Marketo's Marketing Calendar Merges Planning and Operations

From spreadsheets to whiteboards, many modern marketers are using obsolete tools to plan and strategize their marketing activities. To give marketers a more sophisticated way to execute their tasks, Marketo has launched its Marketing Calendar product, a solution that promises to deliver a comprehensive view of marketing campaigns across the organization and facilitate effective planning.

"We know that marketers can use other tools to plan their actions, but most other tools don't give them a complete view of everything else that's going on in the organization. This leads to scheduling conflicts, miscommunications, redundancies, and other issues. Before making any new plans, marketers need to have the full picture in order to avoid these problem," Chandar Pattabhiram, vice president of product and corporate marketing at Marketo, says.

Marketo's Marketing Calendar enables users to transition onto a single tool for all activity and campaign planning, and gain access to marketing content, email recipient lists, and other information that marketers need on a daily basis through a single source, Pattabhiram explains. The calendar is also customizable based on a specific marketer's needs, and can be organized into different views that segment activities and campaigns by channel, region, or audience.

"We wanted the tool to give marketers flexibility. The calendar can show them everything they want and need to see all at once, or they can choose to tailor what they see, and make it more specific. It's all about making marketers' lives easier, and helping them do their job better," according to Pattabhiram.

What makes the product particularly powerful, however, is its on-the-fly program builder capability, Pattabhiram says. The calendar allows marketers to build and modify marketing programs without ever leaving the calendar view through drag-and-drop functionality. Like other scheduling changes, modifications to actual campaigns are updated in real time and shared with the entire team.

"Once a change is made, it's synced up with every other marketer's calendar right away. Updating things is easy, and the synchronization helps marketers stay connected with their teams and with the rest of the organization. Communication gaps are eliminated, and the entire operation just becomes more smooth and streamlined," he says. "Now, the place where planning happens is the place where execution happens too," he adds.

So far, Marketo customers that have used the tool during the beta testing process have been pleased. "Like most marketing teams, we're running multiple campaigns simultaneously, and keeping each new campaign from interfering with the others is a challenge for our spreadsheet gatekeeper and our team," Amanda Wolff, executive manager of digital marketing at Elsevier Education, said in a statement. "Marketing Calendar gives everyone on the team the visibility they need to plan campaigns better from the start, so we can avoid scheduling conflicts and create a well-orchestrated experience for our customers. Having one central source for campaign schedules saves us time and headaches."

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