6 Easy Steps to Create a Marketing Calendar for Your Mobile App

What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear the word - ‘Calendar’?

Holidays?

Christmas?

But did you know, there is a faction of people who will shout out -

Campaigns, Promotions & Deals.

These special people also go by the name - ‘Marketers’.

For them, the regular calendar automatically transforms into a marketing calendar.

To the unversed, a Marketing Calendar is a roadmap for all the marketing activities. It connects the planning of the marketing team members with the execution by showing each team member what tasks to perform and when.

Now, if you are planning to build an app, or own app business, you need a marketing calendar. Why? Let’s find out.

Why does your new app need a marketing calendar?

Here are the top reasons why you need to seriously consider creating a marketing calendar for your app -

Keeps your customers informed

Your marketing calendar will paint a complete picture of all your marketing activities in a particular timeframe. The calendar is shareable, which means everyone on the marketing team can see how their individual efforts are contributing to the overall marketing strategy. For instance, the content writer will be able to see how their last blog is helping a webinar conducted by the marketing head.

Keeps your audience engaged

Let’s go to the other side of the table now - your audience. Yes, even your audience benefits from a marketing calendar. Here’s a simple example. Without a marketing calendar, your blog writer ends up publishing two blogs on the same topic on different dates. Similarly, the social media specialist randomly writes on topics that don’t resonate with the target audience. Both these situations can severely hurt the engagement levels of the audience. A marketing calendar will help avoid such blunders and ensure that you publish only new and relevant content every time.

Keeps you consistent

Marketing is all about consistency. You cannot publish a blog or social posts on random dates and expect results. Even SEO takes 6-12 months to show results. The important thing is you need to create a schedule and stick to it. This will prevent you from posting content sporadically. Your brand exposure will be multiplied when you regularly publish new posts. Your audience will know when to expect the next post and will be waiting for it to be published.

Keeps your team sane

Without a marketing calendar, your team will hardly be on the same page. Let’s go back to the first example. What if the content writer didn’t know when the webinar was and ended up publishing the content a week later. The entire campaign goes for a toss. On the other hand, a marketing calendar will bring everyone to a single place and get a theme to visualize and execute their shared goals in unison.

How to create a Marketing Calendar?

Now that you have seen the ‘Why’ part, let’s address the ‘How’ part as we give you the 6 steps to build a marketing calendar for your app.

Determine how long you’ll plan for

For some app owners, planning a year in advance might be beneficial. For others, it could be quarterly, while for the rest, monthly. It all depends on the magnitude of your campaigns. For instance, if you plan only two major campaigns every year, say Christmas and Thanksgiving, which require coordination with multiple team members, then you need to plan at least a year in advance. On the other hand, if you are someone who would love to create multiple small campaigns on anything and everything that pops up throughout the year, a monthly calendar will be ideal.

Decide the volume

The next step is to determine how many campaigns or posts you will execute in that duration. But before you come up with the number, take stock of your in-house capacity, capabilities, and budget. Find out what you and your team can commit to in that duration. You do not want to plan 20 posts a month when you have just 2 writers who can come up with 5 posts a month. Work with your team to estimate the volume.

Decide what your Marketing Calendar should include

No two marketing calendars are the same. For instance, during the beginning of your app-building journey, you will be handling most of your marketing activities. Your calendar will be way simpler than that of an established business.

Whatever be the size of your app, it is important for you to decide upon the information that’ll be visible on your calendar. It’s usually ideal to start with details like -

• Platform to post
• Date and time of posting
• Copy of the post
• Imageries (Photos and videos)
• Link to the published post

Creating a Marketing Calendar Backlog

Not many marketers do this, but it is a very important component of a marketing calendar. It is a collection of ideas for campaigns and posts that are suited for execution at a later date. For example, while brainstorming with your team, you come up with a brilliant campaign idea that suits Christmas. Unfortunately, Christmas is still far away, and executing it now will not attract enough engagement. Now, if you do not maintain a content backlog, in all likelihood, you will forget about this campaign as you near Christmas. So, maintain a separate calendar backlog that has all the ideas you had during the year along with the proposed date of execution.

Identify important dates

What’s a calendar without important dates. The next step is to identify all the important dates in your marketing calendar. It could include holidays, company events, the launch of a new feature in your app, etc. Mark these dates in your calendar to craft marketing campaigns during that period. For example, if your company is launching a new app feature after two weeks, it will be perfect to send emails with special deals to loyal customers every day starting from next week. But this is possible only if you have identified these dates beforehand so that you can create coinciding campaigns.

Create the Marketing Calendar

And now you’ve reached the last step. Pick a suitable tool for building the calendar. Many tools are available on the internet; some are paid, and some are free. All that you need is an application that lets you customize fields and gives you the flexibility to view the calendar on the go. Google Docs might work in the initial days. But as you grow bigger, you might need more powerful software that can seamlessly integrate with other platforms, reducing your team’s efforts.

Wrapping Up

And that’s how you build a marketing calendar for your new app. Follow the steps highlighted in this post and get started with your marketing activities. But remember, it is equally important to maintain the calendar as days pass by. Many make the mistake of building an elaborate calendar but do not manage it properly, resulting in poor execution of campaigns. So, create and update - That should be your mantra!

And if you need any help building a feature-rich mobile app, Vajro is there to help. Using Vajro, you can build your dream app in just a few hours, that too without writing a single line of code. Want to know more? Book an appointment with us.