In my expertise, your staff ought to all the time evaluation your advertising calendar originally of the quarter, originally of every month, after which each week. So, work this into your current conferences and stand-ups.

This routine ensures everyone seems to be on the identical web page about priorities and what they need to work on. It additionally permits your staff to lift flags, ask questions, or talk about modifications.

2. Go away room for flexibility.

Let’s face it, life occurs. Priorities change, as do ways, social climates, purchaser behaviors, and plenty of different issues. So, depart room for flexibility in your advertising calendar.

Simply because one thing was placed on the schedule a couple of months in the past doesn’t imply it’s nonetheless a superb transfer immediately. Have common conversations about what’s in your advertising calendar, and be prepared and keen to pivot. Agility is essential.

With these reminders and the steps outlined above, your staff must be able to usher in a brand new period of group and productiveness with a advertising calendar. I do know I’m!