Every marketing strategy and campaign needs an infographic template to understand better the marketing and sales team's key milestones, deadlines, and budgets. This article discusses what it should contain and how to build a Marketing Timeline Template. Then, without further ado, let's go straight for it!

A marketing timeline is a document that clarifies your marketing chronology from the first planning approach to the application of action items and measurability. A document of this nature helps to focus and organize all the marketing efforts in a single marketing plan by providing a schedule containing clear objectives, milestones, and challenges to face.

A marketing timeline is an integral part of your organization's marketing tactics to clarify how long a marketing campaign will last and the elements it will utilize. 

Thanks to a marketing timeline document, your company's marketing team can follow the marketing initiatives and guidelines established at the beginning of the process.

In short, a marketing timeline provides a direct approach to the following:

• Projects are coming up in the short term.

• What your employees need to be working on right now.

• The deadlines for any task and the general process.

A digital marketing timeline can be a Word document or template, a calendar, a schedule, and even a Gantt chart. Other benefits of using a marketing timeline are the following: 

• It improves communication and collaboration between internal and external collaborators;

• It helps to plan a marketing strategy in advance;

• It boosts the organization and accountability of a specific product or service.

For any project your organization manages, you should create a separate timeline with the following data:

• The title of the project;

• The team responsible for the project;

• The specific marketing budget for the project;

• Resources the team might need;

• The specific goals of the campaign;

• The startet date and deadlines of the campaign.

Now, we're giving you indispensable steps to create and edit a marketing timeline document for different businesses.

You are likely already running multiple marketing strategies and campaigns, for instance, a social media campaign parallel to an e-commerce campaign. Whatever approach you give them, you must audit them to know how they work.

Deconstructing marketing workflows can help you identify inefficient tasks that slow down your progress and take you away from goals. This way, you can plan to make these tasks work more efficiently or straightforwardly eliminate or replace them.

Optimizing your marketing campaigns' workflows aims to complete tasks and reach goals faster and easier.

Once you've cleaned your workflows for better performance, it is time you and your team establish the goals you want to achieve, considering your marketing budget plan and initiatives.

For example, your organization can decide to apply a digital marketing campaign whose primary goal is to get more visitors to your website. Other smart goals you can reach through your company's marketing strategy are the following: 

• Get more leads;

• Increase the number of effective sales;

• Enhance the internal traffic of your website.

With better workflows, you could reach goals and objectives faster based on better and enhanced tasks and processes.

That said, with the goals over the table, you and your team can start to plan what marketing channels to use to reach these goals.

However, only some of the goals would be directly related to the company's strategy for marketing. Other goals could be improving your relationship with buyer personas or between sales and marketing teams.

Once you've established your main goals and the target audience to them, it's time to determine the most relevant part of the marketing funnel: the strategies you'll use.

The overall marketing strategy you'll implement includes essential information, such as the product your organization will market, the marketing channel or channels you'll use, the general budget at your disposal, and the steps you need to accomplish to develop the campaign.

You can even break down strategies you use for digital campaigns to manage and understand the campaign better. Breaking down strategies will allow you to improve the tasks used in your event marketing plan and its results.

Some strategies will put all your efforts into creating a solid social media campaign focusing on the most important social channels, such as Instagram or Facebook.  

Besides, it's essential to define your strategy's elements and features, for example, articles, tweets, videos, images, tutorials, giveaways, etcetera.

Now you're clear about the best strategy for reaching your goals; it's time you determine the best campaign for that strategy before the project launch.

At this point, the campaign you design must align with the general guidelines of the strategy you adopted and even highlight milestones throughout the marketing plan timeline.

When building your marketing campaign, take your time to be sure that your campaign fulfills all the requirements of your strategy.

For instance, if you want to increase lead generation, your campaign should include a clear deadline for better measuring. Besides, you need to establish a budget for that specific project since the profits you receive from leads must be greater than the budget.  

Of course, your campaign should propose a project management timeline, which is the crucial point of this article. A visual timeline will help you better understand your campaign's essential points and aspects, such as indispensable milestones, deliveries, meetings to check results, and more.

You must also determine if you need to pay for special services, such as paid advertising, to reach milestones faster or hire a specialist, such as a content writer or copywriter, to produce high-quality texts.

This professional should utilize a Search Engine Optimization approach to improve organic traffic to your pages. In this sense, you need to be clear about how many texts the professional will create and how often your team will upload them to the website.

Every effective marketing plan and campaign you build can include social media posts, advertising, influencer marketing, link-building campaign, etcetera.

If your strategy does not consider a project timeline deadline, your team can design a long-term campaign based on creating multiple texts and posts on different platforms.

You should consider this step while developing the entire campaign because all the steps you consider have specific resources and time.

You desire your campaign to have a decent and enough duration; this way, timelines are manageable, and your team can trust in managing it properly. The best solution, in this regard, is to set deadlines for specific marketing tasks. For example, you can establish the end of the week as the deadline for specific simple tasks, such as sending one hundred emails to companies or particular clients.

On the other hand, if your campaign is urgent for marketers or other stakeholders, you may need to set shorter deadlines. Then you can create a new campaign for the next event planning.

Tracking tasks that your organization's team members are carrying out is crucial to see how they're progressing and whether they are following the general guidelines. Besides, most of the time, employees, even professionals, can be a little lost though they know the business plan and marketing goals.

In this final phase, you must track progress to evaluate the situation and make changes if appropriate. You can even help employees to work with key components and accomplish their tasks.

A visual schedule can help team members be aware of what direction to take, what to do, and when to complete the tasks. 

After you run your campaign on the target market and get your results, it's time to measure results and see if they achieved the objectives set. Did you want to increase the number of quality leads? Then it's time to check how many new leads you got in the period. If not, then you will need to make changes in future promotional campaigns.

It always helps to follow some tips when building your marketing timeline. These will help you communicate your ideas better and collaborate with other organization members.

• Set realistic goals and end dates;

• Design every step strategically;

• Use metrics to measure results;

• Promote communication between all stakeholders of the campaign.

All free templates below are editable in Microsoft Office since they're in Word and Excel format. This Office suite will allow you to edit key elements of these documents and adjust them to your purposes.

If you don’t have it, here, on RoyalCDKeys, you can get a Microsoft Office 2021 Professional Plus Key Retail Global copy and start to work on them today!

This Microsoft Excel template provides an annual overview of all the campaigns you carry out during the period. This document is divided into monthly and quarterly views to understand and manage general processes and specific tasks.

This project timeline template gives you different boxes to mention the salesperson, the campaign start date, the campaign end date, the project and target goals, and the total sales obtained during the period.

You can download this sales and marketing plan template from Smartsheet.

As you can see in the image above, this file is a Gantt chart template, which is great for establishing the critical path method and tracking tasks and progress more deeply. Among all the marketing plan templates we share in this section, this is the best to define department, tasks, and how many days tasks should last. You can use this Gantt chart for any marketing strategy and campaign, such as an email marketing campaign or to develop a social media calendar.

You can download this marketing campaign plan template from Aha.io.

This digital marketing plan template is designed to better manage your projects by considering all the possible elements of a campaign. This free marketing document divides the plan into categories, giving rows to any item within the marketing process. This document considers elements for the executive summary, target markets, marketing metrics, performance, implemented social media, analysis and strategy, competitive analysis, and more. This is a great template to be aware of all details within the campaign.

Besides, you can easily manage the project info and build a Gantt chart by exporting it to Microsoft Project. If you don’t have this software yet, you can buy a reliable copy of Microsoft Project Pro 2021 Global Key. 

Regarding the more specific marketing timeline template, you can download it from Ganttpro.

This free template, just like the previous ones, is a spreadsheet document that gives you a different approach to the problem of representing all phases of a marketing campaign. With this template, you can easily assign tasks and track the current situation by seeing every task's progress and deadlines. This file also contains a section to describe key points, such as resources, specific needs, and the budget you'll spend during the development. Use this template to improve the efficiency and better management of all processes.

You can download this event marketing timeline template from Smartsheet.

A marketing timeline template will provide you with a high-level overview of your marketing campaign by describing all the multiple steps and features related to the process. All templates we've shared in this article are easily editable; the time frame won't be a problem. You can also quickly print them if you need a reminder in your office for those workers who may feel lost.  

If you need other templates for various purposes within your company, RoyalCDKeys has all the tools you need to carry out your operations! We have templates for creating your mission statement and a brief overview. Browse our blog and select the most useful for your organization!