Every business should have an integrated marketing calendar.

I’m borderline obsessed with the integrated marketing calendar, because of this:

And also because I have seen how having an integrated marketing calendar can amplify a business’s marketing efforts significantly (my own included).

What is an integrated marketing calendar?

It’s a map of your marketing and biz activities for the year to come, including promotions, events, seasonal themes and holidays. You can put it in a Google Calendar or create an Excel spreadsheet. Shoot, use a giant desk calendar for all I care!

Whether you’re a solopreneur like me, a small business with a handful of staff, or a large corporation taking over the world, your business will benefit from having an integrated marketing calendar!

Here are 5 reasons why your business needs an integrated marketing calendar:

An integrated marketing calendar keeps everybody on the same page

With multiple channels, customer touchpoints, and players involved, sometimes it is hard for everybody involved in marketing to know what their coworkers are up to.

In my previous agency career, our team was only actively involved in email marketing. Another agency or internal team members managed social media. Websites rarely got updated. Some activities at the brick & mortar location never made it to the website, or social, or email. And who knows what was happening with advertising. Because these departments and marketing channels were operating somewhat independently, they missed out on major opportunities to increase each other’s effectiveness.

A simple integrated planning session and calendar ensures that releases, online promotions, and onsite events are visible and reinforced in all channels.

An integrated marketing calendar identifies where there are holes in your communications strategy, so that you can create a plan to fill them

In addition to having your business and marketing activity visible for all channels and teams, having an integrated marketing calendar gives a quick visual for where you might be light on messaging, either at the organizational level or at the specific activity level.

Many of the businesses I’ve worked with have seasonal peaks and valleys. Our local tourism industry is hoppin’ in summer and fall. The winter and spring are more challenging. In the wine industry, heavy ecommerce pushes and wine club shipments were timed in the spring and fall. Extreme temperatures in the summer and winter made shipping alcohol a challenge. Whether you’re in a service industry or selling a consumable product, odds are something about the seasons is going to come into play with how your business performs.

When you’re looking at a 12 month calendar, you can see these holes and be strategic about how you want to fill them. Is there an 8 week dead-zone on your calendar? Come up with a playful online challenge to fill the gap. Does your upcoming product launch have email and web support, but no social media or onsite planned activity? Your integrated marketing calendar would help you see this ahead of time. Thought and intention can then be put into filling the holes in advance, proactively.

An integrated marketing calendar helps you be consistent

Cadence is important. Relevance is more so. Having an integrated marketing calendar helps with both.

Do you tell email subscribers they’ll be receiving a monthly newsletter? GET IT ON THE CALENDAR. Without a plan and a deadline, it’s much easier to overlook that commitment you made to your audience. Pretty soon, six weeks have gone by and you still haven’t sent your subscribers any email. You panic momentarily, then make one of two moves: you either a) slap together an email with little care to how it fits into your overall business objectives and serves your audience, or b) decide forget it, nobody said anything about missing it anyway and promise yourself you’ll hit it hard next week.

Which, let’s be honest, you probably won’t do. Not because you’re a bad business person or even because you are a regular promise-breaker… BECAUSE YOU’RE HUMAN.

By having a shared calendar with important dates and deadlines clearly marked, you’ll be able to see if you need to add any communications. You’ll also see if you are heavy in one particular medium. Maybe your email list is getting pounded, but you don’t have any social media posts scheduled for days or weeks!

How much communication is too much communication, E?

Oh, I wish there was a universal answer to this question. So much of this is business and audience dependent.

Here’s my recommendation.

Start by taking a look at what promises you’ve made to your customers already. If you promised at opt-in that you would only email your customers once per quarter, then put four emails on your yearly calendar. Don’t mess with that number without first letting your customers know.

If you haven’t made any promises to your customers about cadence, then TEST IT. Create a cadence you want to test out for one quarter, and track your customer engagement (opens, clicks, unsubscribes for email, comments, likes, shares, etc. for social media) along the way. If you tweak that cadence the next quarter, either up or down, does your engagement increase or decrease in a correlating fashion?

Are you still at a loss for where to start? I would recommend that you email at least once per month. Post to social media for your business 3-5x per week per platform, minimum. Use that as a baseline and see where it gets you.

An integrated marketing calendar creates clarity on who is responsible for what.

Ever heard the phrase “If everybody is responsible, then nobody is” ? Or did I just make that up?

One column I have included in my default Integrated Marketing Calendar template is a “Who’s Responsible” field.

Assigning clear roles and responsibilities for who creates content and sends communications is imperative! It is vital to ensuring your marketing calendar is actually EXECUTED and not just a pretty visual on the wall.

What if I’m a one-man show?

Solopreneurs unite!

I’m currently working towards having my integrated marketing calendar content produced at least three weeks out (almost there.  I have found batch work to be really effective in helping me to accomplish this goal. I bang out a few blog posts on one day, a few Instagram images another, a few Pins the next. It is a much more efficient way of working for me, because I operate in one “mode” for a set period of time. Writing content uses a different part of my little brain than using Canva to create great images for social media. Building emails in my ESP is different than creating the content and pulling together the images.

This is the system that is working best for me. Find one that works for you and stick to it.

Having an integrated marketing calendar makes it easy to see what you did, what worked, and what didn’t, so that your marketing efforts can become more effective.

The integrated marketing calendar template that I have created for my own business has built-in tracking mechanisms to help me monitor the effectiveness of the content I’m producing.

• I start with a goal in mind (e.g. revenue, registrations, comments, likes).
• I choose which metric I can use to determine if I accomplished that goal.
• Then I designate time on my calendar every week to review the previous week’s performance and update my calendar with the results.

This keeps me honest, first of all. The block of time I hold sacred on my work calendar for this review is an important investment in my business success, and I do my best to take it seriously.

But even better?

My integrated marketing calendar creates a roadmap for me for the next year. By keeping track of the results of my marketing efforts, at yearly planning time I can very simply scrap underperforming content and double down on the stuff that works.

Hello, streamlined planning and a more strategic, data-informed marketing plan!

Summin’ it up

Creating a strategic, integrated marketing calendar for your business is one of the most important investments that you can make.

You’ll have a visual guide to help you ensure consistency and accountability in your marketing campaigns. You’ll be able to easily identify opportunities for your marketing channels to support one another more effectively. And the time and energy you invest now will not only help you get a better return on your marketing investment, it will streamline your planning in the future.

If you want to start 2019 with strategic marketing focus, I’d love to help you create your own integrated marketing calendar. My process starts with an entire gettin’ to know ya phase, which helps me understand where you’re at and where you’d like to go… so let’s get to know each other today, okay?