How to create an event-aware marketing calendar

Campbell Brown
CEO & Co-Founder

Plan ahead for optimal conversion

Being prepared for short to mid term marketing activity is essential for generating the best possible ROI from your multi-channel campaigns. It creates breathing space for your team to be able to:

  • Assess the right advertising channels or platforms.

  • Define the desired targeting options like demographics, location, date, event, keywords and interests.

  • Check the user journey from first click/view through to the desired end action.

  • Agree and track all key metrics to determine ROI and whether or not certain campaigns are worth repeating.

  • Ensure overall campaign consistency and that design, tone of voice, and copy syncs up with your brand.

Having to rush around and push campaigns live at the last minute is never going to result in the optimal execution. Opportunities will be missed and mistakes will be made which can adversely impact an otherwise potentially successful campaign.

Don't overdo it

Now, we’re not advocating you create a 100-page document that makes you feel good, but no one reads, and ends up a computer stand monument to all the trees killed printing it. Quite the opposite, actually.

A successful marketing plan is concise, fluid and easily communicated. In practice, this means focusing on the ‘why’ and extracting accurate measurements of success – not subjective reasoning that in the digital age, becomes obsolete in three months (or less).

A clear strategy powers your ability to adapt faster

Not all plans will come to fruition. This is simply a fact of business life. But having a robust vision actually allows you to adapt faster when unforeseen issues arise, because an overall strategy is in place and decisions can be made quickly.

It also allows the business to jump on potential opportunities that arise in real time, because you can easily identify – or be notified of – new opportunities which align with your overall marketing calendar.

So, where do you start?

There are a few steps that you should take before you start to build out your marketing calendar:

  1. Define your key market locations.

  2. Define your audience.

  3. Define what events you want your brand to be associated with (and to avoid).

  4. Define what events present an opportunity to create relevant promotions around.

  5. Set up how you’re going to measure the success of your campaign. Whether it’s content you’re publishing or a search campaign, you need to know what works so you can repeat its success.

Leverage the power of events in your marketing calendar

Building your marketing calendar around events which impact your business is a great way to time your targeted campaigns to launch when demand is likely to increase or to plan customized marketing to increase demand. This means you can take advantage of this increase more effectively than your competitors – and in turn take a large slice of the additional business.

But it’s not only about the direct events that impact your business. Leveraging events that your brand has some form of association or synergy with can also create useful conversion triggers when communicating new promotions. For example, while International Hug Your Cat Day might not be directly responsible for making people buy pet products, it can be used as an associated trigger to advertise a special promotion or offer.

Or maybe you’re a restaurant chain with many TVs to play sports games. You can leverage upcoming live televised sports games to understand which games will be the most popular to decide what to play on your TVs and/or you can create fun promotional days around specific games to incentivize customers to come to your restaurant and watch. 

Identify events relevant to your business

When it comes to finding events that may impact your business, the usual traditional methods such as Google searches and manual data collection simply won't cut it. In the dynamic world we live in, your spreadsheet would become outdated faster than a blink of an eye.

That’s one of the reasons why we created PredictHQ: to eliminate the above and create a seamless, relevant, global event discovery system that powers actionable insights and collaboration. With PredictHQ, you can find events in a number of ways:

  • Search – Search by event category, location, date, search term, or PHQ rank (we enrich events with additional data, then rank them).

  • Location insights – upload and track your locations of interest to identify event impact most relevant to your business. Quickly access the number of events, types of events, and demand surges taking place near your business locations.

  • Event Trends – a feature that you can use to find peak dates of demand, effectively letting you know which days and events to focus on and building a marketing strategy around.

Your results can be viewed in a list, map, or calendar format. See events within a day, week, month or year view and filter the results by event category, location, PHQ rank or search term. There's even a calendar heatmap which lets you see which days have the most events happening.

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Harness the power of event visibility

Just remember, event visibility plays a huge role in developing a fluid, well-planned marketing calendar for your team. Join PredictHQ today for free to optimize your new marketing calendar by leveraging detailed, location-based event insights.