What do you use for a Marketing Planning Calendar?

[Anonymous]

I'm currently using a Basecamp Calendar to track everything in the Marketing Department -- I have a few different categories:

• Webinars / Conferences / Campaigns
• Holidays & Important Dates
• Email Schedule
• Content Marketing / PR

This allows me or anyone in the department to see everything in one view or to filter to one of these categories to help with planning. It's nothing too advanced and the simplicity helps with user adoption.

I'm curious what other marketing teams are using to help plan and prevent overlap with their marketing campaigns. I'm using Basecamp 2 and if I upgrade to Basecamp 3, the Calendar I currently rely on will change to an agenda view. Here's what Basecamp said about their new calendar:

Calendar: The landscape has changed - most companies use Google Calendar or Outlook or iCalendar for their company calendar. So rather than create confusion by creating another calendar, we’ve focused on an straightforward line-by-line agenda-view rather than a traditional grid view. You can add any events on this agenda view to your own personal Google, Outlook, or iCalendar, and then they'll also show up on your phone, but if you use the Basecamp Classic or Basecamp 2 calendar extensively for calendaring we’d suggest checking out the Basecamp 3 “Schedule” feature before switching over completely.

So is this accurate -- do most companies use Google Calendar or Outlook or iCalendar for their company calendar?

[Anonymous]

I've definitely experienced my fair share of marketing teams using Google Calendars to track activities and... it works! Certainly, depending on your business needs and who needs access, you can get away with functionality you already have in another tool or system.

[Anonymous]

Good to know! And most people are likely familiar with Google Calendar.

[Anonymous]

Hi Scott!

As a company, we use Google Calendar for everything! However, we have a google sheets calendar where downloaded a calendar template and color code it for when we send emails, webinars, invites, and marketing events. For example, a date might look like this:

October 4

SocedoU Webinar (red = webinars)

Send Webinar Invite (black=emails)

DF16 (orange = event)

I just created it last month and it definitely helped with being able to better understand our user experience. Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any questions or feel free to email me directly (kat@socedo.com).

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the input. One more for Google Calendars! I like how you use colors, that will help quickly get a read on what's upcoming. Are you the only one who inputs the dates? Do you let stakeholders add items to the calendar to save the date for their campaign, etc.

[Anonymous]

So we actually use Google Sheets (Google's version of Excel) exclusively for our marketing automation calendar and then pasted the template. We use google calendar for all other company meetings. The only people who can see the calendar are our marketing team + a few other key people in sales. My manager and I are the only ones who input on it thus far, but we work very closely so there has not been any miscommunication in that regard. The colors were my idea, and I love them. It has helped me recall dates, webinar notes, etc quickly in meetings since I am a visual learner, it helps solidify that information a little further in my head.

[Lauren_Beth]

Hi Scott - We used to use Basecamp calendars but that was the only feature of Basecamp that really worked for us.  We've recently switched to Wrike which has some very good calendar/planning views which is much more task oriented than Basecamp was, a plus for my team.  We also use a calendar in Salesforce for sales staff to see upcoming events, speaking slots, etc. In general, I want my team to have the fewest things to update as possible so Wrike is our go to planning tool.