Over the past few weeks, I’ve been sharing the step-by-step process I take when creating a business strategic marketing calendar for the year. Today, we’ll wrap up this three-part series by diving into the final stage: Finalize & Execute!

But first a quick recap of how we got here. I shared the 5 reasons every business needs an integrated marketing calendar. Convinced, you got started by spending a half-day taking stock of the previous period’s results. Then, you mapped this year’s plan over last year’s winners to create a first draft. Today, you’re going to finalize and create a plan to execute your strategic marketing calendar!

First, zoom out and look at your strategic marketing calendar for holes.

Meet with your team, or sequester yourself in a coffee-filled room for a few hours, and take a look at this strategic marketing calendar draft from a 30,000 foot view. Do you see any glaring gaps? Do you see any areas where your messaging is over-saturated?

Think about your marketing cadence and make sure you’re consistently showing up for your customers. Do you promise a monthly email and social media posts every day? A weekly LinkedIn article? A quarterly white-paper? Make sure you have this content on the calendar, even if you’re still a little fuzzy on the exact topic.

Consistency is key.

Take it from me, the last thing you want to do is commit to an over-saturated marketing calendar. Inevitably, you’ll miss a few posts and end up scrapping the whole thing because you are overwhelmed by all the content to create. But don’t get lazy and just do what you did last year, either. Consider increasing the frequency of your blog posts, or adding one or two extra social media posts each week. Push yourself and your team to produce quality content on a schedule that fits the needs of your audience.

It’s okay to not have every detail firmly in stone. It’s also totally okay to come up with some of your content on the fly, based on what might pop up in the moment for your business. Just don’t leave the majority of your strategic marketing calendar up in the air like this. That’s pretty much the opposite of strategic.

Make sure each program has a clearly defined goal and measure for success

With your marketing efforts “peanut-buttered out” over your strategic marketing calendar draft, it’s time to make sure that all your planned content has a worthy goal to achieve.

All content has a cause, every post has a purpose.

On your strategic marketing calendar, create a column for you to declare your content’s cause or goal. Take the time to clearly identify what your target is and how you’ll measure it. If you can’t identify how this program can help your business, it probably isn’t worth the time and energy you’ll put in to execute it.

Is your goal revenue? Set a target sales number. If your goal is engagement, what is the measure you’ll use to know if the content was successful? Is it “likes”, comments, or shares? By setting a clear goal for each piece of content you produce, you ensure that when the time comes, you’re writing and designing the content with your end goal in mind.

Having a measurement in place to illustrate the effectiveness of your content is vital!

Is your measure for success total revenue? If you don’t have a consistent way of tracking that revenue, you’re going to have a hard time pinpointing whether the program accomplished your goals. If your goal is website traffic but you’ve never logged into your analytics platform (or you’re not even sure you have one), set things in motion now to ensure that your traffic can be and is being measured.

Assign roles and responsibilities for execution

Another column in my default strategic marketing calendar template is “Who’s Responsible?” I might argue that it is the most important column on the template. If you don’t make it clear who owns the production and publishing of your strategic marketing calendar, it’s very likely that your content will never get off the ground. Even if you have a dedicated blog content producer, email marketing coordinator, and social media manager, write their names in the “Who’s Responsible” column for accountability and visibility. Make it clear who owns which channels and activities now. Avoid confusion and frustration later.

While you’re at it, set a deadline for when you want the content completed. Do you want a week of buffer before content is supposed to go live? Are you comfortable with approving content the day before your go-live date? Set deadlines based on your business need, but make sure that whoever is responsible is also clear on when they need to get things done.

Erica, you keep talking about who’s responsible. What if the answer is always “Me” ????

This one goes out to all the solopreneurs and one-woman/one-man shows! If this is your first foray into having a strategic marketing calendar, you’re about to fall in love with batch work and outsourcing.

I have written here before about how I produce my own marketing content. I batch it. Writing happens on Monday, copy editing Tuesday, building posts within WordPress Wednesday, and so on. I find that keeping my work output in one specific environment (e.g. Google docs for blog and email content, Canva for social media images), I produce much more efficiently. Not only am I keeping my work tools limited to a small set, I also keep my brain focused on one kind of output.

I can’t sing the praises of batch work enough. I dedicate the first two hours of every work day to producing my own strategic marketing calendar content, and rotate the types of content I’m working on daily. It is magic, and it works for me. It might work for you. Try it!

Pay a professional!

Even with batch work speeding up my content output significantly, there are certain types of work that I am simply not qualified to do. Photography? Not in my wheelhouse. If something needs an amazing image to go with it, I’ll either pay for stock imagery or pay one of my very talented friends to help me make it happen. Anything related to hardcore coding or website architecture? Oh yea, that’s getting outsourced, too. I don’t possess the skills necessary to do those kinds of projects, and the time for me to develop those skills is worth the money I pay experts to do the thinkin’ for me.

By having a strategic marketing calendar produced well in advance, I can see when these kinds of projects or assets are coming down the pipe so I can appropriately schedule my freelance friends. Not having to scramble, and therefore having the best possible content ready to go right on time, is a magical by-product of having a strategic marketing calendar for the year.

A quick note on frequency and format:

I like to plan for the year ahead, then get granular on a quarterly basis so that I’m on a 90-day “review and adjust” cycle. You might find this is overkill, or want to review and adjust on a monthly basis. Quarterly is what makes sense for me, and for my clients. You do you.

Summin’ it up

The “Finalize and Execute” stage is the most important part of the strategic marketing calendar process. This is where the rubber meets the road. Take the time to review and finalize your strategic marketing calendar with all the members of the team involved in executing it, so that there is alignment and buy-in. Clearly state what your goal for every activity is, and make sure you have a key performance indicator (KPI) identified to help you know that you’ve accomplished your goal. Assign (on paper and visible!) who is responsible for content creation and on what timeline. Remember, if everybody is accountable, nobody is accountable.

If you’d like to get started and have a guide through the process, give me a shout. I love leading these conversations and would be honored for you to entrust me with supporting your strategic marketing calendar development. Contact me for free consultation, and we’ll see if this is the right next step forward for our relationship.