Ditch that spreadsheet, it’s time to automate your marketing calendar

Marketo Marketing Calendart
James T Fletcher
CEO, Principal Consultant

23/1/2018

Marketing calendars are the bane of our existence, the painfully disconnected spreadsheet that no one ever really looks like until their boss gets a b*llocking for not knowing what is going out and when. Granted this is a ‘batch and blast’ culture and it’s (for our liking) way too common in the marketing automation space.

Importance of the marketing calendar

The frustrating part is that a Marketing Calendar can be a very powerful tool for marketing to align with sales (and other departments too! Why are we always so mean to sales? 🙂

Here are a few reasons it’s super important:

  • “Air traffic control” – what’s going on and when also when do we have a good time to send something!
  • Overview of activities – it’s obvious, but sometimes it’s easier to show a volume of activity against a calendar view to get a global view of all your activity, including social media activity.
  • Marketing team planner – it views any communication gaps and/or opportunities.

We’re a fan of building lifecycle marketing campaigns targeting our prospects at different stages of our lifecycle – everything from a known visitor to a paying and loyal customer. So using a marketing calendar can be a bit different in this use case.

Marketing calendars for lifecycle nurture campaigns

If you’re running nurture campaigns (or in Marketo terminology Engagement Programs) the benefit of using a calendar is you will be able to see the recurrences of your campaigns, so if you’re sending every week, every six weeks or every six months you’ll see those campaigns flagged up.

Marketo calendar functionality

Now you may know we’re fans of Marketo – and we specialise in helping people build maturity within their implementations. Well, Marketo has this wonderful function available in some subscriptions or as an add-on whereby you can ‘automate’ your marketing calendar function. Unlike  Google calendar, Marketo’s marketing calendar basically does all the hard work for you!!! 

Here’s how it works:

It’s the industry’s first marketing calendar to fuse campaign planning and execution, helping global marketing teams coordinate better, move faster, and get better results than ever before.

Need some help getting yours set up? Contact Us