According to the Internet, a “marketing calendar” shows your company's plan and schedule for marketing events, affairs, media campaigns, and even merchandising efforts, as well as the results of these marketing strategies. This means that this tool is used to help business owners keep track of what is happening on any of the marketing and promotional strategy being used at the time, and also to determine what the next step is after completing a marketing campaign.

Is it essential to your business? Yes, because a marketing calendar helps you jumpstart your marketing campaign as well as assist you in keeping track of where you're headed to achieve your main goal systematically.

What are the benefits of a marketing calendar? Using a marketing calendar helps you coordinate your different marketing campaigns, for one. As a business owner, you have varied marketing strategies scheduled and planned to help you promote your products and services. With a marketing calendar, you are able to organize everything in such a way that all of them points to one direction or goal – that is, to effectively promote your business to your target clients.

Two, it helps you develop a budget that is within your company's means. Because you have a schedule to stick to, you will know when and where to put your money. In other words, with a marketing calendar in place, you are able to organize not only your time but your budget as well, according to the affairs and events lined up.

Three, a marketing calendar helps you to stay on track of your goals and plans. It helps you avoid being sidetracked, hence, miss opportunities that might get you the edge over the other competition. Because you have a schedule to follow, everything is put in their proper place (e.g. budget, staff, plans, resources, etc.). It allows you to get the most of every opportunity that you have to promote your business, as well as optimize your resources to achieve your end goal without having to break your budget.

So how do you create one for your business? A marketing calendar can be created to focus on your marketing needs and requirements. One of the most effective methods is to create a calendar printing project that provides a breakdown of the weeks in a year. Each week will highlight marketing activities that will be held within that time. Your calendar printing project then would reflect specific and individual promotions or marketing events, as well as the individual costs for each of the activity. You may also include the results from the events of that week to be used as your guide in later marketing plans and schedule.

By having your very own marketing calendar, it would be easy for you to see which of the events and campaigns were successful in achieving your goals, and which should be reorganized to avoid further future loss.