[Interactive Tool] Marketing Planning Template
Whether you’re a new marketing leader cutting your teeth on your first major campaign plan or a seasoned pro, this interactive marketing campaign planning template can accelerate the process. This quick guide outlines how to use the campaign planning tool.
Below is a screenshot of what the planner looks like. We’ll go through a step-by-step guide advising how to use it but most importantly, if you want to use it you’ll need to save the planner as a copy, then you can have at editing it and making it your own.
Set Yourself Up for Success, Always Start with a Plan
Launching your campaign without a road map makes it easy to get lost. Campaigns can be short and event-based or long-term product launches or PR initiatives. The campaign planner is helpful for the following types of campaigns:
Product Launches
Short-Term Sales Promotions
Webinars and Education-Based Campaigns
Live Events and Conference Promotions
Add columns to the planner to accommodate additional criteria that your business likes to consider when planning. We do recommend keeping the cost per lead (CPL) columns. CPL levels the playing field and allows you to compare the performance of promotional channels in an apples-to-apples way.
Step 1: Create Campaign Goals
You can’t measure success if you haven’t established goals. The planner includes a dropdown of types of common goals. You can either edit the list to add additional goals or use it as a free response field instead of a dropdown if you have more specific goals. The goals column is intended to identify your final goal. The KPI dropdown will determine what measurables will be used to assess if you’ve achieved your goals. Click the “edit” pencil in the bottom right corner to change the options in the dropdown. The dropdown is a multi-select picklist so you may ad multiple goals.
Step 2: Establish KPIs
Decide what KPIs you will measure BEFORE you start deploying campaign assets. Often with marketing campaigns, the devil is in the tactical-execution details. For example, a strong CTA but a poorly designed landing page could drive traffic but result in no conversions. Make sure all stakeholders are bought into the KPIs and understand their roles and responsibilities. Typically, marketing is responsible for driving the leads to sales, but sales is ultimately responsible for the opportunity conversion. Make sure your CRM is set up to accurately track these KPIs before you start your campaign. Click the “edit” pencil in the bottom right corner to change the options in the dropdown. This is set up as a multi-select picklist to enable you to select multiple KPIs.
Step 3: Decide who your audience is…and isn’t.
Next, it’s time to establish the target audience for the campaign. If your data isn’t comprehensive or well-segmented, you at least want to determine if your campaign is for prospects, customers, or both. There may be nuances to how you message your offer to customers, so if your campaign is designed for both groups, you may still need to produce separate communications for both groups.
As important as who your message IS for…is who your message IS NOT for. Create suppression audiences to ensure you don’t inadvertently slow down open sales deals or cause customer frustration. For example, you may not want to send a discount offer email to people actively in a sales cycle. Or you might not want to announce a shiny new feature to people who bought the old version of your product last week.
Audience selection is also an essential budgetary consideration when deciding how much to allocate to a campaign. If your campaign is targeted at your current customers, you’ve already got them in your database, so you should not need to spend money on third-party media to reach your own customer group.
Conversely, if your campaign targets prospects you’ll need to engage people outside your database and will likely want a budget for third party media, paid social ads, digital advertising, events, and potentially direct mail.
Check out our blog about buyer personas to create more advanced target audiences.
Step 4: Develop and Execute a Tactical Plan
The rest of the planner is dedicated to tactical planning. Here’s what each column is for:
Status: Use this dropdown to keep your team on track. You may also want to add statuses for “stalled” or “pending approval” depending on your internal processes.
Promotional Channels: List every channel where you plan to promote your campaign. We want these to be very granular so we can evaluate performance by channel with the CPL data we plan to collect.
Deployment Date: This will help ensure you don’t unintentionally have overlapping dates and that your campaign has well-rounded coverage.
Cost of Ad: Enter the amount you are spending on each promotional channel. We will use this to evaluate your target and actual CPL.
Target # of Leads: Enter the number of leads you hope to get from each promotional effort. If your goal isn’t leads, enter whatever your goal is (clicks, website page visits, open deals, etc.).
Target CPL: The sheet will calculate your target CPL based on the values you enter for the ad cost and target # of the leads. This will help you evaluate the intended productivity of each promotional channel before you place your buys. It may impact where you choose to spend your money based on your projected CPL.
Actual # of Leads: Enter how many leads you actually got after the promotion runs and the sheet will calculate your actual CPL.
Actual CPL: This will help you evaluate the actual performance by channel and will help you with future benchmarking based on your initial target projections.
Planning Notes/Campaign Messaging: Use this area to note any nuances of the message or plan for the specific promotional channel.
Need Help? Contact Red Brick!
We would love to help bring your next campaign to life. We’ve got over a decade and a half of B2B veterinary marketing experience and can help you connect with your target audience in meaningful ways in all the places where they love to hang out.