2011 Marketing Calendar

2011 calendar for marketers

Dates to plan around for both Business-to-Business and Consumer campaigns

Prospects To Go’s holiday calendar shows government holidays as well as religious and secular holidays that are recognized by enough people in the United States to be noteworthy to marketers. Our calendar has broken ground by also highlighting common vacation and travel days — periods that BtoB marketers want to avoid and consumer marketers tend to hammer.

Changes in 2011

• It's no typo. Tax Day is April 18th this year, not the 15th! Taxpayers will get an extra three days to file their federal tax returns this year. Turns out that April 15th is a local holiday in the District of Columbia, so they moved the deadline forward for everyone!
• Veterans Day on a Friday turns this typically one-day celebration into a possible holiday weekend.
• Christmas, Hannukkah, Winter Solstice and Kwanzaa all come back together again the last two weeks of the year.

History of the calendar

We developed this calendar in 2005 when we recognized that some clients were forced to advertise at poor times because they hadn’t anticipated holidays in advance. Some celebrations — like Martin Luther King Day in January and Columbus Day in October— are one-day events that you can easily work around. But we’ve seen BtoB clients lose as much as a percentage point in response (compared to other campaigns we’ve done for them at other times) when they launched campaigns during the major vacation and travel periods around Thanksgiving and Independence Day.

Of course you need to customize this even further to meet your own business cycle. Event marketers working on city tours can refine this calendar by being sensitive to important ethnic holidays in cities with a preponderance of minorities who will be observing them.
Finally please keep in mind that the end of December, despite the winter holidays, is also the end of many companies’ fiscal year. Sometimes marketers have budget at the last minute and if they don’t spend it they’ll lose it. They don’t care that the timing isn’t the best, and they shouldn’t.

2011