As we arrive splendidly into  The Year Of The Monkey, tactical marketers will be looking for opportunities and inspiration to liven up the year’s marketing plan. Look no further as these resources will bring you a bit of both.

The good people at Experian have published their annual Marketing Insights Calendar and it’s free for you and me (after you share a few personal details – they are marketers after all) to download and use.

What we like about it is, it’s focused on the UK market rather than the USA (setting it apart from many other planners you find floating around the internet). Plus, in addition to major holidays and nationally significant events, each month features useful reminders drawn from Hitwise: an Experian  data product that measures online trends and provides data on visitor and search behaviour. Lateral thinking arts marketers can put their creativity to work on the more obscure titbits – April’s upturn in searches for ISAs, anyone? But you don’t have to contort your brain very much to see the relevance of May 23rd’s note that there’s an uptick in searches for travel planning or June 6th’s that “online research for music festivals begins”.

People will be travelling to your town and may be looking for your event – make sure your website and search optimisation are ready! Help those early bookers by making sure your tickets are available to buy online, and in a perfect world you’ll make sure your payment interface doesn’t create barriers for international bookers. Make sure your location and phone number are tickety boo on Google Maps and that you’ve provided great driving, parking and public transport information.

Don’t forget to plan for local audiences and events too. If you make family friendly work or have courses for young people, you’ll want look out the school holidays calendar and make sure you’ve got something on for those families searching for something fun to fill the afternoons. As it’s almost Valentines Day and because we love you here are links to Scotland’s six city’s school holidays: Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness and Stirling. You’re welcome.

Other marketing planners are out there, and you might want to mix and match. The team at Cognique have a nice mix of cultural and sporting events in their 2016 planner and the Creative Composite include a helpful mix of multicultural holiday dates in their calendar, which you won’t want to forget.

We don’t yet know when the European referendum will be but it’ll likely come to us in either June or September so don’t forget to plan for that one once it’s set. And, none of these planners include the Scottish Parliamentary Elections on 6 May either – so don’t forget to pencil that one in.

Holidays and polling days like these as well as international sporting events like this summer’s Olympics and Paralympic Games in Rio will provide major media (social and the normal kind) flashpoints. The savvy content marketers amongst you can start thinking now if there are any creative content tie ins or promotional opportunities to be had from these. Perhaps one or more of this summer’s athletes are from your town? Or maybe you can offer a killer dinner-and-a-show package for Mother’s Day? Now’s the time to plan to make the most of these opportunities.

You can get more ideas by poking around Google Trends. It’ll tell you what the biggest stories were from 2015 and give you insights into the key search terms in your area of work. Our favourite is the graph for festivals. The seasonal zig zag chart tells you everything you need to know about when festivals are at peak relevance – and when they’re not.

Happy planning!

Main image credit: 2016 Chinese New Year - Year of the Monkey by Epic Fireworks (CC BY 2.0)