Introduction to marketing templates
Marketing teams have the privilege of communicating the benefits of their company's products or services to attract and engage target audiences. To carry out your marketing efforts successfully, you need to set goals, define your audiences, create timelines, and build out critical marketing activities. You also need to keep your team focused on the work that will move your overall marketing strategy forward.
Marketing strategies, plans, and roadmaps keep marketing teams on schedule and aligned with overall company goals. But building these planning tools from scratch can be time consuming. Many teams use marketing templates built in PowerPoint or Excel to get started quickly. While these templates are a nice starting point, remember that static files do not automatically link to the work that gets done.
Marketing strategy templates
Marketing strategy templates help you define the "why" of your marketing efforts and set necessary goals and initiatives. Your marketing strategy is informed by many planning models, such as your customers' needs and your competitive landscape. You need the full picture to align your team around how to best convey the benefits of your product or service. Popular marketing strategy templates include:
Marketing goals: The marketing goals template helps you align your team and work around a common set of objectives.
SWOT analysis: A SWOT analysis defines strategy by identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Buyer personas: Buyer personas document your prospective customers' needs and challenges to ensure your marketing efforts are always relevant.
Marketing plan templates
Once you have a strategy in place, you need to create a plan that describes how you will accomplish your strategy and guide the day-to-day work. Marketing plan templates offer an easy way to define your tactical work and create timelines to keep your team in sync and on schedule. Here are some common marketing plan templates:
Strategic marketing plan: The strategic marketing plan template is useful for connecting your day-to-day marketing activities to your goals and initiatives.
Marketing themes plan: This template helps you prioritize by planning your marketing work around key themes.
Campaign plan: Use a campaign plan template to visualize and track all the tasks that must be completed before launching a campaign.
Marketing roadmap templates
Marketing roadmap templates help you create a visualization of your strategy and related work in a single timeline view. Marketing roadmaps are useful for communicating the overall direction of your marketing efforts to stakeholders and teammates. When thinking about which template to use, remember that it is important to tailor the information you share in your roadmap to your audience. For example, the information you share with the product team should be different than the information you share with the executive team. The most widely-used marketing roadmap templates include:
Marketing initiatives roadmap: This roadmap template is useful for showing stakeholders high-level progress by visualizing work against initiatives.
Integrated marketing roadmap: The integrated marketing roadmap template keeps cross-functional marketing teams aligned by showing the progress of your marketing plan by function (e.g., product marketing and content marketing).
Product marketing roadmap: This template is useful for marketing teams that need to visualize a strategy and plan for multiple products.
Related guide: Free product roadmap templates
Beyond templates
Free templates are a great way to get started, but they are limited. PowerPoint and Excel files require manual updates as work is completed. Mature marketing teams use purpose-built software like Aha! to set strategy, build plans, and visualize roadmaps in real time.
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