Marketing is so important for every type of business (not only digital business) that you can’t let it be by chance. You need to carefully plan your strategies and how to perform them. For this reason, a content marketing calendar would be one of the most important tools in your business arsenal.
In this article, we’ll explore what is a marketing campaign calendar, how to create it, and what digital tools can ease the process and make it more effective.
What is a marketing campaign calendar?
A marketing calendar is a sort of a written road map for your marketing activities.
The first thing you should consider is that when we speak about marketing, we are actually speaking of several different strategies that can include social media marketing, email marketing, advertising on third-party platforms, and more… The steps you need to perform for each of these different strategies should be planned in advance.
So, a marketing calendar example would be one where you decide what kind of content you are going to publish on your Instagram page for the next couple of months, and when you are going to publish each of the content. A similar operation should be made in every area of your marketing strategies so that you end up having a social media marketing calendar, an email marketing calendar, and so on…
Finally, it is also ideal to have all these different calendars grouped in one place, so that every day you know what are the tasks for your marketing campaign.
Marketing Campaign Calendar: why you need one
Now that we know what it is, and before exploring how to create it, let’s take some time to reflect on why you need a content marketing calendar.
You can set up a monthly, yearly, or quarterly marketing calendar: how you do it is not as important as just doing it, because:
- The marketing calendar will help you understand your priorities. And this is also important when it comes to budget. Because marketing has a cost, you need a marketing calendar to understand what to prioritize and how to distribute the budget.
- It gives direction to your marketing activities according to season and trends
- It helps you identify gaps and things that might lack far in advance so that you are always on time to fix things.
These reasons are all important but there is one that it’s the most important of all: having a marketing campaign calendar makes your marketing strategies more effective by making your workflow more effective.
If you don’t have a marketing calendar, you need to go to work every day and figure out how to reach your clients today, how to get them interested in your products or e-commerce… Every day will be a matter of being creative with marketing ideas and then applying those ideas. Other than exhausting, this is ineffective.
If you have a marketing calendar, your work is divided into two different phases:
- The first phase is creative: you decide what your marketing goal is, and how to accomplish it, and you also physically create the content you are going to share or publish. You are also deciding in this phase when to publish every content
- The second phase is only implementing: publish and share the content every day according to your calendar. Then, move on to take care of any other aspect of your business.
How to create a marketing calendar
Just like we’ve mentioned, setting up a marketing calendar requires planning first, and then a physical or digital place through which you can efficiently manage it.
Planning
Your marketing strategy planning should start by considering your marketing goals. Different goals require different strategies.
Set up the strategy
For each of your goals, you can set up a strategy made of social media posts, emails, ads, and more…
Schedule your strategy
You also need to figure out when to publish or share your content. You may not need to only schedule the day on which each content should be published, but also the hour, especially for social media marketing.
What tools can you use for your marketing calendar?
Theoretically, you could choose between the analog and digital alternative but the truth is that the first would be just too ineffective. What you need is marketing calendar software.
There are a lot of marketing calendar software tools out there, and they may have different features. You can choose the tool that you like the most, but you should make sure that it can provide at least the following features (other than, of course, a calendar!):
- Different views: digital calendars can provide the great advantage of letting you view the tasks ahead from different points of view: you can visualize your calendar monthly, weekly, or yearly, by the planned tasks or similar…
- Multi-function: it would be ideal to have all your marketing strategies scheduled within the same calendar; planned emails, posts, and other stuff should all be gathered in one calendar - may be highlighted with different colors.
- It would also be ideal if you could store the text and image you’ll need to publish in the marketing calendar software This way, when you need to post your content, you’ll only need a couple of clicks.
These were the basic features you should require from your marketing calendar software of choice, however, there are some additional features that can make things even easier and more efficient:
- Content editor: the possibility of editing your content from the same software tools that you use to schedule your strategy can save you time, energy, and money.
- Social media integration: some software can be synced with your social media accounts so that you can publish and share your content without leaving your calendar application.
A calendar application that has all these features is perfect: with one tool you can take care of any aspect of your marketing strategy: from the planning to the final publishing operation.
Bonus tip: marketing isn’t everything
We all have heard of this quote at least once: “marketing is the soul of commerce” or “can’t sell if you don’t advertise!”. This is all true, marketing is very important and it has become even more important with time. But it’s not everything - and it’s not your top priority.
Marketing should be one of your priorities, but if you should pick one absolute priority, it shouldn't be marketing: it should be quality.
Marketing is what makes people know about you, your brand, and your products, but the quality is what makes you successful.
In the world of e-commerce, quality goes through both service and products: you need to provide quality products to your customers and you need to provide them efficiently. But how can you reach such a quality standard when you are at the beginning of your career and have limited resources?
Dropshipping with Saleyee.com would be your best option. Saleyee.com is a dropshipping platform, specifically created to provide drop shippers with top-quality products and top-quality services. Other than providing you and your customers with products in all the best-selling categories (with catalogs that are constantly updated), SaleYee also provides you with the tools to stand out from the competition for the quality of your service. These tools include:
- Fast deliveries: SaleYee has warehouses spread all over the world. This is how, when an order is placed, the shipping starts from the lowest warehouse and can be delivered in a couple of days.
- Free deliveries: SaleYee provides free delivery on every order so that you can offer free delivery for all products in your e-commerce
- After-sale support: SaleYee will deal with replacements and refunds on your behalf.
Conclusion: tips for dropshippers
Marketing is important for every digital business and your e-commerce is no exception. For dropshippers, marketing becomes even more important because the competition will be so high.
However, one of the main advantages of drop shipping, especially if you rely on a quality dropshipping company like SaleYee, is that you can delegate a lot to the dropshipping company itself. Your responsibility would be to create your eCommerce and your marketing strategies. When you don’t have to think of fulfilling orders, replacements, or replying to customers it’s easier to plan your marketing strategies carefully.
So, you have no excuses! With our tips and with the help of SaleYee as your dropshipping company, you can start planning your content marketing calendar right now!
