In This Lesson
What is this guide? This lesson dives into how to set up your CoSchedule calendar to help you organize, visualize, and report on your marketing strategy.
Who’s this guide for? New CoSchedule champions that will be implementing CoSchedule for their marketing team.
What you’ll learn:
Before diving in, it’s beneficial to understand how color labels, tags, and project types work together to organize your marketing.
These things give you ways to organize and filter your calendar to make reporting, planning, and tracking easy by using something called a saved view.
Here are a couple of examples of saved views you can create based on color labels, project types, and tags.
Filter Based on Color Label: A Saved View for Each Department You Work With
This saved view gives you visibility into the work your team does on behalf of other departments so you can quickly provide timelines for projects.
Filter Based on Project Types: A Saved View of All Emails and Newsletters
This saved view shows you all the emails your team will send so you can avoid collisions and sending too often to the same audience. Here’s what it looks like on the calendar:
Filter Based on Tags: A Saved View of Every Project That Contributed to a Certain Region
This saved view pulls every project that is tagged with a specific region so you can prove to stakeholders all the activities your team is doing per region.
As mentioned above, color labels are the highest and most general level of organizing your calendar. These are concrete categories that are applied to all your marketing activities – meaning these categories are not likely to change over time.
Here are a few of the most important things color labels can do for you:
To make it easier to set-up, we have a suggested color label structure for three different types of marketing teams. Read the descriptions and select the one that best fits your marketing team.
Now that you know what your color labels will be, here’s how to set them up on your calendar.
Click the hamburger menu and toggle down your name. Select “Calendar Settings”.
Under the Color Labels section, name your label and apply a color.
To create a new saved view, click the last item in the breadcrumb menu. This is where you can navigate between saved views and create new ones.
To create a new saved view, click “Create New Saved View”. Name the view after one of your color labels and check the box that says: “Share view with my team”. (This makes the save view visible to your team members.)
Next, add one of the color labels you just created as a new filter category. Here’s how:
Apply the relevant color label from the drop-down list.
Continue that process until you have created a saved view for each of your color labels.
This allows you to easily report on all the marketing projects you have planned for each department or business vertical.
A project type describes the type of asset that is being created. There are a few valuable ways project types help you get organized:
To add your list of custom project types you created above, toggle down your name and navigate down to “Calendar Settings”. Next, find the “Project Types” option in the left-hand menu. Scroll to the bottom and add a new project type.
Start adding each item you checked on the list above and choose a custom icon from the dropdown menu.
To create a new saved view, click the last item in the breadcrumb menu and click ‘Create New Saved View’.
Name the view after the project type you want to track (ex. Blog Posts) and check the box that says: “Share view with my team”. (This makes the save view visible to your team members.)
Next, add one of the project types you just created as a new filter category. Here’s how:
This allows you to see all the items you have planned for any given content type.
Tags offer an additional way to filter and track your projects.
Think of it this way: tags are additional categories that you might need to track which aren’t covered by color labels and project types.
Here are a few ways tags add value to your CoSchedule calendar.
To create a new tag, toggle down your name and navigate down to “Calendar Settings”. Under the color labels section, you’ll find an area to add tags. Enter each one from your list on the worksheet above.
To create a new saved view, click the last item in the breadcrumb menu and click ‘Create New Saved View’.
Name the view after the tag you want to track (ex. Persona 1) and check the box that says: “Share view with my team”. (This makes the save view visible to your team members.)
Next, add one of the tags you just created as a new filter category. Here’s how:
This allows you to quickly see all the projects that contribute to certain goals, regions, personas, etc.
Now that you’ve created a saved view for color labels, project types, and tags, here’s something else you can do with a saved view, try mixing and matching various filters together to report on anything you need.
Here’s an example:
Create a saved view with content type + tag: Add blog posts as a project type filter AND one of your goal tags to see all the content you published that contributed a specific goal.