Getting a marketing calendar up and running is essential for all marketing teams. As a digital campaign manager, for instance, you need to know which campaigns are currently active, what’s planned, and what might overlap with your own initiatives.
For marketing operations teams, calendars are vital to ensure content, campaigns, and experiences are launched swiftly. And if you’re a marketing leader or executive, calendars help you track every team’s activities and quickly adapt plans to meet current market or customer conditions.
Despite this, many marketers still view a marketing calendar like a Google Calendar—a tool for setting dates, then often forgetting them. For a marketing calendar to be truly effective, it should be unified, collaborative, and actionable.
A Unified Marketing Calendar
Marketing calendars are often fragmented, with each team managing its own calendar. Some organizations have partially unified calendars, but these often only reflect current activities, not what’s planned or in progress.
To derive real value from a marketing calendar, it needs to consolidate everything in one place: every team, every type of marketing activity (content, campaigns, experiences), and all planned and live efforts. A unified marketing calendar moves teams from isolated silos to a cohesive view. And it doesn’t have to be complicated—search filters allow teams to drill down to the specific details they need at any moment.
Collaborative Marketing Calendars
Next-generation marketing calendars should foster collaboration across teams. For example, if the commerce team has a product launch scheduled for June 1st, but the marketing elements won’t be ready until July, teams need a shared platform to reassess and align their schedules.
A collaborative marketing calendar provides this, with real-time collaboration features and easy sharing of calendar views. This helps reduce email back-and-forth and enables teams to collaborate directly within visual timelines and calendar views.
Actionable Marketing Calendars
The key to an effective marketing calendar is not just its unified view or collaborative features—it must be actionable.
If dates are misaligned, tasks are overdue, or shifting market conditions require adjustments, an actionable calendar enables teams to address these issues directly. Marketers should be able to flag issues, adjust dates, or reassign tasks to available resources right from within the calendar.
Choose a Marketing Calendar That Drives Agility
A powerful, agile marketing calendar removes mundane tasks and empowers marketers to take action, realign campaigns, track key milestones, and collaborate seamlessly across the organization.