Hey guys it's Adrienne, I am a senior marketing manager here at Hiilite and
today I'm gonna talk to you about how to set up a marketing calendar for not only
your digital marketing but your entire annual marketing strategy.
The first thing we're going to do is we have a template that we've developed
super easy, super simple tool, I'm gonna walk you through how to set it up and
how you can apply this to your marketing strategy to help you plan all of your
tactics and measure your results over the year. Okay so I've got our template
open here and it is built into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. I'm gonna
give you guys the link to where you can go to download this template for
yourself, but first I'm just gonna give you a quick overview of the different
components and how you can use this for planning your annual marketing. The
first tab is basically just an overview of your entire year, so you have the
first column to break up your activities. Depending on what tactics you're
using you can outline your pay-per-click campaigns Adwords, Facebook your social
media if you're doing any video or photography blogging newsletters
essentially whatever it is that you need as far as to your marketing tactics you
can list them here and then we basically have the weeks of the year laid out.
This is a really great way for you to see in one snapshot kind of what
different activities are happening and how they're overlapping. It's great to
make sure your campaign messaging is matched up, for example, if you know
you're going to be doing a Facebook campaign at the same time as your blog
and your newsletter you might want to make sure that your content for those
things are aligned. So yeah this basically just takes you have the whole
year to break down your different activities and give you a really good
overview of everything so basically you can just go through and mark
you know, say the first, the second and third week of January of course this
will probably be longer but you can go through and fill this out. The next tab
is your budget and so as you can see that's kind of color-coded down here and
we've broken it into quarters you can make the quarters to whatever it is for
your business, whatever your fiscal year is. For ease of starting off we've broken
it into four quarters basically you have the first quarter January through March
second quarter April through June 3rd quarter July through September so on and
so this isn't an opportunity for you to include your budget for the year so what
is your quarterly budget for the different activities that you will be
undertaking for your marketing for the year? So you can go ahead and fill that
out and then it's also really great to keep track you can fill out your budget
here and then you could go ahead and fill out your actuals as the year
progressed and see if your annual total is adding up to what you had budgeted. If
you're over or below budget. Okay so the next tab is your your goal. Basically
your overall annual strategy overview so you're gonna want to list out what are
your objectives so is it going to be a you know '25% increase in revenue' is it
going to be an additional you know you want to 'land three minimum five figure
clients' or whatever that looks like for you whatever it can be list your
objectives for the year. These are your goals for the year then in your metrics
you're going to want to say okay how am I going to measure my progress towards
these results? So obviously like what am I going to use to measure increases in
revenue well it's going to be annual or monthly revenue numbers and so on so you
want to think about this is this is your overview for the entire year. What
targets are you going to market? What platforms are you going to go after? This
is basically your audience, your user profiles and we talked about that
in some of our other videos so defining who your
primary, secondary audiences are what platforms you're gonna reach them on and
where are they located so your geo-targeting. Once you have this, you're
in a really good position to say like okay now that we know what we want to
achieve for the year how are we gonna break that down into quarterly campaigns
that are going to move us towards this overall goal and you can start with your
q1 so it's similar idea but rather than the year you're gonna look at
'what are our objectives for quarter one' 'how are we gonna measure them' 'who are we
targeting' 'what platforms are we using' there's a few other additional items you
can include in here again this is a template you can build it out to what
works for you. You could talk about not only where
you're targeting who but who are your main competitors what's the tone and
messaging of your campaign for this quarter what activities are you gonna
undertake. So once you've filled out your strategy
for the quarter each tab following can break down the actual month by month
activities that you're going to undertake so you have your note section
here you can actually detail each activity for your campaigns in these
weeks you have a full calendar view to be able to see the days of the week and
you can also fill in different items here so maybe it's launch campaign
but this allows you to coordinate the activities of your team so that you can
actually define everything that's gonna need to happen month by month so that
you know what's being done and who's doing what makes it easy for everyone to
collaborate on your marketing activities together so that's what you're gonna do
you're gonna go through and fill out the next quarter month by month. Super-easy
and again it's a template so you can modify it to your needs if you'd like. So
for example in q3 you know we actually broke down even more detail as to what
we wanted to achieve on social media paid platforms or email marketing it is
a spreadsheet so you can go ahead and make this work for your business or your
company and this is how we were able to coordinate with the team and see
timelines when activities we're going to be undertaken and so forth. So yeah I
hope you guys find this useful it's a really great way to keep track of
everything that's happening for you throughout the year keep you focused on
your main goals and moving towards the targets that you want to achieve. The
thing I really like about this template as well is that I you don't need to
rebuild it every single year in fact if you just go up to the first one here and
for the next year you can copy your document update the date and it will
automatically update this calendar for you and make sure that you're into the
next calendar yea. So super easy to use it's my favorite template that I've come
across and I've made some adjustments to it that work for us at Hiilite as an
agency and I hope that you guys find it useful too. If you have any questions
like I said I will post the link to where you can download this template
below and if you have any questions feel free to reach out leave a comment
just send me a message on social media and I'll be happy to clarify anything
that you might need. So make sure you subscribe to our channel if you want
more useful tidbits like this I plan on creating a few more template based
videos for you guys with downloads that go along with them so thanks and I hope
you enjoyed this video.