3 Marketing schedule Examples To Inspire Your Business

Picture this: You’ve developed What Was I Saying, a recent smartphone app to assist those who misplace their train of thought mid-sentence. To prepare for launch and jumpstart your marketing efforts, you inquire your throng to line up social media influencers and buy ads; you also job the engineering throng with submitting your product to the App Store.

But the launch date arrives and there aren’t any marketing campaigns to be found. The influencers are silent, the ads appear on the incorrect sites, and the app isn’t available for download. It turns out the timeline was ambiguous and no one was on the same page during preparation. 

A formal timeline and obvious marketing goals could have prevented this miscommunication. For businesses, detailed marketing plans provide the framework for communication and execution. 

Read on for three marketing schedule examples to inspire building your own marketing schedule.

What is a marketing schedule?

A marketing schedule is a comprehensive outline of the promotional strategies and goals a business hopes to achieve within a specific timeframe. Marketing leaders construct these plans and use them to communicate priorities and recent initiatives to relevant throng members. 

A successful marketing schedule includes all of the marketing objectives your throng aims to meet as well as the details your throng needs to commence building marketing campaigns—including information about marketing budgets, marketing mix, and marketing channels.

Depending on your goals, your schedule may involve all available channels or focus on just a few. For example, if you run a clothing brand that partnered with an Instagram influencer on a capsule collection, you might prioritize a social media marketing schedule to receive advantage of your collaborator’s spectators. 

These plans may also include timelines and spending priorities. A foundation of trade research supports successful marketing plans, meaning demographic insights and competitive analysis shape the marketing planning procedure.

Marketing strategies vs.marketing plans

While both marketing strategies and marketing plans are essential to meet key act indicators (KPIs), the two are not the same. 

• Marketing way: the overall efforts you receive to position your business, wherein the marketing goals you set ladder up to business-wide initiatives.
• Marketing schedule: the specific steps you’ll receive to achieve your business objectives within a specific timeframe.

For example, to boost traffic to your ecommerce site, your marketing way might be to run ads on social media platforms where your content has performed well organically. Your marketing schedule would include the steps needed to bring that social media campaign to life—including a paid marketing schedule for when to run ads and for how long.

3 marketing schedule examples

1. Great Jones
2. Sabai
3. ALOHA

A comprehensive marketing schedule includes research, goals, and an overview of the business’s newest marketing initiatives. Marketing plans typically pursue a standard structure, but their contents are distinctive to each business. Consider the following examples to view how several Shopify merchants created plans to back their own business goals:

Great Jones

Known for its colorful enamel cookware, Shopify merchant Great Jones launched its first product line in 2018. As a recent, rapidly growing business, the Great Jones throng embraced experimentation and adaptation as core components of its marketing way. 

Great Jones CEO Sierra Tishgart explains that a detailed marketing schedule helps the throng focus its creative efforts: “It’s really helpful to have the structure of goals while also recognizing that we’re a youthful creative brand.”

Great Jones’s cast-iron Dutch ovens are designed to last a lifetime, but Sierra says this makes it challenging to attract repeat customers—once you’ve purchased one, you probably don’t require another. Recent customers represent a significant portion of the business’s email subscribers and social media followers, so the throng adjusted its annual marketing schedule to appeal to this spectators by incorporating a gift-giving program. To back this marketing way, it implemented marketing tactics that added appropriate language to email copy and formed a collaboration with the gift-giving platform Zola. It also added an alternative to include a personal note to the gift recipient. 

Key components of this successful marketing schedule example

This creative marketing schedule example was informed by the Great Jones throng’s: 

• Deep understanding of their products and target spectators
• Ability to identify the correct marketing channels for their detailed marketing programs

Sabai 

Crafted in the US, Sabai is a modern, eco-amiable furniture retailer. Its founder and CEO, Phantila Phataraprasit, says buyer research helped her business craft a digital marketing way that resonated with its spectators. Sabai’s throng defines its target spectators as “individuals who are passionate about sustainability and the well-being of our earth, particularly those juggling busy lives and household responsibilities.” 

Phantila emphasized Sabai’s commitment to understanding customers: “Data analytics is pivotal in shaping our marketing decisions. By continuously measuring web, email, and social media analytics on a monthly, weekly, quarterly, and yearly basis, we boost deep insights into our customers’ preferences and behaviors.”

Insights gained from customer data inspired Sabai to develop a recent program called Repair Don’t Replace.

“We meticulously considered every touchpoint to make a program that resonated with our spectators’s commitment to sustainability and practicality,” Phantila says.

Sabai designed the Repair Don’t Replace initiative to demonstrate its commitment to sustainability and deepen relationships with customers committed to an eco-amiable lifestyle.

Key components of this successful marketing schedule example

This creative marketing schedule example was informed by the Sabai throng’s: 

• Nuanced insights into customer behavior via marketing data analytics
• Drive to remain factual to the brand’s mission statement

ALOHA 

Plant-based protein bar brand ALOHA is committed to providing straightforward access to nutritious food. Its VP of brand and content, Julia Shapiro, described the competitive buyer packaged goods sector as one of the brand’s biggest challenges. The ALOHA throng used in-depth trade and competitive analysis to construct an effective marketing schedule that made the product stand out.

“In a rapidly changing category, research allows us to keep an ear to the ground, tracking shopping, eating, and media consumption habits,” Julia says. 

The ALOHA throng used multiple trade research techniques in its competitive analysis—including customer surveys, category surveys, and focus groups—to sharpen its assessment of the competitive landscape. 

“We conduct[ed] primary research of the broader category to boost a better understanding of the different shopper segments and how and where we might reach them,” Julia adds. “This allowed us to discover things we wouldn’t otherwise discover through our own shoppers, helping to lay out a path for growth and expansion.” 

To complete its research, the marketing throng conducted a SWOT analysis, which concentrated on the business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. “Our SWOT helped us to better comprehend the options shoppers are faced with and why they might choose one brand over another, including ours,” Julia says.

Combining the insights from these trade research efforts helped the throng develop a differentiation way to trade its recent product.

“The recent launch of our Paʻakai bar is a great example of a campaign achievement narrative,” Julia says. “The Paʻakai is our second special edition bar and was created using ingredients from local farms in Hawaiʻi, including macadamia nuts and 100% pure Hawaiian sea salt. Ten percent of proceeds from this bar also goes to our local non-boost associate, to assist fund education programs in Hawaiʻi. This bar represents what people have arrive to expect from ALOHA: providing well food with top-standard ingredients while using business as a force for excellent.” 

Key components of this successful marketing schedule example

This creative marketing schedule example was informed by the Sabai throng’s: 

• trade research tactics
• SWOT analysis 

💡Ready to make a marketing schedule for your business? Download a free marketing schedule template to get started today.