Communication Calendar
Having a communication calendar is a smart way of carrying out your marketing events and activities effectively. If you are a success-conscious business person, you do not have to do things haphazardly. Plan whatever you intend to do well in advance for better usage of your time and other valuable resources. As you operate your business, one of the things you need to consider is having a communication calendar.
What’s a Communication Calendar?
It’s just a simple plan comprising of all your scheduled marketing campaigns, events and activities in 12 months. It’s also a record of the different ways you plan to use to remain in touch with your customers. These may include email marketing, newsletters, article writing and submission, information updates, advertising campaigns, product and website promotions. The onus is on you to think of any other promotional activities that you may include in your calendar or plan.
Communications Plan
For instance, if you plan to use article marketing and a newsletter in January to boost your  business online, you should specify in your communication calendar when and what you intend to do as in the example below:
January:
i. Articles (8 articles, 2 per week, submitted for distribution on Tuesdays & Fridays) on custom awards and wedding invitation cards.
ii. Newsletter (one newsletter, sent in the first week) on new products and website promotion.
Your communication calendar should have the right amount of communication to your customers. It should neither be too little nor too much for it to act as an essential tool for boosting your business.
You need to know what you want to achieve and come up with your calendar of activities. If you give too little or too much, your communication calendar will not be sufficient.
For instance, I have come across many article marketers, who upload and distribute over 15 articles in just one month. If you are an article marketer, remember that you have readers who subscribe to your RSS Feed and continue to receive every post you submit. While quantity is essential in article marketing, quality is even more critical. Your readers may not want to be bombarded with so many articles, especially if they lack in quality, within a short period. They also read useful information from other sources and have limited time.
You can have different communication calendars for different customers groups depending on their needs and problems for which you are trying to provide a solution. For instance, you can choose to have a plan for existing customers and another one for prospects.
Why Should You Have a Communication Calendar?
People create plans for various reasons. But let me share with you five of them that I consider being cross-cutting.
#1 – Build Trusting Relationships
Trusting Relationships
A communication calendar helps you to build trusting relationships with your customers and to maintain them. Building long-lasting relationships require a high level of quality service delivery, believing in your words and promises, listening to your customers, solving their problems and being innovative. You can never achieve in all those areas if you do things haphazardly.
#2 – Ability to Plan Easier
Having a communication calendar makes your planning easier. You can know what to do and when to do it. Secondly, you can understand how to do your tasks from a well-informed point of view. Thirdly, you can attend to your customers’ needs and expectations by analysing the flow of touches from their point of view and reflecting yourself on essential aspects of your business vis-à -vis your customers. Am I doing enough or too much? Am I doing the right activities and in the proper order?
#3 – Turn Desires Into Actions
Turning Desires Into Actions
A communication calendar makes it easier to transmute your wishes, thoughts and innovations, into measures that will help you to grow your business. Having it written down and committing yourself to fulfil every aspect of it is a proven way of walking your way to success in your enterprise. Transforming your desires, thoughts and ideas into their monetary equivalency is only achievable by taking action, and the channel through which you attain your plans is your communication calendar.
#4 – Activity Coordination
Your communication calendar helps you to coordinate your activities. Marketing entails performing various actions to boost your business. It’s not easy to fulfil those activities in a more coordinated manner without proper planning. Each part of your calendar supports and links to each other. Your calendar, therefore, helps you to be efficient and effective.
#5 – It’s So Motivating
Motivated Businessman
Having a communication calendar is very rewarding. There is nothing more motivating than seeing yourself achieving in every aspect of your plan. At the end of each day, each week, each month and each year, you can evaluate yourself depending on the achievements made. Even when you fail to transmute your results into their monetary equivalency, you derive satisfaction from the progress, which in turn is a basis for future achievements.
Conclusion
As I wind up, you need to know that while creating your communication calendar, your challenge is to think hard and deep, basing your planning on different sources of information like the feedback you get from your customers. A well-thought-out plan, which is exhaustive enough and well-balanced, can help you to boost your online business. Try it out!
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