The traditional marketing calendar is out of date. Here’s what you need instead.

Why it’s time to consider a more customer-centric approach to your brand’s marketing activities.

Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day, Cyber Monday…any marketer worth their salt can recite the major retail events of the year.

 But if your marketing calendar starts and ends with generic, seasonal dates then you’re missing out on sales, says Adam Simms, the co-founder of data segmentation platform LoyPal.

 “The main issue with the traditional campaign calendar is that most of the dates are artificially designed,” says Simms. “Winter doesn’t finish on the 31st of August nor does demand for your new product disappear on day 43 of your six-week launch campaign.”

 Instead of a paint-by-numbers approach, Simms recommends thinking about the specific needs of your customers as well as those of your business.

Create your own calendar

 The first step in creating a marketing calendar is deciding which traditional or seasonal events to include.

 “The ideal marketing calendar is one that fulfils the expectations of your client base,” says Simms, adding that not every business needs to create campaigns for every single date. “So, if you’re a cookie business and customers expect you to [run a campaign] at Mother’s Day, then do that. If it’s not relevant, don’t.”

 Once these key dates are in your calendar, think about ways to create false sales peaks to help drive excitement and sales during slower periods. This might involve coming up with activations and campaigns that are unique to your business or brand. “You want to smooth out troughs and create false peaks to stimulate demand.”

 Simms warns that these original activations may become increasingly important this year, as c

Think customer-centric

 As well as traditional retail events and more unique activations that elevate your baseline sales during quieter periods, there is one more layer to consider when creating your marketing calendar.

 “The final aspect is to overlay a comprehensive lifecycle marketing approach,” says Simms. This means setting aside budget and resources to create campaigns that target customers at specific stages in their relationship with your brand. For example, a nurture series to welcome new customers or a re-engagement campaign to activate lapsed customers.

 A data platform like LoyPal can help brands identify different customer segments and talk to them “in the right way, based on the relationship that they’ve already got with your brand”.

 “Taking the customer lifecycle into account allows for more customer-led opportunities to create campaigns that resonate with where people are at, not just aligned to a product release schedule.”

Be flexible

 A final tip, says Simms, is to stay flexible.  “Allow your campaign cycle to breathe rather than flipping from one thing to another just because of the date. Doing this means if you’re seeing some success in messaging or have some traction in a campaign, you can continue to back it for a while longer while the demand is there.”

 Simms points to the way visual merchandising managers think about this: if winter is technically over, but it’s still cold outside, they’ll push scarves to the front and at POS to eke out some final sales. In Australia, hard and fast seasonal changes are less like flipping a switch and more like a subtle change that can go on for weeks. 

Building a buffer into your schedule can allow for some considered spontaneity: think “sneak peeks” and exclusive pre-orders for valued customers if the summer heat arrives early. If the weather’s still chilly, the messaging around Spring/Summer might be pushed back while you continue to generate demand around the AW collection instead, especially to new customers who may not have seen the full extent of the range or customers who haven’t purchased for a while.

To find out more about creating a marketing calendar that drives sales or creating campaigns that speak to different customer segments, contact LoyPal.