What is a Communication Calendar and 7 Tips to Create One

When your business communicates with other vendors, organizations, and clients, your calendar can fill up quickly. Disorganized messaging can leave you in the lurch as you miss important communications or scramble to keep up with the different ways you communicate with your customers.

Creating a communication calendar keeps your organization’s tasks streamlined and organized. With a good calendar, you’ll have them all in one helpful, centralized location. Using this tool, you can make plans, schedule your work, and track your messaging campaigns to make the best impression on those with whom you interact.

What is a communication calendar?

A communication calendar is designed to help you schedule how you plan to communicate with your target audiences. The calendar is highly detailed with day-to-day tasks and will extend the full length of a communication campaign.

Communication calendars usually include information such as when you are:

• Going to be out of the office for holidays or events
• Scheduling tasks for in-house goal setting
• Drafting content for different platforms
• Setting up messaging campaigns for specific audiences
• Launching messaging campaigns for outreach
• Assessing or evaluating the campaign

Communication calendars also review all your top objectives and let you identify the people responsible for handling the tasks that you add to the calendar.

4 Types of Communication Calendars

Internal Communications Calendar

Internal communications calendars are one type that you can use in your business. They focus on internal communications within your organization to help everyone see upcoming events so they can plan their personal schedules accordingly.

External Communications Calendar

An external communications calendar—or a marketing calendar—is another audience-targeting communication calendar. A marketing calendar organizes all your upcoming marketing projects to help you quickly see what’s coming next, where you are along a project’s timeline, who you need to communicate with, your timeline, and other detailed information.

Digital Communication Calendars

Digital communication calendars are focused on their formatting more than the kind of audience they’ll reach. Some of the formats you might choose include:

Software

Software-based calendars may be based on content calendar templates. They can also be preset social media calendars available through apps. In this case, the calendar is built into the app you’re using, and it’s centralized in a way that everyone on the team has access from their desktops or mobile devices.

Spreadsheet

Most business owners and professionals are familiar with spreadsheets. Spreadsheet communication calendars are marketing calendars that don’t use specific, dedicated apps or software. Instead, you can use any kind of spreadsheet (Google Sheets, Excel, or another kind) to stay organized.

Spreadsheet calendars are typically best for smaller teams.

Boards

Boards are another option you can use. Whiteboards and Post-it notes go a long way when you want a physical calendar right in front of you, particularly if you have to add or remove items regularly. Some people enjoy a physical calendar to ensure it can’t be accidentally deleted, too.

There are digital whiteboards you can use, and they’re very user-friendly. Whiteboards that are physically in a room won’t be as easy to share, and won’t be as flexible as a digital whiteboard.

How To Create a Communication Calendar: 7 Effective Tips

To create an effective communication calendar, you need to ensure you’re choosing the right format, setting objectives, and creating a tool that actually helps you stay organized. Here are some things to keep in mind as you work on yours.

Choose your format wisely.

Choosing the right format is important. It affects the way the calendar is organized, color coding, accessibility, and more. Consider color coding tasks, keeping tasks separated by the individual, and other options to stay organized.

Set a clear objective for each calendar.

Your first step is to set clear objectives for each calendar you create. What goals do you need to achieve? For example, are you hoping to start an SMS marketing campaign? Are you sending out business texts?

Outline what you need to use your calendar for and be detailed on how you’re going to use your calendar to support your communication strategies. For example, if you are using your calendar to plan content for car sales text messages, be clear about the goals, timeline, and strategy you have in mind.

Set clear production timelines.

With any communication calendar, one perk is that you can set it up for a specific timeline. Within the calendar, you can set mini-timelines as well, so you can see how long it should take to produce and distribute your content.

Target each calendar to a specific audience.

You need a communication calendar for each audience you serve. If it’s an internal calendar, ensure you set it up for people within your organization. If it’s for external audiences, think about how you can reach them most effectively and how you can set up the calendar to provide the most benefit to that crowd.

Select the best communication channels for your target audience.

There are different content types. You might use social media content, coschedule videos and standard text posts, and more. With your communication calendar, identify the communication channels you need to reach and keep your content ideas (and strategy) aimed at the target audience in the most productive way possible.

Draft the schedule.

Your next step is to draft the schedule for your communication calendar. Initially, your schedule may start out top-heavy, particularly when you want to get ahead on a project. However, as you transfer your schedule from your spreadsheet or another project management tool to this calendar, consider the best arrangement of tasks to avoid overwhelming or overburdening anyone on the team. And, if you’re using a marketing calendar, ensure your content ideas are timely and make it to audiences when they will need it most.

Create the message.

Before you build a communication calendar, your goal should be to create the right messaging to guarantee your communication plan will help you achieve all your business goals. A good content strategy can help you get your message in front of others, but you also need to know that the message you’re spreading is the one that will help you reach your marketing goals.

4 Benefits of Communication Calendars

Communication calendars have several significant benefits for businesses. Your organization may enjoy some or all of the following benefits these calendars can provide. Content calendars can:

Help improve and organize the marketing pipeline.

Out of all the benefits of communication calendars, this one may be the most important. With a good communication calendar, you can improve the organization of your marketing plans, helping you launch your marketing efforts on time while staying organized throughout your campaign’s overall timeline.

A marketing calendar will help you keep your strategy in line with your business’s goals at different times of the year and help you prioritize projects as they become most important.

Help leaders direct efforts and delegate tasks.

Seeing who has tasks to do and who has time to add something to their plate can be a big support. An internal communication calendar (such as Trello or Jira, for example) can help you do this.

Help monitor campaign performance more effectively.

It would be great to see how your marketing campaign is doing at a glance. You can with a good communication calendar. Your work will be organized and streamlined, so you can always look at the calendar to see exactly where you are on a marketing campaign’s or project’s timeline. And, as different phases of the project come to a close, you can identify if you ran behind, were on time, or got work done early, which can help you schedule better the next time around.

Help improve overall project management and internal production deadlines.

Finally, an internal communication calendar is an excellent project management tool for scheduling with others you work with. Your team has its own internal production timelines, all of which can be laid out on a communication calendar. On top of that, you can see who is responsible for which tasks, the content types you’ll be working with, and other information on this editorial calendar.

3 Important Dates for SMS Marketing Calendar

In your SMS marketing calendar campaigns, it’s necessary to note important dates and events that could impact your timelines. Some of the most important dates to keep in mind are:

Holidays

You will want to include holidays on your marketing calendar. Start with the major holidays celebrated by your company (ie: Federal holidays such as Christmas, Easter, and New Year’s Day). Avoid scheduling any kind of content or work on those days, and you need to take those days into consideration when you set up your project timelines.

Also consider including holidays that specific team members celebrate. For instance, you may have a team member who celebrates Eid, or you could have a team member who will be away on and off throughout Hanukkah.

Commemorations.

Think about commemorations when you plan your content schedule as well. In your communication calendar, write down important events and commemorations such as International Self-Care Day or Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving).

You should also keep other dates, such as Labor Day and Veterans Day, in mind as you begin to schedule your workflows. Some of those days won’t require team members to be off, but you may have specific content types to send out to target audiences as a part of your content strategy.

In-House Dates

Finally, don’t forget to schedule days that are important in the office. For example, is the office going to be closed for repairs for a few days in the summer? Do you need to plan for one of your employees’ vacations? Don’t forget to add those dates and information about how those dates will impact your content creation and planning calendar.

Podium Helps You Connect With Your Target Audiences On Schedule

Staying on track with a communication calendar helps you with content planning as well as staying organized in the office.

With Podium’s Messaging Platform and AI Employee, you can get your messaging in front of the right people at the right time. Consolidate messages from every channel into a single inbox and respond at any time, day or night, with our conversational AI Employee.

Watch a demo to learn more!