Marketing Campaign Template

A marketing campaign template will help your startup breakout your individual campaigns, gain more focus and improve the accuracy and outcome of your efforts.

All too often marketing efforts completely miss the mark and fail. Largely because they aren’t thought through and it becomes the wild west after the initial marketing plan and ideas are floated. It doesn’t take many months of failed marketing to break a startup. 

Use this marketing campaign template to score more wins.

Business Goal

What business goal is this campaign specifically being created to achieve? What is the desired outcome of this marketing campaign? It could be inbound sales leads, pure branding, securing new partnerships, SEO, or something else.

Focus on one. Add any specific targets that you hope this campaign will help deliver. That may be 100 sales for next month, achieving a certain ranking or generating a certain amount of traffic and form fills.

Other Related Campaigns

Marketing campaigns work best when in coordination with each other which is something to keep in mind as part of the marketing campaign template. They are also most effective when each has its own single focus, as listed above. This is the space to mention any other simultaneous campaigns and how they should function together. 

For example, you may be launching a Facebook retargeting campaign to back up and convert more traffic driven in from a new press release, or direct mail campaign. Or you may be sending an SMS blast in coordination with being published in a certain magazine.

Target Persona

Before using this marketing campaign template, you should ask yourself who is this campaign meant to reach?

Include the detailed profile of your target persona, as well as the size of this target market, and why this effort is designed to best connect with them. Who are they, where are they, what is their pain point, and how is your message heralding your solution?

Channels

What channel or platforms are going to be used in this campaign? It could be just one. For example, a new Instagram ad campaign to generate more sales leads. Or it could be Google and Facebook being used to generate leads for a new product or service you are rolling out.

Targeting Details

The more targeted your marketing the more accurate and better results. You’ll connect with better qualified and easier to convert leads. What specific targeting will this campaign do? What filters are being selected? What language is being used? What keywords are involved?

Content Needed

Every marketing initiative or marketing campaign template relies on content. What content is going to be needed for this? Is it text for outbound or display advertising? Are there graphics to be designed? Scripts or talking points and videos? You don’t want to rush this critical part where it all comes together. Order and have it created well in advance.

Additional Research Needed

Things move very fast out there today. There’s a good chance you’ll need to do additional, fresh research before actually pressing launch on your campaign. This may be cleaning up your database and recounting contacts, new up to date keyword research for this month and week, checking regulations and compliance, or what the competition is advertising.

Be sure to have a system for getting this new research to your team on the frontline who are implementing it.

Additional Parts of This Funnel Needed

Just running Google Ads by themselves isn’t going to create strong results. Nor is it just putting up fantastic blog posts or a magnificent piece of direct mail. It has to be supported and a part of an effective funnel. If you are putting new content on your site then you also need to collaborate and drive traffic to it.

If you are running online ads, you need a high converting landing page. If you are driving in the traffic and opt-in leads, you need a hyper-responsive sales team that can interact with leads live online and in all of their preferred mediums. List these items so you get real results.

Other Resources Needed

What resources do you need to make this marketing campaign template? This includes tech tools, software, web pages being set up, apps, and the people to put it all together. 

Timeline

Create a countdown to launch, with all the items needed to be done. Be sure to leave extra room for tweaking and polishing all these items before you go live. Share this part of your campaign in your project management dashboard for the whole team to collaborate on.

Budget

What budget is needed to do this campaign well? Be sure to account for all the parts of the puzzle from content to execution, as well as handling of any leads that come out of the campaign. It’s no good creating 20,000 hot and fresh new leads if you have no salespeople to convert them. 

Tests to Perform

Marketers do a great job of marketing their own tools and strategies. Before you jump all in on one it pays to do some tests. Just be sure you are testing large enough and long enough to really gauge the success and profitability of a new channel.

This is likely in the range of $3,000 to $5,000 for most channels, and for at least 3 months. Decide on the most important metrics you will measure to determine success. Know how you will track the results. Then you can tweak and repeat.

Next Steps

What are the most important next steps to take to build out and make this marketing campaign live? Add quick bullets or a numbered list here as part of the marketing campaign template. 

Remember that storytelling plays a key role in fundraising. This is being able to capture the essence of the business in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here) that I recently covered. Thiel was the first angel investor in Facebook with a $500K check that turned into more than $1 billion in cash.

Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that is being used by founders around the world to raise millions below.

Still not after going through the pros and cons of different sources of startup funding? Check out this fundraising training where we help founders from A to Z with fundraising.