Creating a marketing campaign can be stressful at the best of times. In the worst case scenario, it can be painful and devastating. You need to make it a success from the off as your plan defines your future perspectives. It sounds obvious but as soon as your undertaking goes wrong, it may mean that it was doomed from the start due to lack of proper planning. It can easily become a waste of time, effort, and money.
So, how can you ensure that a marketing campaign is set up to succeed? Well, one possible way of doing this is to create a visualized plan from the start. Of course, for some even this step can cause a problem as without proper experience you can easily miss lots of important phases. Luckily, there are solutions in the market that offer ready-made help right away. This solution is a template. In our case, a marketing campaign template that will allow you to properly work with your campaign.
What are the benefits of using a ready-made template?
- Structure
Having a marketing campaign template allows you to get down your ideas, phases, dates, and milestones on paper or in a special tool in a structured manner. You can always refer to it, re-read to make sure that what you have down makes sense, enter changes that will occur, and follow all the dates and actions. It keeps things simple and easy and allows you to keep a proper structure. This, in turn, means your marketing campaign stands a much better chance of being successful.
- Time saving
Another benefit of using a template is that it helps you to save on your time. First of all, all typical of a classical marketing campaign steps are already included in it. You simply don’t need to reinvent the wheel – you have everything structured in one place. Moreover, most of the templates are flexible. It means that you can delete or add anything you need thus converting a template into a mixture of pre-defined and personal phases.
Secondly, by having a guide in front of you, you prevent yourself from going off on a tangent or losing where you were and not being able to remember. Just one glance and you are again in your campaign.
- Automation
It is convenient to work with specialized tools and services as all the processes in them are automated. Once you made a change, it is already reflected in it and has an impact on other actions and phases. Do you need to remove a task or date from a template? No problem as this action requires just a few clicks.
- Efficiency
If you run a successful campaign and you really like your template, you can use it in the future. This partially refers to the second bullet in the list – it saves time. Also, it allows you to upgrade yourself as a marketing manager: with the course of time, you’ll get more and more experience in planning and managing campaigns.
How to find a marketing campaign template that will fit you?
There are plenty of tools, online or offline, that offer templates. They deploy different approaches. So, you need to make a search and find out which one meets all of your requirements. Thus you significantly simplify all the processes that are required to successfully complete your plan.
Gantt chart marketing template
To save your time on searching, here is one of the widespread tools for creating projects and campaigns – a Gantt chart. For example, you can use a ready-made marketing campaign template in GanttPRO Gantt chart software.
In a Gantt chart, you can easily create tasks, subtasks or groups of tasks thus entering all important phases of your marketing project. The following steps can be included (but not limited to) in your plan:
- Marketing goals.
- Target market and customers.
- Your USP (Unique Selling Point / Unique Selling Proposition).
- SWOT Analysis of your market and competitors.
- Marketing Channels.
- Budget
In online Gantt chart software, it all has great visualization on a timeline. It means that every tasks, phase, action or milestone has its start and end dates. Also, it is possible to set dependencies between phases, track the progress as well as collaborate with your team (it is highly likely that you are not alone in your marketing project). To cut it short, a Gantt chart template is a robust solution for managing marketing campaigns.