MARKETING SCHEDULING

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1 MARKETING SCHEDULING

2 Scheduling for effective marketing Most businesses and marketing agencies will have a process to help them plan their marketing activities. Effective scheduling enables you to create consistent and continual promotional activity across all of your marketing channels and helps you plan for seasonal events too. By scheduling your marketing in advance, you can focus on being reactive to customers and topical subjects on your social media channels, as well as other forms of digital marketing. You should relate your schedule to any seasonal peaks and troughs in your business, so you can effectively use your marketing activities to drive and increase sales. 2

3 Consider timings for marketing activities The easiest way to plan in advance for any marketing activities is to consider logical timings for your target audience including key times of the year and seasons. For example, an arts club provides after-school activities for children aged between 4 and 11. The sessions usually run from school closing time, 3.30pm, and finish at 5pm. Therefore, if the arts club wants to attract more children to participate in their after-school sessions, they need to consider the daily patterns of their parents before they send out any marketing messages. The main reason for children attending the arts club is due to the fact that parents are working during this time, so posting messages on social media between 3.30pm and 5pm may not be seen. The arts club could consider posting later on in the evening, i.e. after 7.30pm, when parents are more likely to have eaten their evening meal. The arts club also offer summer clubs during the school holidays therefore, they could also consider scheduling a full marketing campaign after the half-term break during May to give parents plenty of time to consider their offering and make bookings. 3

4 Ways to schedule marketing activities There are some simple ways you can schedule your marketing activities in advance we have listed some of the main approaches below: Produce a scheduling plan using an Excel spreadsheet See our Campaign Plan and Social Media Scheduling templates in the resource area. By creating a scheduling plan in Excel, you can easily send to any key stakeholders who may be required to sign this off. Make sure that your plan covers all aspects of your promotional activity and populate with key dates. You can then work from the Excel spreadsheet to populate your online scheduling tool and automate as much of your marketing as possible. Use an online scheduling tool such as Hootsuite, TweetDeck or HubSpot to automate your social media posts. Many Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems also offer scheduling tools for marketing activities - this can be useful, as these interactions will write back to the data for each individual customer allowing you to track and measure response rates. 4

5 Create an editorial calendar to remind you when marketing campaigns are due, or when blogs and social media posts need to be published. By adding reminders to an online calendar, you will be able to keep track of future marketing activities. If you work in a team, you could create a shared online calendar on an system like Outlook or Gmail to ensure that everybody is kept informed of key dates. Ideally, you would undertake all of the above methods to ensure that you have a sound strategy in place for scheduling your marketing activities. When it comes to your marketing campaigns or the creation of regular marketing content, advanced planning will result in a consistent and considered approach instead of always being reactive, which often leads to lower quality marketing activities. 5