We will continue with our marketing efforts as a marketing means that every entrepreneur must to consider. After marketing plan as one of that marketing weapons now we will continue with a marketing calendar as a part of one solid marketing plan.
Marketing tasks, such as brochures, flyers, radio and TV campaigns, mailings, phone calls, networking techniques, etc. must to be managed and implemented in the real time.
A marketing calendar must to be part of any successful marketing plan. Simply, marketing calendar is a 12 month description of what you plan to do about your marketing efforts as an entrepreneur. Yes, this mean that marketing calendar is a written road map for your marketing activities for a period of time. You must to know that your marketing calendar is a dynamic, living document that will change over time.
How to make it?
Marketing calendar is a tool that must to get:
- How you will market,
- Who you will market to,
- How much it will cost,
- When you will market,
- How many potential customers you will reach,
- Results or how many customers you reach with that marketing effort.
The simplest way to make your marketing calendar is to make table in MS Excel or MS Word and put the subtitles as a column for every marketing effort that you plan to get. Marketing calendar may to be in electronic format as .doc or .xls files. Or may to be in printed document version. The format is not so important, but the implementation and content of the marketing calendar.
Most marketing calendars break down the months or weeks of a year and address the marketing activities that will take place in each month or week.
Simplest marketing plan that you must to have will look like this table:
|
Marketing Activities |
Target market |
Costs |
Date from |
Date to |
Potential customers |
Results |
Why marketing calendar is so important?
The marketing calendar is important because it:
- helps you to measure every marketing effort for the period,
- helps you to track marketing costs,
- helps you to improve your marketing efforts
- helps you stay focused.
Yes, with marketing calendar you will be able to measure all your marketing weapons that you use for attracting new customers. This is provided with columns about results of some marketing effort. As a result you must to put number that will tell how much prospects are transformed in real buyers or customers.
In your marketing calendar you must to have columns that will show costs about every marketing effort. Because of that, by using a marketing calendar effectively you will not only be enabled to manage effectively all your marketing efforts but it also help you in budgeting your marketing efforts. At the end of the year or time that your marketing calendar obtain you can measure effectively all your marketing efforts in term of money.
For example, if you spend $1000 in some ad in newspaper, and if you included in that ad discount card you will know exactly how much customers come from that ad. If there come 5000 customers that spend average $10 your income from that ad will be $50.000. And now if your profit margin is 5% your profit will be $2.500. This is excellent marketing effort, because you obtain full costs of that ad and earn $1.500. But, if we have only 1000 customers that spend $10 we will receive $10.000 in income, and with 5% profit margin your profit will be $500. Now, you must exclude that ad from your marketing calendar for the next year. With this process you will be able continually to improve your marketing efforts. You must always find ways how to measure your marketing efforts.
A marketing calendar is a helpful tool you can use to help chart your company’s marketing efforts and results and in this way you stay focused on all planed marketing activities in the year. In this way, marketing calendar is the only way that will help to you to carry out your marketing plan.
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