Why TSS believes that Marketing is the roadmap for your business!
Updated: Nov 16, 2022
What is a marketing roadmap?
A marketing roadmap is a document that details how cross-functional teams can work together on marketing initiatives. It encompasses big-picture strategy while providing enough detail about team members’ day-to-day tasks to ensure everyone understands what they’re responsible for and how those duties align with larger goals.
A marketing roadmap template is a preformatted document, spreadsheet or other resource that provides a structure and starting point to kick-off planning. A marketing roadmap template can be an essential tool for teams in a few ways.
Benefits of using a marketing roadmap template
Marketing strategy roadmaps can be complex documents. You may want them to include work on multiple channels for a single campaign. But you may also want a specific marketing project roadmap for efforts like winning back lost customers. Your company can benefit from custom templates in several ways, such as:
Utilizing an existing format: with a complete, customized template, teams can jump right into marketing plans without needing to consider the best format or document choices.
Ensuring every roadmap covers the basics: you can include columns or required fields in a template to ensure every roadmap covers the basics or contains information critical to your processes.
Guidance for complex roadmaps: Templates can include guidance on what the team might want to think about when engaging in strategic marketing brainstorming and planning.
Consistent documents for all marketing campaigns. Starting with a base template ensures all your marketing roadmaps share similar structures, making them easier for anyone in your organization — from executive team members to marketing reps — to reference at a glance.
Understanding what a good marketing roadmap contains is the first step to creating custom roadmap templates that work for your organization. While marketing roadmaps can take on a variety of forms—including Kanban boards, Gantt charts, or even simply spreadsheets—they should contain specific information that defines success and spells out how you plan to get there.
What are the common parts of a marketing roadmap?
Whether you create your marketing plans in a spreadsheet or with sophisticated work operating, every roadmap should address schedules, goals, activities, and other important elements. Some common parts of marketing roadmaps include:
Goals: Spell out measurable goals for your marketing efforts. Smart goals define what success looks like so your team knows when it arrives.
Time frames: Roadmaps help guide plans and efforts over a specified period of time. Dictate time periods that match the scale of your project or campaign, such as days, weeks, months, or even quarters or years.
Schedules: Once you have a time frame, create a schedule of all efforts to fit inside it. Tools like Gantt charts can help you visualize schedules alongside a roadmap.
Overall initiatives: Initiatives are larger efforts that help teams understand a campaign’s focus.
Specific activities: Activities are the tasks teams complete to support the overall initiative.
