Do your marketing efforts give you the results you want? Are multiple e-mails, social media posts, and other project tasks overwhelming you? Creating a marketing calendar might be the solution for you.
Marketing calendars will help you deliver better marketing projects and execute them faster. They provide enough lead time to plan large projects, especially when you need to work with influencers or other business partners or have extensive design requirements.
What Is a Marketing Calendar?
A marketing calendar is a helpful tool for marketers to plan their campaigns. It helps them organize the tasks and activities that need to be done during a certain period of time.
Marketing calendars are a great way to keep track of your marketing efforts. They help you plan out the different types of content you want to post, when you want it published, and the goal for each piece of content. It keeps track of social media posts, email campaigns, website content, and other marketing activities so that you don’t miss any opportunities to connect with your audience.
A marketing calendar is a single, centralized place to manage the marketing campaigns as a whole, including the dependencies, visual assets, day-to-day task edits, topic ideas, and much more, making your team members more coordinated.
With more than 60 % of customers expecting brands to understand their unique needs, creating a marketing calendar based on customer journeys, which can enhance SEO and improve the performance of digital ads, is vital for any business to achieve its goals.
Creating an Effective Marketing Calendar Based on Customer Journey Maps, SEO, and Digital Ads
From when customers feel the need for a product or a service to deciding to buy a product from you, they go on a journey. The customer journey involves multiple customer-brand interactions where the customer learns about and builds trust in your brand.
When you sketch out the potential paths a customer takes from brand discovery to purchase, you have created a customer journey map. Marketers must think from the customer’s perspective when planning a marketing calendar. Real business happens when brand strategy, customer personas, and your journey maps intersect.
Create Customer Personas
The first step to creating a marketing calendar to align with the customer journey is to create a detailed customer profile. Creating a persona will help you understand your customers’ intentions, motivations, lifestyle choices, emotions, and actions at each point in their journey.
The customer personas are helpful in understanding because they
- Factors that drive their interest in your business.
- What influences their decisions?
- What pains or motivations might make them consider your brand?
- Benefits and features your brand presents that resonate with your customers.
List Touchpoints
The next step would be to identify the potential touchpoints where your customers might interact with your brand. It can include
- Finding your website using a search engine.
- Discovering your brand using a digital ad.
- Reading your blog.
- Seeing your Social media posts.
- An email from you.
- Video on your YouTube channel.
- Mentions of your brand on review sites.
All these touchpoints are potential places to improve your marketing strategies, which you are already using to reach your customers and improve their experience.
List Customer Actions
Listing the actions a customer could take when interacting with your brand will help reduce the number of steps the customer takes in the journey and improve the overall experience.
It can include signing up for a newsletter, downloading an eBook, clicking a digital ad, visiting your website through a search engine, and so on.
When you align the touchpoints and customer actions with the different stages in the customer journey, it will help make a meaningful marketing effort.
- Awareness stage is when the customer is just discovering your brand, your marketing plan can include social media posts, blog posts, and digital ads.
- The Consideration stage is when the customer is trying to know more about your brand and comparing features with competitors. Try to include reviews and product pages in your marketing plan to ensure you hit the right note with the customers.
- The customer decides to make the purchase in the decision stage — ensuring the customer has a smooth buying process with the help of emails, pricing pages, and regular updates will be good.
- The stages after the purchase are crucial for a business; make sure you create your marketing calendar to enhance the after-purchase experience and increase brand loyalty with live chat support, help articles, newsletters, and emails.
Integrating SEO with Customer Journey and the Marketing Calendar
Customers use the search engine at multiple stages in the customer journey. Close to 30% of online shoppers start their search for a product with a search engine. SEO is a vital strategy for your business as it makes you more visible. Most SEO strategies are keyword-centric, and one has to create strong SEO strategies with the right keywords and backlinks. An effective SEO can also target customers further down in the marketing funnel.
The most common touchpoints in your customer journey that might involve an online search can be product research, competitor analysis, price checking, delivery or returns, and customer service.
Keyword research will assist you in determining what your customers are looking for. Using keyword research to repurpose or create content will help you rank at the top of targeted search results. During the consideration stage, your content should answer your customers’ questions, such as through FAQs, blogs, and other persuasive content.
A strong SEO strategy can help create content of great value and ensure you catch the relevant audience and nurture them to become loyal customers over time.
When created considering the customer journey and SEO strategies, a marketing calendar will help connect the customers with the right messages at the right time. Make sure you use multiple channels and multiple formats of communication to grab attention from all directions.
Choosing an appropriate calendar tool can help efficiently manage marketing campaigns. Also, try to have regular brainstorming sessions with the team to create a well-rounded marketing plan, keeping the customer journey and SEO strategies in mind.
If you want to create a results-driven marketing calendar for your business, contact Assist, LLC. Our business app provides a comprehensive set of digital marketing solutions which can help your business reach its goals. Schedule a meeting today to leverage the power of digital advertising to the fullest!
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