In the famous words most often attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”
It seems this quote can apply to an infinite amount of professions, and marketing is most certainly one of them. When it comes to tracking your digital marketing, having a concise and simple to use document will take the headache away from planning, measuring, and reporting on your marketing efforts. It is also much easier to find success with your social media and content marketing efforts when you employ the use of a tracking document.
At VA Partners, we use what we call our “Digital Marketing Calendar” to house all relevant information regarding our clients’ and our own digital marketing efforts. The document is a simple Excel spreadsheet and includes various tabs dedicated to tracking different activities and types of content. The calendars are used on a daily basis and can be shared with others on the team, or presented to clients to review various goals, milestones and posts.
Here is what we include in our Digital Marketing Calendar:
Plan
This tab serves as a quick snapshot of your marketing plan and a handy guide that has quick links to your social media profiles, blog page, etc. This tab should also include things like your general social media and content marketing plan (for example, how many tweets you plan on posting per day and what mix of those tweets will be company or 3rd party content).
Goals & Milestones
In your plan, you should have goals for your social and content marketing efforts. Pageviews, social media followers, social shares, and inbound leads are just a few metrics you can track in this tab. Depending on your activity level on social media and how much your business plans to blog, this tab can be updated weekly or monthly to report on progress.
Milestones can be things like “first corporate newsletter issue”, or “1000 followers on LinkedIn,” or “website redesign.” The point of tracking these milestones are to keep longer term objectives in mind and to ensure accountability. Chances are you won’t reach 1000 LinkedIn followers overnight, so using a milestone tracker will keep you honest and motivated to reach these longer term goals.
Social Media Tracker
As its title suggests, this tab should be used to track any and all social media posts on your various social media channels. The social media tracker can be organized as a simple grid with your channels as the column labels, and the date as row labels. As you schedule social media profiles with tweets, Facebook posts, and LinkedIn updates, you can simply paste the corresponding updates in the tracker. This will allow you to have one place where all of your posts can easily be reviewed.
Content Schedule/Blog Calendar
This tab is used to plan out your blog posts and other content marketing efforts. Depending on how often you’ve decided on posting blogs, you may be able to plan out your blog topics for a considerable amount of time into the future. You can then assign team members different blog topics to write about based on their strengths & experience and keep everyone accountable with set due dates for submission (we recommend at least 2 days before posting). This tab should also track any less frequent content that your marketing team would publish like white papers, industry reports, or case studies for example.
If you’d like to talk about implementing a digital marketing calendar, don’t hesitate to contact me to learn more. If you’re looking to learn some more about startup and B2B sales and marketing, why not download one of our white papers?
