Marketing calendar templates
Last updated: April 2024
Marketers manage a lot of deliverables. There are date-driven efforts, such as launching advertising campaigns, publishing new content, and posting to social media. You also field ad-hoc requests from the entire organization. Keeping track of everything in motion can be all-consuming. And if teammates are working from their own project lists, details can get out of sync quickly.
You need a shared marketing calendar that makes it easy to navigate dependencies and adjust dates when needed. A well-organized calendar allows you to zero in on important details for each marketing activity and also see the big picture.
The templates in this guide give you a blueprint for creating a shared calendar — each can be tailored to a different marketing function. If you are part of a small marketing team, an Excel template may be enough to help you stay on schedule. Larger teams typically need a more robust solution like Aha! Roadmaps — so you can link planned work to strategy and collaborate across other teams.
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What to include on a marketing calendar
Dates matter when there are a lot of moving parts. And marketers work cross-functionally with most teams in the organization — the product team for product launches, the sales team for training material, the customer support team for documentation, and so forth.
An effective marketing calendar helps you:
Visualize upcoming due dates and activities
Define what marketing team members are responsible for
Arrange deliverables in a logical order to support key initiatives
Provide visibility to other teams about what is happening and when
A marketing calendar filled with activities that are not driven by an overall marketing strategy will be ineffectual. Of course, if you do not include the right information — or include too many details — calendars become unwieldy too.
Let's look at some elements that make a marketing calendar usable and actionable:
Time frame: Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly — designate a timeline view that matches the level of detail that you need.
Goal: Provide a shorthand way to show the broader goal or initiative that the work serves.
Campaign: Include the campaign or launch that the deliverable is part of.
Persona: Help your team understand the target customer for each marketing activity.
Start and end dates: Include internal start and end dates for work as well as a go-live date.
Type: Specify deliverables by team or format. For example, use different labels for the content team vs. the product marketing team or for blog posts vs. case studies.
Channel: Tag deliverables by marketing channel (e.g., social media, email, website, search engine marketing).
Status: Include status labels (e.g., "Not started," "In progress," and "Scheduled") that make it easy to spot progress.
Related:
7 marketing calendar templates
There are many ways to customize these templates. Be sure to balance the level of detail needed with the effort it takes to maintain the calendar. Do not feel like you have to include everything — find what works for your team and your marketing goals.
Whiteboard template in Aha! software
We offer a monthly calendar as a whiteboard template in Aha! software. It is ideal for high-level planning and collaboration. Once your plan is set, calendar items can be easily converted into real work items in Aha! Roadmaps. That way you can go straight from planning to implementation.
Event marketing calendar template
This event marketing calendar allows you to map out in-person or virtual events for the year. Use the daily view to outline a schedule for the day of the event. Duplicate the daily calendar to reuse it for each individual event.
Content marketing calendar template
This calendar can be used by content marketers as an editorial calendar. Use different colors to designate different types of content — blog posts, customer stories, white papers, etc. You can copy, edit, and move the colored boxes to customize this content marketing calendar for your team.
PR and communications calendar template
This marketing calendar can be used to plan customer communications, such as emails, newsletters, press releases, and in-app messaging. Separate icons let the team see the balance of messages across the month.
Go-to-market calendar template
Launching new products and features requires advance planning. Use this go-to-market calendar template to visualize all the product releases happening over the course of a year. Pair it with a more detailed view to show the cross-functional activities required for a successful launch.
Integrated marketing calendar template
This integrated calendar brings all marketing efforts together into a single, high-level view. This format is useful when presenting your marketing mix to leaders and other stakeholders.
Marketing calendar templates like these are a handy way to get started. When you are ready to build an integrated campaign in an environment that makes it easy for your whole team to stay aligned, try Aha! software.
