Creating and Using a Marketing Calendar Effectively

The marketing tools that you keep in your toolbox help you in the success of your marketing goals. A primary and essential tool is the marketing calendar. A marketing calendar assists you in launching your marketing vehicles in a way that can drive you to your goal in a structured and thought-out manner.

By using a marketing calendar effectively you will not only be enabled to coordinate all your marketing efforts but it also assist you in budgeting your adventures.

A marketing calendar can keep you on track, making sure that you are using every opportunity that you have to market without lapsing in your efforts. With it you can rest assured that your planning, budgeting and staffing are taken care of. This alone could save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars.

How to Create and Use a Marketing Calendar?

Marketing calendars can be created to address your specific needs. Most marketing calendars break down the weeks of a year and address the marketing activities that will take place in each week. A calendar will be best used if it is specific, spelling out individual promotions or events. I've personally found it best in my experience to include the marketing cost for each event and the results that came from the event. By doing this it is easy to see at a glance which events and strategies were productive and on target. This aids you in planning your marketing in the future.

A marketing calendar also crystallizes your focus and allows you to see the investment and value in your marketing program. By doing this you are able to build a consistency in your planning. This again will aid you in preventing marketing lapses that cause the "feast and famine" effect that many businesses experience.

Below you will find a link to a sample marketing calendar that you can download. Remember to be flexible when creating your calendar. Rest assured that there is no right or wrong way, it's really about what works for you. The purpose of your marketing calendar is to create results - this is just the first piece to mapping to those results.

Remember this is only a template, you will want to adapt it to fit the needs of your business.

Click Here to Download the Template in .pdf format 

Affiliate Marketing Holiday Calendar 2012

Ready to start some advance planning for your affiliate promotions in 2012?

Here’s a basic holiday calendar.

Jan 1 – New Year’s Day
Jan 2 – New Year’s Day’ observed
Jan 6 – Epiphany
Jan 13 – Stephen Foster Memorial Day
Jan 16 – Martin Luther King Day
Jan 23 – Chinese New Year
Feb 1 – National Freedom Day
Feb 2 – Groundhog Day
Feb 14 – Valentine’s Day
Feb 20 – Presidents’ Day
Feb 21 – Shrove Tuesday/Mardi Gras
Feb 22 – Ash Wednesday
Mar 1 – St. David’s Day
Mar 2 – Read Across America Day
Mar 11 – Daylight Saving Time starts
Mar 17 – St. Patrick’s Day
Mar 20 – Vernal equinox
Apr 1 – Palm Sunday
Apr 5 – Maundy Thursday
Apr 6 – Good Friday (Many regions)
Apr 7 – Holy Saturday
Apr 8 – Easter Sunday
Apr 9 – Easter Monday
Apr 17 – Tax Day
Apr 25 – Administrative Professionals Day
May 1 – Loyalty Day
May 1 – Law Day
May 3 – National Day of Prayer
May 5 – Cinco de Mayo
May 13 – Mother’s Day
May 15 – Peace Officers Memorial Day
May 17 – Ascension Day
May 18 – National Defense Transportation Day
May 19 – Armed Forces Day
May 22 – National Maritime Day
May 27 – Pentecost
May 28 – Whit Monday
May 28 – Memorial Day
Jun 3 – Trinity Sunday
Jun 7 – Corpus Christi
Jun 14 – Flag Day
Jun 17 – Father’s Day
Jun 20 – June Solstice
Jul 4 – Independence Day
Jul 22 – Parents’ Day
Aug 15 – Assumption of Mary
Aug 19 – National Aviation Day
Sep 3 – Labor Day
Sep 8 – Carl Garner Federal Lands Cleanup Day
Sep 9 – National Grandparents Day
Sep 11 – Patriot Day
Sep 17 – Constitution Day and Citizenship Day
Sep 21 – National POW/MIA Recognition Day
Sep 22 – Autumnal equinox
Sep 30 – Gold Star Mother’s Day
Oct 1 – Child Health Day
Oct 4 – Feast of St Francis of Assisi
Oct 8 – Columbus Day (Most regions)
Oct 9 – Leif Erikson Day
Oct 15 – White Cane Safety Day
Oct 16 – Boss’s Day
Oct 31 – Halloween
Nov 1 – All Saints’ Day
Nov 2 – All Souls’ Day
Nov 4 – Daylight Saving Time ends
Nov 6 – Election Day
Nov 11 – Veterans Day
Nov 12 – Veterans Day’ observed
Nov 22 – Thanksgiving Day
Nov 23 – Black Friday
Dec 2 – First Sunday Advent
Dec 7 – Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day
Dec 8 – Feast of the Immaculate Conception
Dec 17 – Pan American Aviation Day
Dec 17 – Wright Brothers Day
Dec 21 – December Solstice
Dec 24 – Christmas Eve
Dec 25 – Christmas Day
Dec 26 – Kwanzaa (until Jan 1)
Dec 31 – New Year’s Eve

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Helen is a blogger, market researcher and Internet Marketing consultant, best known for her "Facebook Advertising Campaign Package ", whatishot : I will shout out your advertising website Link or event for $5 on fiverr.com(referred to by industry professionals as  'What's Hot' of Facebook marketing) 

Market Research for 2012

Submitted December 27, 2011 - 10:00
Market Research- Marketing Research -Strategy Online Market Research

Every year ends with dozens of prediction pieces looking back on the past year or ahead to the next.  Heading into 2012, some of the “Top 10” lists are expanding to 12 to celebrate, with topics ranging from beer to mobile infrastructure.  While there are many year-end lists for the market research world, I’ll offer a single theme instead – Convergence.

Mathematically, convergence may signal the arrival of computational limits or even the irrelevance of sequence order.  However, in market research  “convergence” is more like what happened in the convergence of the telecommunications industry – where several services are available from the “same pipe”.  Here are some examples of areas in market research where we might see convergence in the year ahead:

Mobile and Shopper research will collide.  A National Retail Federation poll recently found 41% of members were increasing investment in mobile retail and marketing.  It’s crucial to continue to develop and test new mobile research programs to help us continue to progress.

Mobile is no longer the “3rd Screen”.  Many households are moving to digital entertainment and away from traditional TV, and the use of mobile streaming apps is on the rise.  For brands, the ability to track advertising, image and sentiment will get more complex and the sheer volume of data will require creative new models to make sense of it.  This is an area where research analysts can bring expertise to the conversation.

Gamification of research will be extended to mobile devices.  While there is still much investigation into the best implementations for game-based research, the movement to mobile devices will create pressure on game-like and game-based research.  This will affect the validation of both gamification and mobile research.

Economic issues in Europe will force brands to more closely manage pricing.  The interconnected economies of North America and Europe create the need to have a global aspect for domestic price plans.

Pricing and Packaging will converge into a single study architecture.  The tradeoffs between changing or holding price points will drive new studies that collect attitudes on simultaneous changes to price, package size and quantities that are all variables for pricing strategy.

Social Media drives statistical research, and vice versa.  Social media monitoring is being used to inform sentiment analysis across brands – however the elements needed to make predictive assessments are still missing.  Research analysts will increasingly experiment with adding social media metrics into time-tested models.

Brands will begin using traditional methods to test and quantify social media trends.  As the flexibility and speed of traditional studies increases, it’s harder to ignore the value of social media data in helping us better understand consumers.  But what we need is the discipline of traditional MR methods to deliver predictive data necessary for business change.  This will be especially useful in proving ROI for event sponsorships as well as understanding “cause marketing” endeavors.

The definition of “actionable” data will change to include visualization for the non-research stakeholders. Insights teams will partner with other organizations to deliver results to a wider audience.  The need for storytelling calls for us to leverage research, business intelligence and analytics to create directive results that can be interpreted by a wide variety of audiences.

Research analysts will increasingly utilize data from non-traditional sources to answer market problems, including customer databases, POS data and web analytics.  This may or may not be part of the “Big Data” evolution, but multiple data sources will increasingly be found in study research.

Traditional research methods will not die.  Tried and true methods like surveys, ethnographies and the like will be combined in new ways, with yet-to-be-discovered methods to deliver actionable insights for business.  There is no end to the opportunity for change.

I guess we ended up with a “Top 10” list after all!

2012 will be a transformative year for Market Research.  

10 Computer Shortcuts: Obvious to Techies but Unknown to the Rest

I’ll cover my head in shame: I only discovered keyboard shortcuts about a year ago. There, I said it.

Here are a few shortcuts that take out excessive mouse use and — cumulatively over thousands of computer movements per week — save hours and hours.

There a million and one “shortcuts,” but learning them all takes forever. The headache savers below are those I use almost every time I touch a computer. Though self-evident to most techies, I hope a few Luddites like me will find them a revelation. If using a Mac, use the Cmd key instead of Ctrl…

For Firefox (get off of the slow and virus-prone Internet Explorer):

Ctrl-K - Takes you directly to the search box at the upper right, where you can search Google, Amazon, and more with one click (Enter)

Ctrl-L or F6 (latter PC) – Takes you to the URL field to type in a new web address (Hint: just type in the name of a company or person — no “www” or “.com” — and hit enter to find their website, if it exists)

Ctrl-T – Opens a new tab

Ctrl-D – Bookmarks the page

Ctrl-+ – Increases font size on any webpage

Ctrl-[-]- Decreases font size

Ctrl-0 [zero] – Returns font to original size

For Gmail:

First, go to “settings” to the upper-right of your inbox and turn on keyboard shortcuts. There are a lot of them, but there are my faves:

c - compose a new message

tab + return/enter – send message

u – return to inbox (or previous conversation list)

r – reply

a – reply all

f – forward

e – archive

and my favorite of all:

# – delete message

What are your favorite keyboard or computer shortcuts?