5 Ways to Market Smarter with our Marketing Calendar

1. Diversify your channels

If you're new to marketing your small business, terms like “multichannel campaign” can be intimidating. Don’t worry—we’re here to help. Multichannel campaigns allow you to interact with customers through a combination of communication tools.

And using multiple channels can go a long way toward making your marketing campaigns more effective. According to Gartner Research, multichannel campaigns outperform single channel campaigns by 300%. And with Mailchimp, all your channels and campaigns can be managed together, along with a calendar to help view and organize them.

If you’re not using multichannel campaigns because they’re too complicated, our marketing calendar can make it all a little easier to manage. For example, the owner of Sawyer’s Bake Shop wants to promote seasonal breads. On Friday, she looks at her marketing calendar and sees she has emails going out the next Monday.

She thinks her audience might need a few reminders before they come into the shop or buy online, and decides to start a social media campaign to run over the weekend as well. Later in the week, she’ll run some digital ads, and by the end of the week, she’s ready to move the last loaves out the door. And for her favorite customers? She’ll add a postcard campaign to say thanks. And it’s all together, in one simple view, so there’s no confusion about what’s happening when.

With our marketing calendar, you can see how your emails, postcards, social posts, and ads work together as a cohesive marketing campaign.

2. Plan ahead

Busy seasons, holidays, and events can sneak up on even the savviest marketers. Our calendar view helps you anticipate important upcoming dates and plan your marketing around them.

Our bakery owner can look at the calendar and see that Valentine’s Day is coming up. She can schedule her promotional emails and social posts, and create her promotional landing page in January, allowing her to concentrate on chocolate croissants and tarts on the big day. And it’s not just for holiday sales—campaigns around events, new product launches, and even the time of year, can all be scheduled in advance.

Grab every promotional opportunity, and avoid the scramble to get your content and information out at the last minute. The marketing calendar helps you see the big picture, while letting you take care of the day-to-day demands of your marketing strategy.

3. Strike a balance

Consistent marketing makes a strong impression on current and potential customers, but it may be hard to determine what “consistent” actually means. Customers want to buy on their time, and some may need to be nurtured or motivated to buy with several messages. There’s always the risk of overwhelming your customers by communicating too frequently, and conversely, you don’t want to miss opportunities by not promoting enough.

Remember the multichannel campaign our bakery owner sent earlier, featuring seasonal breads? Well, she just had another great idea: a social campaign of time-lapse videos of bread as it puffs up while baking. She knows that’s a lot of bread for her social channels because she sees her last bread-based promotion on the calendar. Now, she can time out her posts to make the most impact.

With one glance at our marketing calendar you can quickly see opportunities to add or remove campaigns, striking the right balance for marketing to your customers.

4. Collaborate with your team

It’s not just the owner of Sawyer’s Bake Shop who does the marketing—she also enlists the help of one of the bakers sometimes. Unfortunately, this can lead to confusion, inconsistent messaging, and needless back and forth.

She might schedule a postcard that directs the audience to a shoppable landing page for a promotion. But her baker doesn’t know it and schedules social posts with conflicting messaging. Our marketing calendar facilitates these conversations with its visual layout, and shows all your marketing plans in one clear view, helping your team stay on the same page.

And if you’re working together and find something that needs to be adjusted, it’s easy to make content changes for future campaigns. You can access reports to see the insights from past reports as well, which can help spark ideas on what to do next. And since your calendar is right there, it’s easier than ever to plan ahead—together.

5. Customize and personalize for different audiences

So you've got your marketing scheduled at the right time, but are you sending to the right people? By filtering the marketing calendar by a specific audience, you can do more to personalize the timing and content for each of your campaigns.

For example, Sawyer’s has an audience that’s active on social channels, so they’ll be shown the time-lapse videos mentioned earlier. They have another audience that hasn’t been by the shop in quite a while, and will run a winback campaign for that group. And their super customers, the ones who have been with them since the beginning, deserve some perks, so they’ll receive a discount, sent via postcard.

The marketing calendar is available on all our payment tiers. To get the most out of it, we recommend using it together with scheduled emails and social posts, which are available in our Standard plan.

We developed the marketing calendar to help keep you organized and productive as you keep building and growing your marketing strategy. It’s flexible enough to help you accomplish all your marketing goals, and helps you make the most of your time when it comes to executing multichannel campaigns. Take advantage of the marketing calendar, and become even more confident in your marketing strategy.