Enterprise marketing calendars are critical in planning and aligning a company’s marketing strategy with execution. However, many companies still use Excel spreadsheets to build and manage their marketing calendars, even though this is not the best solution. In this blog post, we’ll discuss why building an enterprise marketing calendar with Excel is not recommended and how using a specialized marketing calendar tool can benefit your business.

1. Lack of Collaboration and Sharing Capabilities:

Excel spreadsheets are designed for one person to work on at a time. When multiple team members need to access and update the same marketing calendar, version control and collaboration become a major issue. With Excel, it’s hard to keep track of who made changes and when, leading to confusion and potential mistakes. Furthermore, sharing an Excel spreadsheet with a large team is not practical, and it’s challenging to keep everyone on the same page.

2. Inadequate Data Management:

With limited data management capabilities, excel makes it difficult to organize and analyze marketing data. As your marketing plan grows, it can become difficult to manage the data, leading to errors and duplicates. In contrast, a marketing calendar tool can automatically organize and analyze your data, making it easier to see the big picture and identify trends.

3. Time-Consuming:

Building: and maintaining a marketing calendar in Excel is time-consuming and requires manual updates. It’s easy to make mistakes, and correcting them takes even more time. In contrast, a marketing calendar tool automates many of the manual processes, reducing the time and effort required to manage the calendar.

4. Inability to Integrate with Other Marketing Tools:

Excel spreadsheets do not integrate with other marketing tools, such as social media management platforms, email marketing software, and analytics tools. This limits the ability to track and measure the success of marketing campaigns, and makes it challenging to analyze the impact of marketing efforts. In contrast, a marketing calendar tool integrates with other marketing tools, making it easier to track and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns.

5. Limited Customization and Reporting Capabilities:

Excel spreadsheets are limited in their customization, visualization and reporting capabilities. It’s challenging to create custom reports, and the information presented is limited to what was manually inputted into the spreadsheet. In contrast, a marketing calendar tool offers a range of customization options, making it easier to create and customize views and reports.

6. No Real-Time Notifications:

Excel spreadsheets do not offer real-time notifications, making it challenging to stay informed about important updates and changes. In contrast, a marketing calendar tool offers real-time notifications, ensuring that everyone is up-to-date with the latest changes to the marketing plan. Additionally, users are able to customize what changes they want to be notified on.

7. Static and Limited Views:

Visualization of the marketing plan is key for management to understand what campaigns and activities will be supporting the marketing strategy. Alignment of marketing initiatives allow marketing teams to execute according to plan and yield a higher conversion rate on the executed campaigns. Unlike Excel, a marketing calendar tool offers filtering capabilities to alter and customize views to the user’s preference and business needs.

Building an enterprise marketing calendar with Excel is not recommended due to its limitations in collaboration and sharing, accessibility, data management, time-consumption, integration with other marketing tools, customization, reporting capabilities, and the lack of real-time notifications. Using a specialized marketing calendar tool can benefit your business by improving collaboration, reducing manual processes, integrating with other marketing tools, offering customization and reporting options, and providing real-time notifications.

To understand more about how CrossCap’s marketing calendar tool is helping brands  improve their marketing process, request a demo.