Hello 2022!
We are fourth week into it, and yet we are still in awe of the big positive shifts we experienced in 2021. It’s been quite a journey for all, particularly for us at the Commerceplus. We are super grateful for the feedback from clients and readers who found value in the content we have created and shared. Here’s the team putting together another piece on 2022’s promotional calendar just for you!
Ecommerce in South East Asia continues to bloom progressively even with the uncertainty brought upon by the pandemic, and clearly, there is no sign of slowing down. While people are raring to get back to their daily ways, their online buying behaviors and habits have fundamentally shifted and by using the right tools, you can continue to engage and capture growth in the coming year.
One of these tools would be the promotional calendar. An Ecommerce promotional calendar acts as one of the essentials for all the brand curators and business owners, because everyone would hate to miss out the important dates to plan out a great marketing campaign and set the promotion in advance.
This is especially true for the days leading up to a peak sale event which should be focused on boosting your engagements, add to cart rates and voucher collections for a strong checkout on the peak days itself.
4 Things to Consider for Maximizing Your Efforts Around an Ecommerce Promotional Calendar
So, what should you really expect from an effective promotional calendar? If you are well aware of the importance as mentioned in the previous calendar you loved, in which we also explained some of the important events which are still relevant to this year’s posting. We understand the overwhelming choices of calendars you can find in the Internet, but we will be realistic on how you will need only one or two that just make sense.
Let’s get started with a few keynotes:
Localize your Promotional Calendar
Your calendar needs to contain the major Ecommerce events and cultural holidays happening in 2022 across the nation you are targeting, for the entire year. In other words, you cannot expect a promotional calendar for American market to be applicable to the Southeast Asian countries. Not only does the two share fairly little amounts of festive holidays, the buyer behaviors are also vastly different.
The Ecommerce buying behaviors for the US and Europe markets are often largely centered around 2 larger peaks towards the year end, but with Ecommerce in South East Asia, the efforts put in especially by the dominant players like Lazada, Shopee, Tokopedia, Bukalapak, Amazon SG are creating many smaller mini peaks to spread out the demand generation. For example, Lazada will celebrate it’s birthday sale on March 27 and this will be a regionally coordinated event with lots of promotions going on and advertising fueled push to generate traffic to the site.
A good promotional calendar will include marketing efforts and plans across marketplace campaigns, own brand campaigns, timed product launches, flash sales, live streams, promotions to keep the Ecommerce store active and exciting for visitors.
A localized calendar will help to determine focus on when exactly is the best time to launch the marketing activities, creative asset developments and advertising activities.
Tip: We use an Excel to map out on a full month the activities across marketplace, own site, brand activities, promotional tools and also advertising activities. This gives the whole team a good idea what is going to happen in the following month and the creative team better planning and allocation of resources to work on creatives.
Make it Usable Across Teams
Yes, we cannot stress enough on how it is vital to keep the promotional calendar simple and easy to understand for all. It will be accessed by the brand owner, the store operations team, the customer support, the creative team developing the assets for the store and the advertising materials.
Tip: Use a project management tool like asana, trello, and in our case, tasks by planner from Microsoft teams. Set up an internal discussion to map out the key activities so everyone is aligned and assign out the timelines. You don’t want your promotional calendar to end up looking like a compilation of sticking notes with lengthy words. Bear in mind that using a fragmented, disorganized calendar will cause more harm than good as it only distracts your team from the main thing – to remind them to stay on track.
Efficient Workflows for Your Stakeholders
Promotional calendar comes in all shapes and forms – pick that one that fits your needs and budget. Popular marketing calendar tools like StoryChief and Loomly are nice to have – but they are definitely not the most cost effective option. Good ol’ printable calendar in Excel or Google Sheets is good to have, as it is easy to manage and organize while we know some picked Google Calendar as it is more accessible in general.
Based on your team structure, we think you’d know best which works for your company. Keep the team tight and have the project lead be the go to person who plans and know every detail of the upcoming month’s promotions.
Tip: It is the persistency in maintaining and updating your promotional calendar to make sure it is a functional calendar for everyone in the team.
Keep the Promotional Calendar in Sync with Your Content Calendar
In contrary to the level of details you have to present in a content calendar, a promotional calendar is essentially a written roadmap – it is made to plan ahead, simulate opportunities and sales targets while keeping the whole team aligned on deliverables. The terms might have been used interchangeably – but when the two are being properly integrated, a marketing calendar is born.
Content plans are typically used by the content planning team, creative and copywriting team and is centered around product knowledge, customer engagement and also promotions. Having the content calendar and promotional calendar synced together will help provide an additional boost to maximize engagement during the key promotional periods.
Sounds confusing? Allow us to explain further. Oftentimes, there is only a singular, centralized marketing calendar being used for bigger organizations as the calendar is developed to allow editing from multiple users at one go – and this usually comes with a price tag. This is simply an additional expense that might be a little too burdensome for those smaller companies with limited funds. We have created the promotional calendar below in hope that it will facilitate your content planning activities.
