3 Reasons Why Event Planners Need A Marketing Calendar

Your team is talented. Their knowledge of the events industry is second-to-none. And in the past, they’ve helped to bring your event idea to life through content marketing, social media posts and engaging website copy. 

But there’s a slight problem. Your planning isn’t the best. 

You see, planning is crucial. Without it, you can spend too much time in meetings, discussing ideas over and over with no end goal in sight. It’s harder for everyone to be on the same page as your approach isn’t structured. 

That bank holiday event was great, but you didn’t come together with your team early enough. With some forward planning, you could’ve got more out of your marketing, delivered a knockout event and generated more income, allowing you to grow your brand and deliver events on a bigger scale. 

Fear not. Skiddle’s Promotion Centre Blog lives to make your life easier. And we’ve got a solution. 

A marketing calendar. 

It’s a pretty simple tool. Essentially, a marketing calendar is, you guessed it, a calendar where you can store all the crucial information for your next campaign. You can create it monthly, weekly or yearly, scheduling tasks for different team members and any freelance marketing experts you bring on board. 

In this article, we’ll give you three reasons why event planners need a marketing calendar. Sound interesting? Scroll down to find out more. 

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A marketing calendar streamlines your efforts

Remember your primary school swimming lessons? Yeah, we’re trying to forget those too. But stick with us for a moment. 

Your instructors may have advised you to buy a swimming cap. 

You know the ones. Rubber, stretchy, and, honestly, pretty uncomfortable pieces of gear that messed up your hair before and after you put them on.

The instructors may have told you that, with a swimming cap, you’d become streamlined in the water. And what happens when you become streamlined? You’re faster, quicker and more efficient. You glide through the water like a natural. It’s the same concept with a marketing calendar. 

A marketing calendar allows your team to become one. 

For example, you’re running a series of special summertime events. Big things are in the pipeline, and you want your team to deliver the message through engaging social assets and eye-catching ads. Maybe you’ve got a freelancer on board to create bespoke content marketing for the idea. 

With the initial message set, you can brainstorm ideas about how you’ll deliver it. Once you’ve had the meeting, you can spend some time assigning the great ideas your team has generated. Your social media guru, your ad wizard and your freelancer? They’re all on the same page. 

It’s a lot less painful than a swimming cap – less talcum powder –  and you’re on the way to maximising the talents of your team. You can now glide effortlessly through the waves of the event industry. 

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You can target crucial dates

As an event planner, you’ll know some dates are crucial to target. 

But let’s be honest. Life comes at us fast. And that’s without mentioning that the events world moves at lightspeed, combining with the hustle and bustle of the every day to make it easy to forget things. 

You can spend some time filling in key dates in your marketing calendar. We’re thinking of May, spring and summer bank holidays, Easter, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Summer Solstice and Freshers Week. 

That’s a lot of events. But more importantly, a lot of chances to generate income and deliver knockout experiences. 

Now, we’re not saying: go out and come up with full-blown ideas for a holiday that’s three months away. However, having the dates on the calendar means you’ve got them in front of you. It’s likely to help you come up with things on the fly. 

It helps with promotion, too. 

At Skiddle, we compile ‘Inspire Me’ pages, which you can find here. Essentially, they are a series of guides that bring together event types in one place, helping customers find their next rave, gig or comedy night. 

We have Inspire Me pages for some of the holidays we mentioned. So, if you’ve got a cracking bank holiday event coming up and you list with us, you can place a note in your marketing calendar to let us know about the event. 

Suddenly, your event is shown to our monthly user base of 6.5 million people. It’s a simple but highly effective tool when promoting your event. 

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You can track results, spot trends and identify weaknesses

“Data Is King” 

Said the many marketing experts looking to get first-page ranking on a search engine. 

And they’re not wrong. If you work in the events industry, you’ll be dealing with a lot of it. Remittance reports, ticket sale numbers, sign-up data? They’re all part of the game. 

Recording results from the different facets of your campaign is a no-brainer. 

With these insights, you can see what content performed well, giving you a better understanding of how to improve or what to keep doing. 

Maybe something you thought was a nailed-on success actually wasn’t. 

Or the throwaway idea you came up with on a delayed train home generated lots of traffic. 

Data keeps you on your toes. Plus, once you’ve built up a backlog, you can get a long-term picture of how well your marketing campaigns work. This will make it easier to change things when you need to. 

Now, you don’t want to clutter your marketing calendar. That would contradict the point we made earlier. Everything needs to be streamlined and have clarity. We recommend using the most important metrics as a starting point.

Some of the marketing calendar software allows your team to write comments underneath the job list. So, you could fill in the key metrics there. It’s time-consuming, true, but being on top of this will undoubtedly help you in the long run. 

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Got a question you need an answer to? Give us a call on 03333010301 or ask us a question over on the Skiddle Promoter Twitter account by clicking or tapping on the button below. Alternatively, you can also find a list of our most frequently asked questions over at https://help.promotioncentre.co.uk/