5 ways a Unified Calendar can improve your marketing strategy

“There is no single source of truth and content information is hard to find and access.” — Samantha, VP of Digital Marketing

“I dread when my VP asks for the content plan; it takes me three days to ask around different teams and collate a deck to share” — Zach, Digital Marketing Manager

“My marketing strategy, content planning, and media execution is a bunch of spreadsheets that I update manually” — Sarah, Content Strategist

Does any of the above sound familiar?

If yes, then you are probably facing what we call point solution chaos, where every team — from different channels, locations, categories, and functional units — all work in silos. 

When marketing leaders spend half of their time unifying teams and standardizing manual processes, it doesn’t allow for developing content strategies or driving campaign objectives. 

Unified Marketing Calendar — The ultimate visibility tool for paid and owned channels

Disjointed marketing activities across channels, markets, and business units lead to frustration for marketers. Siloed planning and execution of campaigns across different channels result in disconnected messaging and inconsistent experiences for your customer. 

Leveraging a unified paid and owned calendar provides visibility, transparency, and collaboration to your teams across channels and gives your customers a consistent and cohesive experience. Here are five reasons why it’s critical to have a unified calendar. 

Unified visibility

When your marketing managers don't have visibility into other planned campaigns and content, or initiatives that might be running at the same time, you don’t have a unified marketing strategy. In order to get it right, a unified marketing calendar needs to:

• Be scalable enough to support all channel teams with their specific requirements across paid and organic channels

• Employ a robust governance structure to ensure only brand-approved content goes live across all regions

• Be able to differentiate and filter content and campaigns for each business unit, and align with KPIs and goals

Most organizations can replace more than five disconnected tools used by different channel teams by deploying a unified marketing calendar.

Unified planning with placeholders

You don’t need to know every detail at the beginning to put together a marketing plan. To avoid creating content that may not be used, marketing teams can build placeholders into their plans for paid and owned channels to ensure team input and buy-in prior to developing the content. When creating your marketing plan your team should:

• Align on the minimum information you need to pre-plan campaigns for every team/channel

• Align on flight dates and campaign timeframes based on business priorities 

• Create placeholders for all relevant channels and placements, whether that’s an Instagram Story, a LinkedIn Ad, blog post, or a podcast, ahead of content production

By using unified planning and developing placeholders, teams can reduce wasted content by more than 25%.

Unified execution 

Marketing teams can drive greater efficiencies when strategy and publishing/media teams share a common calendar. To achieve unified execution, you’ll need:

• An actionable calendar that provides visibility into planned versus live campaigns, assets, and activities

• A single source of truth for every type of marketing activity: global and local campaigns, projects, content sets, and channel activations

Unified end-to-end workflows from planning to execution on a shared marketing calendar can reduce duplication of work by at least 25% and create better visibility across teams.

Unified customer experience

Providing customers with a consistent experience and messaging across channels is imperative to building stronger brand recognition and loyalty. A unified marketing calendar can allow your brand to unify customer experiences and:

• Meet customers where they are with effective messaging on the channels they’re already using

• Deliver consistent content that resonates with customers and keeps your brand top of mind to drive conversions and sales

Brands can improve the campaign performance by more than 32% by applying AI-driven optimization and insights during ideation and planning.

Unified collaboration

Marketing teams strive to accelerate their time-to-market. With a single platform for all teams to collaborate, you can help ensure all of your key stakeholders can give their input and activate your campaigns on time. For effective collaboration, your unified marketing calendar should be flexible enough to:  

• Adjust and communicate updates to content plans and campaign timelines that align with business priorities

• Collaborate across channel teams, assign tasks, and reuse content

• Share specific calendar views for both teams and executive stakeholders 

Brands can achieve at least 40% reduction in time-to-market with unified collaboration. Automated workflows on a unified calendar ensure greater alignment and visibility across teams and roles.

A unified calendar can be a reality without adding another point solution. A unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform can bring your marketing calendar in line with all of your marketing and advertising activities to increase visibility, collaboration, governance, and insight for all of your end-to-end marketing workflows. Learn more about Sprinklr Unified Calendar, Modern Marketing & Advertising, and Unified-CXM by requesting a demo.

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