Your Marketing Calendar Sorted: How To Get Ready For 2021
With the new year nearly upon us, it’s a good time to start thinking ahead about what you can do to get your practice ready to thrive in 2021!
In particular, it’s time to start getting your marketing calendar in order. In this blog, we want to guide you through the function of your marketing calendar, and what key things you’ll need to mark down in your planner for the year ahead to ensure your marketing efforts are always timely and effective. Let’s get into it!
What Is a marketing calendar?
Think of this as a roadmap for your marketing activities. It should help you to visualise and plan, so you know roughly what you need to do and when you need to act on your marketing strategy. It therefore should help you to:
· Meet your practice goals
· Inform your team of your planned marketing activities, so everyone knows what’s on the horizon
· Share and track the performance of your actions
· Clarify and create your strategic plan for the future!
The site Coschedule did a survey last year that showed organised marketers are 397% more likely to succeed. Marketers who set goals are 376% more likely to succeed, who document their strategies are 313% more likely to succeed, and who proactively plan their projects and campaigns are 356% more likely to succeed. Those are some serious statistics to pay attention to! It’s all in the documentation and planning.
So, in all, a marketing calendar keeps the team on track and focuses your efforts, so you have more control over attaining your practice goals. It should save you time in the future and help minimise wasted efforts!
What should your marketing calendar contain?
This will really depend on your particular marketing goals. You might want to track all of your content efforts across blogs, video, and social media, laying out when and where you plan to post things and the costs associated. You might want to start thinking about:
· Any associated keywords you’re targeting for SEO purposes
· Any events that you’re hoping to tie into
· Any paid ads or other paid efforts associated with your content
· Who is in the team and can take ownership of tasks
· Any key performance indicators (KPI’s) that are relevant to you
This last point should tie back into your metrics that you’ve set for yourself (in other words, your goals!). This might be things like:
· Increasing traffic to your website
· Numbers of sign-ups to an email list
· Email marketing performance (e.g. open rate or click-through)
· Conversion into purchasing a service
Metrics are a whole other subject for another day, but for starters, have a think about what success looks like for you and your practice, and how you might track this as part of your marketing calendar.
How do I actually make a marketing calendar?
For starters, choose a flexible place to host your calendar – you might create an Excel spreadsheet, and we particularly love Airtable as a tool. Create columns for each thing you need to keep track of, use coloured labels or tags to make it easy to read, and keep it flexible – so you can always add in new items as they come up!
Start with the following columns:
· Date to publish
· Publish location (website, social media, etc)
· Status (open, in progress, pending review, scheduled, ready, published)
· Assigned to/Tasks
· Theme/Topic
· Image/Image description
· Caption
· Hashtags
· Keywords
And the following, to track performance:
· Likes
· Comments
· Reach/Discovery/Impressions
· Follows
· Profile visits
· Website clicks
· Email sign ups
How do I start populating my marketing calendar?
To start populating your calendar, it might be worth adding in the important general days for the year that are tied to your practice. This can include:
· General national holidays or events
· Practice events
· Practice milestones
· Industry related events
· Industry related hashtags or awareness days
· Any product or service launches
· Local community events
Here are some suggestions to get your calendar started:
January
Dry January and Veganuary
1st New Year’s Day
18th Blue Monday
18th – 24th Cervical Cancer Prevention Week
25th Burns Night
February
LGBT History Month
4th– World Cancer Day and Time to Talk Day
9th National Pizza Day
12th Chinese New Year (Year of the Ox)
14th Valentine’s Day
16th Pancake Day
17th Ash Wednesday
20th Love Your Pet Day
March
World Sleep Day and No Smoking Day TBC
Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month
1st – 7th Eating Disorders Awareness week
4th World Book Day
8th International Women’s Day
14th Mother’s Day
15th – 21st Nutrition and Hydration Week
17th St Patrick’s Day
20th First Day of Spring
28th Daylight savings starts
April
Stress Awareness Month and On your Feet Britain
1st April Fool’s Day
2nd Good Friday
4th Easter Sunday
5th Easter Monday
7th World Health Day
10th Siblings Day
11th National Pet Day
19th Bicycle Day
21st National Tea Day
22nd Earth Day
May
National Walking Month
TBC Mental Health Awareness week
3rd May Day
11th National Eat What You Want Day
17th World Baking Day
20th World Bee Day
29th National Biscuit Day
31st Spring Bank Holiday
June
Pride Month
1st Beginning of Summer and Global Day of Parents
20th Father’s Day
21st International Day of Yoga
28th Wimbledon Starts
July
School holidays begin
August
TBC Cycle to Work Day
2nd Summer Bank Holiday
6th International Beer Day
9th Book Lovers Day
26th National Dog Day
28th National Burger Day
31st Summer Bank Holiday
September
Back to school
10th Suicide Prevention Day
23rd National Fitness Day
25th World’s Biggest Coffee Morning
October
Black History Month, Breast Cancer Awareness Month and Go Sober for October (Stoptober)
1st World Vegetarian Day
5th – 9th Back Care Awareness Week
10th World Mental Health Day
12th – 16th National Work Life Week
16th World Food Day
25th World Pasta Day
31st Halloween and Daylight savings ends
November
Movember (Men’s Health Awareness Month)
1st World Vegan Day
5th Guy Fawkes Night
11th Remembrance Day
16th – 22nd Alcohol Awareness Week
December
14th Christmas Jumper Day
25th Christmas Day
26th Boxing Day
31st New Year’s Eve
Read more about the NHS health campaigns events for inspiration here.
We hope this gets your marketing calendar started for 2021. For all your content needs and a guiding hand through the marketing speak, we can help.