Best Marketing Calendar Template for 2025

Content creation takes time and strategy, which can get lost in daily tasks. A marketing calendar can help you create and implement a winning content marketing strategy.

In this article, we’ll discuss why you need a marketing calendar and how to create one for the coming year. We’ll also share a free marketing calendar template for Excel and Google Sheets, as well as a US marketing calendar with the top 2025 holidays, events and social media days to know so you never miss an engagement opportunity.

What is a marketing calendar?

A marketing calendar is a visual framework for planning marketing activities weeks, months or years in advance.

It’s a planning tool that helps you strategize and draft. Marketing calendars can be single documents that align themes across channels (for example, digital marketing calendars or marketing events calendars) or channel-specific calendars for a blog or social media channel.

Marketing calendars can help with rolling out content strategies, remembering important dates (like seasonal campaigns) and planning distribution. They allow you to brainstorm and plan at a high level.

Beyond visual organization, marketing calendars help drive revenue. Marketing teams that document their strategies are 414% more likely to succeed, and 70% of teams set marketing goals for their marketing initiatives, projects and campaigns.

Marketing calendars answer three questions about content and marketing activities:

• Who? Who handles each marketing task? Are there enough resources to complete all the tasks on your marketing plan calendar?

• What? What upcoming tasks do we need to prioritize? What are the marketing plans for any seasonal deals, launches or sales?

• When? When does each campaign start and finish? When will the campaign deliverables, such as articles or social media posts, need to be ready?

Why do you need a marketing calendar?

Once you answer the core questions of your marketing efforts, it’s easier to plan and execute strategic and cohesive marketing campaigns.

Creating a marketing calendar in advance lets you capitalize on holidays, themes and events important to your audience. Using timely hashtags and creating content around trending topics, you can join global conversations and earn impressions and followers.

For example, if you’re a coffee shop, you don’t want to miss out on International Coffee Day (Oct 1, 2025) as a chance to offer special promotions and drive online engagement and store traffic.

A marketing calendar is also valuable for managing workflows and internal marketing processes. It can help you determine how and when to develop and deliver content.

What are the key parts of an internal marketing calendar?

There are different tools and frameworks for marketing calendars depending on your needs (more on those later). No matter which you choose, though, there are some core components to all types of marketing calendars:

Component	Description
Visibility	Everyone involved should be able to see your marketing calendar (but don’t all need permission to make changes). Transparency keeps everyone on the same page with deadlines, project timelines and publishing dates.
Collaboration	Marketing calendars allow team members to comment on items so they can add updates or questions. Keep communication in one place so everyone is informed.
Milestones	Marketing calendars allow you to break up projects into smaller goals. Milestones make processes and next steps clear and keep every contributor on track.
Deadlines	Marketing calendars allow marketing managers to set deadlines and publishing dates to ensure campaigns launch on time.
Functionality	The marketing calendar design should be simple enough for your team to see what tasks they’ve got coming up. If they need to wade through complicated blocks of information, there’s a greater chance they’ll miss something.

Now that you know the ingredients to a successful internal marketing calendar, let’s examine how to implement one for your team.

5 steps for creating an internal marketing calendar

Omnichannel marketing campaigns should work together. If you’re running a Twitter campaign alongside an email marketing campaign about the same event, they should make sense together.

An internal marketing calendar can help you do this while giving you the resources to execute.

Here are five steps to create an internal marketing calendar from scratch.

Step 1: Start with your goals

Before you start adding campaigns to your calendar, you have to answer some simple questions, such as:

• What are your goals (e.g., to drive brand awareness or introduce a new feature)?

• How many campaigns can you realistically run with the resources you have?

• What is the start-to-finish process of campaign creation?

Basic questions like these will keep your calendar under control as you develop and execute new ideas.

Step 2: Decide on a schedule based on your internal marketing needs

Decide how far in advance you’ll plan your marketing strategy (e.g., per quarter or year).

Lay down your team’s plans for that period. Pull out each element of your marketing strategy to know how much content you expect to produce.

• Your content: Decide on your publishing frequency, whether you publish internal blog posts, guest posts or ebooks.

• Your social media marketing calendar: Decide how often to post on social media and marketing channels. Industry best practice varies by platform and field.

• Your email marketing strategy: Set a newsletter frequency and include any other email campaigns you plan to run.

• Any other content your team produces: Plan the time involved in other content types, such as videos, podcasts or Instagram Live posts.

After breaking down your goals, choose the best tool to help you stay organized.

Step 3: Choose a marketing calendar tool

Picking an internal marketing calendar is about ticking the boxes that suit your team’s needs. At a minimum, you want something that will let you compile simple information in a visual, chronological format accessible to all stakeholders.

More complex strategies may need more functionality, such as publishing tools, content optimization or project management. Overall, marketing tools fall into three categories.

1. Spreadsheets

Create a simple marketing calendar in Excel, Google Sheets or Google Calendar.

Add tabs to track tasks, projects and timelines. However, there can be limitations for complex marketing departments.

Customization is endless, but you won’t benefit from automation. If you’re creating one for a team, use a cloud-based solution so you can collaborate in real time and make comments.

The benefit of creating a calendar this way is that it’s cost-effective (often free) and easy to get started. They’re helpful for simple marketing strategies and companies with lower budgets.

2. Project management and CRM software

Some brands successfully use project management software or a customer relationship management (CRM) platform like Asana or Pipedrive to assign content to their team. This approach can help create content calendars for larger teams with complex workflows.

The benefit of creating a calendar with a project management tool is you can easily track tasks, contributors and deadlines across many marketing projects.

• Managers can assign multiple tasks, deadlines and contributors simultaneously

• The marketing calendar software can notify the team about upcoming projects

• People can leave comments and updates and see project details in one place

Many tools have marketing campaign calendar templates for content or editorial calendars, making it easy to get started with even more complex strategies.

3. Social media and content management tools

Specialized tools designed for planning marketing content, such as a content marketing calendar template, can help you save time and optimize your content.

They let you input draft content with text and images, share it with a client or supervisor for approval and press publish to schedule your finalized content for the month.

Content planning tools go beyond workflows. They often have extra features to help you optimize your content and measure the success of your campaigns. These can include:

• Headline analysis

• Optimized publishing times

• Image and video asset organization

• Keyword discovery and research

• Marketing analytics

• Ads management

These features can help you save time or boost content performance.

Step 4: Plan out content

Once you’ve created a structure for your calendar, you’re ready to start brainstorming content. Consider which types of content you want to include, such as email or social media campaigns, articles and promotions.

This step determines when and how to engage with your audience. Here are some tips on how to decide what engagement opportunities are best for your brand:

• Coordinate content with any promotions your brand has planned this quarter or year

• Set any critical deadlines like registration for enrollment

• Identify any industry awareness days or events you can live tweet

• Brainstorm seasonal or holiday tie-ins (e.g., running a Black Friday email campaign or interviewing team members or customers for International Women’s Day)

• Repurpose content (e.g., turn podcast interviews into blog posts or research into infographics )

• Create a campaign or hashtag around a topic when you see a gap

• Consult the US holidays list below and consider which are most important to your target audience

Decide which content you want to tackle and populate your calendar accordingly. Remember to leave room for flexibility. You’ll inevitably encounter unexpected engagement opportunities and want to capitalize on them.

Step 5: Set up workflows

Your final step is to break projects into tasks on your calendar. Add landmarks for each event, product launch or seasonal activity and establish a timeline for each moving piece.

For instance, if you know you have a product launch at the end of the first quarter, work backward from the delivery date, adding tasks, due dates and milestones (e.g., sign-off meetings). Attach documents or checklists to projects or tasks as needed.

Create task lists for each project stage and assign tasks to team members to ensure consistency in your processes so everyone knows what they’re doing.

Note anything that may disrupt your timelines, such as team members on vacation or scheduled away days, and factor those in as you plan.

Free marketing calendar template

Download your free content marketing calendar template – which can also be used as a social media or email marketing calendar template – below.

Ensure you don’t miss an opportunity to engage contacts by filling out this calendar template with key events.

US marketing calendar dates for 2025

We’ve compiled a list of US holidays you should know to spur your creativity and help you create a robust marketing calendar. The key dates include everything from federal holidays to health awareness months, from religious and cultural holidays to less formal commemorations and awareness days.

We’ve also included suggested monthly themes to help you keep your content cohesive.

January

• New Year’s Day – January 1

• Golden Globe Awards – January 5

• National Human Trafficking Awareness Day – January 11

• Martin Luther King, Jr. Day – January 20

• College Football Playoff National Championship – January 20

• National Cheese Lovers Day – January 20

• Winter X Games – January 23-25

• Australia Day – January 26

• Lunar/Chinese New Year – January 29

Best practices for holiday marketing in 2025

As you integrate holidays and seasonal tie-ins, use best practices and common sense to avoid costly content or email marketing mistakes. Keep your content varied. For example, don’t create too many posts around “National ____ Day”; that will turn your audience off.

Use caution when creating content for holidays or cultural celebrations like Black History Month or Diwali. Ensure someone from that culture or represented group collaborates on the content. Double-check your messaging and imagery to ensure you aren’t stereotyping.

Finally, make sure your planned content doesn’t clash with holidays and events. For instance, somber days like 9/11 or Veteran’s Day aren’t the best timing for funny, irreverent posts. Labor Day probably isn’t the best day to launch an email marketing campaign since many people are off work and may not be checking their email.

Final thoughts

Remember that a marketing calendar is a living document: revise its structure and themes at any time during the year to meet changing business priorities or timely topics.

You may tweak your content based on learning as you analyze your marketing campaigns and see what’s performing best. The calendar is there to support you, not the other way around.

A marketing calendar helps you set a vision, organize your thoughts and create content your audience will love. Using these tips will help you succeed in 2025.