The first quarter is often a grim one for brands of every stripe, as sales from holiday shopping dry up, belts tighten among consumers, and advertisers and marketers must respond in kind by scaling back or strategically concentrating their own efforts.

Yet the arrival of a new year also offers an opportunity to assess and consider new and more effective ways to reach your customers, which can help your brand make up some of the margins during leaner times. One suggestion: Create an annual brand calendar for your target audience to follow, connect to and engage with. It’s a simple tactic and a proven approach to increase brand engagement, affinity and loyalty.

Why Annual Brand Calendars Work

As part of your brand management strategy, it’s likely that you already maintain a calendar with key marketing dates – events, promotions and more – that are tied to a larger branding strategy. A brand calendar is just a natural extension of these efforts, with an emphasis on organically deepening the connection with consumers in a way that doesn’t make them feel that they’re being sold to at every contact point.

A brand calendar allows your target audience to understand how your brand fits into their personal schedule and keeps you top-of-mind year-round. For an even more effective brand calendar, consider a live calendar that your audience can subscribe to for free. This gives a brand the ability to add new events directly to customers’ personal calendars, and to update existing ones, significantly increasing brand engagement.

Integrate Your Brand Into Consumers’ Lives

The overarching goal of brand marketing – creating an indelible impression and striking an emotional chord that connects customers to a brand – becomes far more achievable when you get personal. Understanding your target audience, learning their interests and values, and figuring how your brand can provide additional value to their daily lives is all part of the process. But the value of a brand calendar is in its power to seamlessly integrate that value into consumers’ everyday experiences and awareness, along with birthdays, yoga class and Sunday brunch. Providing customers with an option to seamlessly integrate a brand calendar with their own personal, digital calendar can provide that constant awareness and personalization.

Professional sports teams are a great example of organizations that effectively use brand calendars. Beyond a game-day schedule, some teams include historical organizational hallmarks, charity events and even players’ birthdays. An NFL team might include related industry events such as the Super Bowl, the draft and the last day to vote for the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award – key dates that aren’t necessarily specific to an individual club but may be relevant to its audience and add value to a brand calendar.

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What Your Brand Calendar Should Include

So you don’t work for an NFL team, aren’t able to plug your audience into a game-day calendar and are struggling to find obvious dates that fit into a brand calendar and would resonate with your target audience. Some brand calendars are admittedly easier than others to build. But focusing on two areas should help with the challenge: dates that are specific to your brand and dates that are specific to your industry.

For brand-relevant dates, consider entries with tangible calls to action such as product drops or platform updates, annual sales, webinars and in-person events. A brand calendar literally moves these engagements to top of mind for your audience and can boost visibility into some of your key marketing initiatives. If you allow customers to connect with your brand calendar, you can even add surprise events – new drops or exclusive discounts – directly to their personal calendars.

As for industry-related dates, consider including major conferences, seasonal themes (such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday), awareness days (example: key deadlines) and more possibilities that will position your brand as an industry thought leader. A smart-home technology provider, for instance, may include the dates for CES and Black Hat USA – even if they don’t plan to attend. Leverage your calendar to make your brand the go-to source for your target audience on all matters related to your space.

Don’t Overcomplicate Your Brand Calendar

Depending on your brand’s voice and tone, there may be creative opportunities to add both brand- and industry-related dates to a calendar that will enrich your target audience and amplify your brand-marketing efforts. If you’re McDonald’s, dates denoting the debut of the Shamrock Shake and McRib can strengthen brand association. Similarly, Nike might highlight the anniversary of the original Air Jordans drop – and possibly align a sale of the latest shoe in the line with the date. Although Texas Instruments invented the first microchip, Intel – a global microchip leader – might highlight the date as a gesture of acknowledgment and to signal its status as an ambassador in the industry.

That said, it’s wise to be selective when choosing dates for a brand calendar intended for consumers to engage with regularly. Your brand should be an integrated presence, not an omnipresent one. Avoid cluttering yours with too many dates or events, especially if using a subscription calendar that connects directly to those of your audience. A brand calendar should be meaningful and add value rather than overwhelming or annoying. Like any other marketing tactic, a brand calendar tends to be most powerful when its audience perceives it as effortless and noninvasive. Less, quite often, is more.

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