When it comes to creating an efficient, standardized process for managing campaigns, the secret sauce for any expert marketing project management strategy is a marketing plan template. A marketing plan template can improve your marketing operations and make marketing teams more efficient in the process. In this article, we’ll teach you how to create a marketing plan template and introduce you to a tool that will streamline the whole process for you.
What is a marketing plan template?
A marketing plan template is a standardized roadmap of all your content goals, tasks, and deadlines. If you use a free template, it can be a free roadmap tool to project success. Ideally, an effective marketing plan template will outline repeatable steps, tasks, and documentation required to launch a successful campaign.
What features should be in a strategic marketing plan template?
All strategic marketing plan templates should feature:
- A summary of your brand with details like your mission statement, your SWOT analysis, and any big picture goals.
- An outline of your marketing goals alongside an explanation of how they tie into big picture goals, what projects you’ll use to achieve them, and how progress will be measured.
- Any target market or buyer personas you’ll use to create your content.
- A marketing strategy outline that includes your unique selling proposition as well as your 7 P’s of marketing (product, price, promotion, place, people, process, and physical evidence).
- An itemized budget.
- A list of which marketing channels you’ll need to support or start using.
- Strategy, assets, and documentation for social channels
- Content marketing plan (blog posts, newsletters, webinars etc.) and workflow
A campaign planning template is a great way to transform your marketing strategy from a concept to an actionable plan. A marketing plan template can be duplicated over and over again for your brand’s recurring projects. Or it can be used by other members of your team to manage new client campaigns.
How do campaign planning templates benefit marketers?
Marketers using templates to work smarter benefit from saved time, effort, and resources. According to the Content Marketing Institute, marketing campaign templates are one of the most useful tools to help marketers “build a solid foundation.” Templates define priorities and create a clear roadmap for how and when tasks should be carried out. This helps teams of any size get on the same page.
It also provides a consistent, systematic approach you can monitor, assess, and tweak over time. Plus, if your agency has a lot of projects going, marketing campaign templates save you from reinventing the wheel whenever you start a new one. As you develop an in-house marketing team, your new members can reference your marketing campaign template and get up to speed faster.
How to create a marketing plan template
If you already use online collaboration tools to run a marketing team, then learning how to create a marketing plan template will be easy. Here’s how to strategically draft one with the help of your project management software.
- Audit your strategy.
First, make a list of all your customer touchpoints including everything from social media to email newsletters. Note your growth over time.
Then, compare those results to your projections and goals using a SWOT analysis. Afterward, check out what your top competitors are doing. See how you rank against them in search engine results, engagement, and other target KPIs.
Next, decide what content is performing well amongst your chosen buyer personas. Finally, use this big picture overview to make some educated guesses about your current buyer purchasing cycle and what you can do to make it more effective. You’ll use your marketing plan template to test these theories over time. - Define your goals.
Outline what you want to achieve, when you’ll get it done, and how you plan to measure it. If you have a set marketing budget, put that in too. Consider which parts of your current marketing strategy support these new goals. Consider which distribution channels will help you get there. Also think about whether or not you have to adjust your branding, SEO, or optimization strategies to get there. - Choose your tactics.
The golden rule is to limit your strategy to five or fewer marketing tactics per year. But one per quarter should be more than enough to see results. Create some clearly defined goal milestones then plot them out on a timeline.
Pro tip: Make sure you have all your KPI measuring tools up and running for each tactic before moving on to the next step. - Add detailed tasks.
Each tactic should include deadlines, level of effort, and who is in charge of it. For example, if your main tactic for quarter one is Twitter marketing, you’ll want to establish your target number of original Tweets, retweets, and engagements you expect to complete each week. You should also indicate how much time it will take to complete each task so the person in charge knows what to expect. - Draft your template.
Get input from stakeholders and teammates then adjust accordingly. Your marketing plan template will change from time to time as results come in. In fact, you may want to add regular strategy check-ins while you’re at it. Keep in mind that your marketing plan template is meant to provide guidance, not dictate every little move your team makes. Over time, you’ll see what’s working through trial and error. Use your goal KPIs, project data, and team feedback to make slight adjustments, improving as you go.
What should you expect in a digital marketing plan template?
You should expect a digital marketing plan template to include standard project management. These include visual timelines, communications tools, task creation and development, asset storage, and advanced reporting. Marketing managers should also expect to see at-a-glance dashboards to help them keep track of all the moving parts plus automation tools like task dependencies that trigger notifications and next steps.
Introducing Wrike's Marketing Campaign Management Template
Any marketing campaign management strategy can make use of Wrike’s expert templates. Organize your entire plan from start to finish, execute every task, automatically measure outcomes, and provide proof of progress through visual Gantt charts.
Bring clarity to the process so your team knows exactly what to do and why they’re doing it. And for marketing managers, getting a high level overview of key areas like project statuses and budget allocation can make a world of difference as they plan and execute their campaigns using Wrike’s marketing template.
Use Wrike’s marketing plan template to maximize productivity
A marketing plan template is a concrete roadmap that helps managers work smarter by enabling them to strategize, define, and execute goals. A solid template will help organize marketing goals, strategy, budgets, channels, and more.
Marketing campaign management templates like the one Wrike offers include handy tools like Gantt charts, dashboards, and task details that help execute their plan at a high level. Check out our two-week free trial to see for yourself why successful marketing managers use Wrike for all their marketing plan template needs.
