Many people, including marketers, think that the most important part of marketing is having a creative vision. The truth is that you must have a solid plan if you want your marketing efforts to be successful. After all, a vision is merely a set of ideas that have still not yet come to fruition.
That’s where a marketing plan comes in. Every year, you need to create and regularly revisit this plan to make sure that it is the best way to help your company reach its yearly targets. If you don’t have a strategy, you won’t know how much to put in your budget, how to spend your time and money, or what end goals you need to reach to grow your business.
A marketing timeline should be simple and easy to follow. It should cover all the elements of your marketing campaign, from concept to delivery. This timeline can be built upon as the foundation of a master plan and can be broken down into sub-timelines for important components of your campaign.
When creating a marketing campaign timeline, it is important to consider your marketing strategy. A timeline can be an effective way to keep track of tasks, overlapping deadlines, and the overall progress of the campaign. Depending on the type of campaign you’re running, you may even create separate timelines for different marketing channels.
Here’s how to make sure your company is geared towards success through your marketing timeline.
What is a Marketing Timeline?
An online marketing campaign timeline is a visual organization tool. It allows you to see the timeline of your marketing strategy over time. It lists key milestones, events, campaigns, and sales. The timeline provides a high-level view of your marketing campaign and helps you manage resources and focus on the right marketing strategy.
Marketing timelines are a way to organize your marketing plans such that whenever you plan to ideate, make, and publish, your ideas are accessible to you at a glance. Most marketing campaigns are made up of a few different elements, like social media advertising campaigns, newsletter and blog-based content marketing campaigns, website revisions, external events, etc. Marketing timelines can also work as creative project campaign timelines and marketing plan timelines that track progress on each of your campaigns.
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You can make different marketing plans for each channel if you want to. So, if digital marketing, events, and content are your main channels, you may choose to have an online marketing timeline, an event timeline, and a content timeline all ready for one campaign. But it’s also a good idea to combine them in a manner that they can all be viewed on one calendar. This will let you see how well each channel works with the other ones, all while giving you a bird’s eye view of where you currently stand.
What matters at the end of the day is that putting your plans on a marketing campaign timeline helps you, your team, and your clients keep track of what needs to be done and when.
Before a Timeline, Finalize the Marketing Plan
Before you can put your marketing plan on a timeline, you need to have a solid plan.
Start by looking at the situation. From there, you can build your plan. Do you have a certain type of message you want to send? Do you want to go after a new market segment? Do you want to make a new demand? Once you’ve decided on a plan of action, you can start making plans.
Think about what trends your audience might be interested in. If you have a small budget, you may go with social media platforms that will have the most impact. For example, if you want to reach Generation Z, part of your plan might be to get your brand on the newly introduced Instagram Reels. If your audience is B2B, you might want to write more blog posts with good SEO.
When your plans for the campaign are ready, you can start putting them on your marketing campaign timeline.
What Should the Marketing Plan Timeline Look Like?
Firstly, you must decide if you want to visually represent your plan on a quarterly or annual basis.
As far as different options are concerned, a Gantt chart is a good tool to use and is fairly common. A Gantt chart, for those unfamiliar, is essentially a horizontal bar graph where projects exist on one axis and calendar dates exist on the other, marked with the start/end dates of the project. A Gantt chart lets you know at a glance what your team is working on at any given time. This lets you coordinate your work and see potential problems that you can avoid.
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When sending reports to specific stakeholders, feel free to switch to calendars and tables as the need arises. Tables are quick to absorb and share, while calendars are what really keep your teams on track.
There are many ways to make a marketing plan. The easiest way to do it is to start from scratch. This way, you can modify or update any part or parts to suit your needs. But if you’re short on time, you can also use a marketing timeline template or project management software. Notion is a common choice for those looking to create databases or Gantt charts. At the end of the day, the “right” format will depend on what you need and how your team and other stakeholders will respond.
How to Iterate on Your Marketing Plan Timeline
As you write down your plans on the timeline for your marketing campaign, you’ll realize that you’ll need to make changes along the way. When you’re brainstorming, you often come up with a lot of ideas. But when you start to put them on your marketing timetable, you start to see that there are limits, especially time limitations.
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Don’t freak out if this happens. This is fine. And it’s better to talk to them now than after you’ve already told your client what you’re going to do. You might also want to change your plans so that your channels work better together. For example, if you’re using an integrated marketing strategy, you might find that releasing a teaser for your new product the same week as the birthday of a key influencer gives you the chance to start a birthday giveaway contest. This can be a good reason to change the date of your product teaser release.
You can also make your communications more effective by making the most of these timing and releases. Accept these changes and make the most out of them.
Making the Marketing Campaign Timeline Sustainable
Getting new information while a project or campaign is running is a normal part of managing it. Being open to new information is a good strategy. In fact, it’s best to look at your project after each cycle to see what works, what doesn’t, and how you can make it better.
Learn as much as you can about your audience. Why do they do what they do? What gets them excited? As you learn more, be open to change and make sure your marketing schedule is also flexible. Using software to manage projects can help you to be prepared for changes and new challenges.
The Bottom Line
Having a timeline not only helps your team work better and more efficiently but also helps in planning for resources, and making sure you have an effective integrated marketing plan. An online marketing campaign timeline is a handy tool to plan your future marketing activities. It can also be used to assess your marketing plan in the long term. By planning ahead, your campaign has a greater chance of success. It also allows you to prioritize projects and communicate goals across your team.
While it may seem like marketing campaigns only depend on how creative or boundary-pushing your idea is, it also has a lot to do with how well you plan, manage, and carry it out. Under all of the chaos, there is a plan that holds everything together.
Use marketing timelines to keep track of how your marketing campaigns are coming along and make sure that your plans work out successfully. Furthermore, reuse and adapt them in suitable ways so you can make them sustainable and preserve company efforts in future marketing campaigns.
At Arturo Digital, we pride ourselves on delivering marketing strategy services with extensive deliverables such as marketing plans and marketing timelines. As a leading full-stack marketing and digital agency, we offer design and strategy solutions that help you build and grow powerful brands.
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