Creating Your Own Marketing Calendar for 2018

How to Create a Marketing Calendar for 2018

You may be wondering when is a good time to start planning your New Years campaign. The answer – last month. While it may be difficult to know when you should start planning and running your Facebook and Instagram campaign for any big event. Whether it’s Christmas, Valentine’s Day, or even an obscure event.

Panning, preparing, and being ready is an essential part of beating out your competitors and getting those sales. Developing a marketing calendar guarantees that you don’t miss any important opportunities. We want to make sure that you’ll never miss your chance to crush a holiday sale ever again.

Below we’ll go over when to start preparing your social media marketing calendar. This post will tell you when to run your Facebook Ad campaign for every major holiday, and highlight some smaller holidays you can use to benefit your marketing campaigns.

Why Do I Need a Marketing Calendar?

You may be reading this and wondering, why do I need to plan for holidays so early? This is one of the first things that we will address, so let’s get started.

Campaign Planning Starts Early

You should have a nearly-full social media calendar compiled in advance for big holidays. This way, nothing sneaks up on you, you know you have every base covered, and you can coordinate organic campaigns with Facebook Ads if you choose. This can give you more time to evaluate your audience and see what types of content they’re responding to, and which offers you think would be most interesting to them.

You should also have your campaigns planned, prepped, and ready to go. It’s no secret that planning Facebook Ads can take awhile. You need to choose your images, create your offer, and do all the copywriting. And then come up with additional variations for split testing.

Preparing a marketing calendar also gives you time to make sure that you have enough product in stock, that you’ve crunched the numbers on the discounts to make sure you’re still turning a profit, and that you’ve done your research about when the shipping will actually guarantee arrival.

You want to have everything in place, especially since during a big event, the last thing you want to do is try to scrounge together marketing materials that should have been done ages ago.

Key Shopping Dates & When to Prepare

This is what we really want to get to, right? We want to know what the biggest shopping days of the year are, and when we need to start to get ready so we can add them to our marketing calendar.

The biggest shopping events (for most industries) are:

  • New Years Eve
  • Valentine’s Day
  • Mother’s Day
  • Father’s Day
  • Memorial Day
  • 4th of July
  • Back to school sales (July/August)
  • Labor Day
  • Halloween
  • Black Friday
  • Cyber Monday
  • December 12th- December 24th (ramping up for Christmas and Hanukkah)

It’s easy to look at that list and think “well that’s manageable.” But then when you consider that you have to plan those campaigns at least one month in advance- and sometimes several- it becomes a lot more stressful.

 

We recommend getting started as soon as possible, if you already haven’t. If you feel as if you don’t have the time to manage all of the work that comes along with preparing a marketing calendar, or even need help managing your online campaigns, call us at DMA Solutions! DMA Solutions offers affordable marketing solutions for all businesses both large and small. Contact us today and let us know what you need!

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