Final BFCM Prep: Reviewing Your Marketing Calendar

On the 83rd episode of Marketing Interruption, Andrew Maff continues the Final BFCM Prep Series by getting into what sellers should be doing with their different marketing campaigns they'll be running during this time and how to prepare a visual calendar and even a visualization of triggers to better understand what will be happening when to ensure none of your campaigns overlap with each other.

Tune in and enjoy today's interruption!

TODAY'S EPISODE:

00:35

Welcome to episode number 83 of the marketing interruption podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Maff stone. And today I am talking to you about reviewing your marketing calendar. And if you're watching this on YouTube, you just realized that I forgot which one I was doing. I have my notes here with me. So I'm a very visual person I learn by with my eyes, I don't really learn that much by reading. I'll be honest, I do read books, but I'll probably knock like one out a month maybe. So I prefer more visual stuff. And so that's kind of why I incorporate different marketing calendars. And so there's a few different ways you can do this. So HubSpot has one, pretty obvious. So even if you're scheduling emails, or blog posts, or social media or anything like that, they actually already have one that's filled out. So you can find a calendar and HubSpot and will give you all that information for you. If not, I actually think which I'm not sure, but if you get the marketing starter at HubSpot, which is like I think 50 bucks a month at that think you get that benefit of being able to just leverage icalendar I love it just because you can actually see what's going off when I'll definitely take screenshots of it or export it if I can, and save it so that next year, I know what went live and when what's the other one sem rush or sem rush. However the hell they pronounce themselves there, they have one as well, where you can actually map this out. Or you could use a Google Calendar, which honestly is my preferred way of doing it. Because then I can share it with different people.

02:11

Boredom timeout is basically creating a calendar, where you have an event that you create, where it's a social post, or social ad, or it's an email campaign or anything like that, where you can actually see when it goes live, during Black Friday, Cyber Monday, I try to take all of our sellers anxiety  from them. So I cover my battleground as much as I possibly can. So one of the things I actawayually do is and it's tedious and it's obnoxious, and you may not want to do this, but tell your marketing person to do it is create a calendar, you set an event for when things are going live, at what time and I always set a an alert so that I get a ping on my phone or on my computer about 10 minutes before a social post goes live or before an email goes live or anything like that. So that the second it's supposed to go live, I can refresh and make sure it actually went live a little tedious like that, I like to just make sure that I don't hit any issues and someone didn't hit a wrong button and something didn't go live and it was supposed to. So it's kind of like my, you know, second pair of eyes on things. It's not me specifically, but whoever's running the account of that client, they'll do it.

03:18

Um, so marketing calendars, great thing to create, I'll usually even take like, if I'm running a certain social ad during a certain period, you'll make that that calendar date, like longer, so that you can actually see like the entire time frame that it's running, I'll even sometimes put links into the event of like, what creative is running and how much the budget was and things like that, especially because if you can export that calendar, it's going to give you a lot more insight next year when you go to do this again. But another thing to kind of keep a visual and it kind of comes into your marketing calendar, a little bit is using something like funnel etics. So funnel etics I've been using for years. I love it, it's great, because I can visualize everything, let alone the fact that I can track everything is a completely different podcast, but just the visual aspect of it alone I love where you can essentially drag and drop, you know, website pages, or emails or social ads or whatever it is the hell you're running. And then you can draw an arrow to each of them or whatever you need to do. And what I actually will map out there is the entire campaign of just what's happening. So it will essentially be like day one will do this, which will then trigger this which will go this way and hit on day two, which will hit the day three, and you can actually just map out the entire thing. So you actually visualize it. So for me, it's great for the sellers that we work with because I can actually just show them in like a painted picture of what's running. If you are in house in a marketing and you're running a marketing department, it's a great thing to show to your CEO. It's just nice to be able to visualize what's going off and when because then you can go Okay, today's the 28th and based on this, okay, this email should be going off at this time and then Hopefully your marketing person is refreshing that to make sure that actually does in fact go live. I know it's tedious, I know and basically is me telling you that I have no trust in the software that we're using. It's not true. I just like to double check stuff.

05:13

But map all that stuff out and then if you can export it to screenshot it and save for next year, take get a folder and just put that spreadsheet we talked about earlier this week and the calendar put it all into one place, but everything you can in one place so next year, you can really review what you did for Black Friday, Cyber Monday. That is all I have for today. Quick and easy one. Again, if you have any questions you need any help during this time, shoot me an email. I'm literally just an open book right now. It's my favorite time to just help just because I have fun doing it. I don't know why something's wrong with me. But uh, that was it. So shoot me an email marketing interruption@bluetuskr.com and I will talk to you all tomorrow.