Some things never change.
Yet, we get shocked when they still arrive.
A marketing calendar that gets referenced by the marketing team regularly is how we plan ahead for the things that "never change".
✅ the annual industry event that your company always sponsors
✅ the charity golf tournament your company hosts every May
✅ K-12 RFP season
✅ holiday cards
✅ fiscal end of year
Using a marketing calendar allows marketing pros to allocate resources (people, time, money) appropriately without draining those resources prematurely.
As a marketing professional, I HATE working from a place of being reactive to things. This is where a marketing calendar can come in and help us turn from a reaction to a proactive mindset in marketing. And if you're just starting out and saying, "We don't have a marketing calendar!"
How you start to create one is start tracking today.
When you get the request for a proposal, track in the calendar how long it takes until you do the submission. Whenever an industry event comes up, put that on the calendar and you're going to track an email campaign, a social media campaign, ordering swag, and when you shipped items. You start to track all of those things today.
So come this time next year, whenever you're planning out your resource needs, your budget needs for marketing, you get to see what you did last year. And you get to see you go to the same event every year. You know you are going to get the event notification in March and the team goes in June. You start to plan all this stuff out.
And if you know, come March that you are going to have maybe 10 RFPs due, prepare for two events, your company hosts a golf tournament, and you plan a major networking event then you can start planning for all those things in December/January and not have to wait until the last minute in March to really get everything together and be prepared.
So think about a marketing calendar of not just when things are going happen, but it's actually tracking your time, your resources, your energy to make sure that you are presenting marketing in the best way for your business.