Does your team have a go-to marketing calendar software solution? It should. Whether you’re running a brand-new startup or you’re managing marketing operations at a well-established organization, it’s critical to create a marketing schedule that will guide your promotional efforts and keep new content and campaigns flowing regularly.
While a simple spreadsheet may seem like a cost-effective solution, things can quickly become complicated when coordinating content across multiple channels. With marketing calendar software, however, you can easily capture and track all your marketing ideas and campaigns, share them with team members and stakeholders, and manage marketing workflows from start to finish.
Below, we’re discussing the reasons why a marketing campaign calendar is so beneficial and showing you how Wrike’s online marketing calendar software can help you stay on top of your marketing efforts more easily and efficiently.
Why your team needs online marketing calendar software
You may be skeptical about trying a new marketing calendar software solution. After all, what’s wrong with using a spreadsheet to keep track of your campaigns? Well, if you’ve tried managing your company’s marketing using a spreadsheet before, then you know why it’s not the ideal solution.
Here are just a few of the key reasons why spreadsheets are more hassle than they’re worth when it comes to marketing management:
Multiple versions can muddle your marketing
If you’re a one-person department in a small startup, a spreadsheet may seem simple enough. But as your company and marketing team grow and more people begin to access the file, it can become more difficult to maintain a single, “master” spreadsheet. Otherwise, you quickly end up with multiple versions of one document, which leads to a confused and messy marketing plan.
Makes reporting a royal pain
On top of trying to consolidate data from multiple sources into a single master spreadsheet, managers must also compile reports based on that data — which is no small task. This can become more daunting as your company grows and scales.
Lack of integration with marketing systems
If you’re using any automated marketing systems, online marketing calendar software that can integrate with these systems will streamline your processes and reduce the amount of tedious, time-consuming work. Spreadsheets, on the other hand, just aren’t capable of this, meaning you’ll miss out on a lot of the benefits that an automated system has to offer.
Hard to share
Again, in a small organization, a single spreadsheet may suffice for a while. But the more your team grows, the more complicated sharing and updating that spreadsheet becomes.
Hard to scale
The bigger your operation and your spreadsheet become, the harder it is to manage all your content ideas, campaigns, and reporting metrics. If you’ve ever worked with large spreadsheet files, you know they can be a royal pain, not to mention they can easily lead to errors and lost data as they become larger and more data-heavy.
While spreadsheets have their place, the reality is that marketing calendar software is the better choice for managing your organization’s marketing. With a marketing campaign calendar, team members and stakeholders both within your department and across your company can quickly track the status of campaign assets and timelines while easily capturing new ideas before they’re lost or forgotten. Plus, online marketing calendar software eliminates a lot of burdensome manual processes, saving you even more time and hassle.
Using a marketing campaign calendar for maximum impact
To use a marketing campaign calendar effectively, you need to first have your marketing strategy in place. From there, you can develop and launch targeted marketing campaigns and establish an editorial content plan to consistently produce relevant content that brings in new leads and builds brand awareness. With these elements solidified, you’re ready to put your marketing calendar software to work.
When it comes to an ongoing content marketing strategy, you also need a tool that will allow you to capture new ideas before they’re lost or forgotten. Wrike’s editorial calendar template makes this a snap. With this template, you can add new ideas for easy prioritization and archiving, then map out your content creation and publication workflow using Wrike’s campaign calendar. The editorial calendar template also integrates into your Wrike dashboard so you can easily monitor and track the progress of your content pieces.
Similarly, you can create and deploy classic, timeline-driven campaigns using Wrike’s marketing campaign template. This resource helps you break your campaigns down into specific tasks and assign them to the appropriate team members, monitor your campaigns and track their performance, and review results.
Put simply, Wrike empowers you, your marketing team, and your entire organization with the best marketing calendar software. To discover all the ways in which Wrike can help you plan, deploy, manage, monitor, and review marketing campaigns with ease, sign up below to start a free two-week trial today!
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