It’s official. Marketing teams everywhere are going fully remote. Despite the inevitable learning curve, these dispersed teams still need to juggle major projects and communicate effectively to support campaigns and product launches.
Such campaigns will likely cover social media, email, and content. Plus, your design team will need to create entirely new assets. There are a ton of moving parts, and organizing this project will be no small feat. If you’re being honest, you’re already feeling a little overwhelmed.
Breathe in, and then exhale. Starting any new project can be daunting, especially when your team members are not co-located, but you don’t need to go it alone. A marketing campaign strategy template (or even multiple templates) can help you lay a foundation and start making progress from anywhere.
What exactly are these templates, why should you use them, and where can you find them? We’re answering all of your template-related questions right here.
What are project templates in marketing?
Let’s break this down as simply as possible. Merriam-Webster defines “template” as “something that establishes or serves as a pattern.”
In the context of marketing, your template will be a document that serves as your starting point, because it already has the basic structure and some must-have elements in place.
For example, maybe you’d have a blog post template that already has fields for the blog’s title tag, author, meta description, keywords, and blog formatting. Or, perhaps you have social media graphic templates that make it easy to drag and drop different text into an existing design.
When it comes to marketing and project management forms and templates, the sky’s the limit for what you can create and make use of.
Why use a marketing campaign strategy template
If you’re accustomed to starting every single project from scratch, this question might be lingering in the back of your mind: why use templates? Well, having these starting documents in your back pocket offers a number of advantages.
1. Templates boost efficiency
Workers are spending up to 520 hours annually on repetitive tasks — and those rote tasks include starting something fresh when it could easily be templatized.
Making templates accessible for your remote marketing team will help them save time on the upfront logistical or administrative work so that they can focus on what matters most: channeling their creative energy into the actual project.
2. Templates ensure consistency
You don’t just want to experience success — you want to repeat it. But, that’s easier said than done. That’s another perk of templates: they help create some cohesiveness. Cohesiveness in project planning, especially for remote teams, is paramount.
When a whopping 49% of organizations don’t have a clearly defined digital marketing strategy, having templates in place that contribute to your organization’s bigger picture will elevate you above your competition. You can ensure that every project is supporting your strategy, rather than throwing things out there and hoping something sticks.
Additionally, training a team is one of the top challenges that marketers face. Templates help you get new team members up to speed and make sure that everybody is producing consistently solid work, whether they’ve been on your team for days or years.
3. Templates make getting started easier
Any marketer will be quick to tell you that getting started is often the toughest part. You stare at a blank page, and making any progress feels a lot like trudging through wet cement.
With a template, you already have the bare bones in place. You aren’t starting totally from scratch, which makes rolling up your sleeves and getting the work done at least a little bit less daunting.
Useful templates for project management in marketing
You want to roll out some templates to ease the burden on your remote marketing team. So...now what? Where can you find ones that are actually useful?
Wrike offers a number of different project management tracking templates that are easy to use and can take some of the stress out of getting your marketing projects across the finish line while working remotely.
We’ve rounded up a few of our favorite project management templates here for you. But rest assured, there are plenty more you’ll want to check out.
1. Agile teamwork template
The Agile methodology is particularly popular among software development teams. However, for major marketing projects where you need focused communication and visibility across teams, this Agile project planning template makes it simple and straightforward to prioritize work and monitor your team’s progress.
2. Project scheduling template
Mapping out a reasonable timeline for your marketing project can feel impossible without a crystal ball. But this simple project schedule template makes it easier. You can use it to break your big projects into actionable items, assign due dates, and then use a Gantt chart to keep an eye on progress. Suddenly that big, hairy project won’t feel like such a chaotic guessing game.
3. Marketing campaign management template
Similar to the project scheduling template, this one is created specifically for marketing campaigns — making it the perfect choice to map out your remote marketing team’s projects. With this marketing campaign management template, you’ll ensure alignment, increase accountability, streamline the revision process, and keep better track of all of your deliverables.
This barely scratches the surface on all of the marketing templates that are available through Wrike. There are plenty of others (from an editorial calendar template to a product launch template to an event management template) that can boost the way your marketing team works. Plus, with Wrike, you can also create your own custom templates for things like project request forms and even OKRs.
Make this your golden rule: If you find yourself doing something on a repeated basis, go ahead and create a simple template for it within Wrike. When your marketing team is working remotely, streamlining tasks with templates can help keep everyone aligned and focused on campaign delivery. You might just be surprised by how much time and stress it saves you.
Want to get your hands on these templates and even more powerful work management features? Start your free trial of Wrike today.
