At its core, a marketing calendar is a pretty simple thing. It’s an overview of your team’s upcoming marketing activities and significant events . Think of it like a vacation schedule, only with fewer trips and more blog posts—sounds fun, right?
What is the purpose of a marketing calendar?
With a marketing calendar, you know exactly what’s coming up , what’s completed , and what’s planned next . It’s the best way to organize your work, create transparency, and communicate with stakeholders.
Some companies choose a single marketing calendar b2b email list that gives them a comprehensive overview of all activities planned for a given month, quarter, or year, while others prefer multiple marketing calendars dedicated to specific activities, such as specific calendars for social media or editorial.
The complexity of a marketing calendar (just like a vacation schedule) depends on how detailed your team wants to be and how you plan to use the calendar, but more on that in a moment.
What should a marketing calendar contain?
Regardless of the intricacies of your marketing calendar, there are some milestones you should definitely consider. Here are a few examples:
- campaigns
- Product launches
- distribution
- Webinars and live events
- Industry conferences
- Content publications
- Emails
- Holidays
- Experiments and tests
These milestones can have a significant impact on purchasing behavior . Tracking them in a marketing calendar allows you to plan and respond accordingly.
Depending on your team’s needs and workflows, you may also want to include details like the platform or channel, project by implementing an ai social description, assignees, deadlines, status, and available resources in your marketing calendar—but this often depends on the type of marketing calendar.
In my experience, many teams benefit from activity-specific marketing calendars instead of a single, general calendar.
With all the activities that fall under the marketing umbrella, activity-specific calendars ensure you can focus on the right information at the right time . Different types of marketing calendars also give the responsible teams more freedom to customize their calendars as needed.
Let’s look at some popular marketing calendars :
Campaign calendar
This easy-to-use calendar displays all the important campaigns you’re running during a specific period. Campaigns can focus on new product launches, holiday promotions, or content promotions, for example.
The items in this calendar will likely determine the milestones in review business your activity-specific calendars. For example, if you publish a new research report, you might schedule a related blog post on your editorial calendar or a promotional email on your email calendar.
Calendar events
Do you host a lot of webinars? What about in-person events? Those belong here, too. Like your campaigns, events often have related activities that appear in your other calendars.
Take HubSpot’s INBOUND conference, for example . While the INBOUND team has its own event calendar, HubSpot’s marketing team also has INBOUND-related content tracked in an editorial calendar.
