The Integrated Marketing Calendar is basically an interactive tool wherein information from all corners gets collected. In fact, this is the SAP CRM tool wherein all planned and on-going marketing activities for a known time period can be tracked down effortlessly. Through this calendar, there is so much you can do, including displaying, changing, and creating marketing activities; either in graphical or a list form.
The marketing objects that can be covered through the Integrated Marketing Calendar are – Key Timings, Campaign Element, Campaign, Marketing Plan, MDF Initiative Element, Marketing Plan Element, Trade Promotions, MDF Special Program, Deal, Agreement, MDF Program, and Market Development Funds Initiative.
The best thing about the Integrated Marketing Calendar is that you can use it to improve your visibility and alignment of different promotional and marketing activities, and therefore, help increase collaboration between various marketing teams for their campaigns, marketing, programs, and planning. All in all, this calendar is sure to help a number of professionals. So whether you are a trade promotion manager looking for trade promotional activities and settlement or a marketing professional looking for product launch campaigns, this calendar is sure to benefit all.
How to set up the Integrated Marketing Calendar?
It is fairly easy setting up and customizing Integrated Marketing Calendar in SAP CRM. All you need to do is go to SPRO and then click IMG. Once you are in IMG, click Customer Relationship Marketing followed by Marketing. Under Marketing option, click Marketing Planning and Campaign Management and then Marketing Calendar.
Features in the Integrated Marketing Calendar
- Using the calendar
There is so much you can do with an Integrated Marketing Calendar that you can optimize all your marketing efforts in an effortless way. For example, you can copy, create, and delete various marketing projects; all through the calendar itself! What this also means is that you can access all necessary information in one place. Besides this, the calendar lets you visualize promotional planning results, create plans for promotions using template library, make necessary changes in the calendar itself, etc.
- Calendar user group
Many different calendars can be served through the Integrated Marketing Calendar.
- It can serve as an accounting calendar. For example, you can see information about when to schedule promotions for a particular account.
- You can set up a global calendar. Here, you can easily define important events that directly matter your customers, like an internal event like brand launch or a football match, etc.
- It can also be a task-based or activity calendar, where you can view and make changes to activities that are in progress, planned, or completed.
- Calendar configuration
There is also an option to configure the calendar to only include information and features that you require. This way you can get over your tasks easily and improve your productivity.
For example, you can select the ‘Accounts’ filter search instead of ‘Agreements’, especially if you are a key account manager. Accordingly, there is also an option to hide the feature you do not require in exercising your role. In the above example, you can consider hiding ‘Agreements’ option. Furthermore, there is an option to make the calendar available to you only in ‘Display only’ mode.