Struggling to stay focused and organized in your marketing efforts? Creating a marketing roadmap could be your secret weapon.
This guide, for digital newbies and seasoned pros alike, reveals the magic of these plans. Learn to set clear goals, tame unruly tasks and build a profitable long-term strategy for your product or service. Skip the planning pain, grab a ready-made marketing roadmap template and watch your marketing thrive!
Click to jump ahead:
- What is a marketing roadmap?
- How do you create a marketing roadmap?
- What are the elements of a marketing roadmap?
- What are some examples or business use cases of a marketing roadmap?
- Types of marketing roadmap
- FAQs about marketing roadmaps
What is a marketing roadmap?
A marketing roadmap is a comprehensive timeline that details what you want to accomplish with your campaign, what you will do to accomplish it, and when you are going to accomplish it. It is a fully-integrated plan that contains a clearly defined starting point, milestones, and deadline in order to establish a strategic direction for your marketing campaigns.
Here is an example of a marketing roadmap template for a go-to-market marketing campaign that effectively shows the goals and steps that need to be accomplished for each quarter within the year:
Some of the benefits of a marketing roadmap include:
- Aligning your team around the goal of your marketing strategy
- Coordinating each team member’s specific function, role, tasks, and responsibilities in the project
- Providing the entire team with visibility on the next steps and upcoming marketing activities
- Tracking progress, productivity, and efficiency
- Communicating direction and progress to management and other internal teams.
How do you create a marketing roadmap?
Now that you know all about marketing roadmaps, it’s time you learn how to maximize them for your marketing campaigns. Just follow these 5 simple steps to start creating your own marketing roadmap:
1. Determine what you need
Before you dive into your design, start with a plan. Whether your roadmap is for a project, campaign, or annual strategy, you need to define what you’re going to plan and the goal behind it and identify what tasks and steps it will cover.
2. Get down to the details
Once you have determined what you’re going to do in your plan, it’s time to break it down into separate elements to set the scope of your roadmap.
List all the things needed to complete each step, estimate how long each step will take, build a team and assign a member for each task, and establish expectations and limitations for each part of the plan to promote a more realistic and results-driven strategy.
Here is a template with detailed sections that you can customize to squeeze in all the information you need in your marketing roadmap:
3. Pick a template
Now that your plan is ready, you can now organize it using a roadmap template of your choice. You can draft an outline of your roadmap using Venngage’s blank canvas or go straight to Venngage’s templates library to pick a template that fits your plan. Choose from fully editable templates to help you come up with a design that works best for you.
This template is great if you want a marketing roadmap that looks clean and simple yet provides an effective organizational structure for your strategy:
4. Customize your roadmap
You don’t need to be a designer to create a compelling marketing roadmap. With Venngage’s drag-and-drop feature, you can easily customize a template and change each element with a single click to make a roadmap design that is truly your own, down to the last detail.
This professional-looking roadmap template is a great example of how you can use shapes to direct the viewer’s attention to the most important elements of your presentation:
Feel free to incorporate your brand style with different tools and options from the editor, like My Brand Kit which allows you to apply your brand colors.
You can also browse from different fonts and select a custom font style that fits your message and speaks to your audience. Enhance your design using visual aids from Venngage’s library with 3+ million stock photos and 40,000+ icons and illustrations. If you want to swap out an existing icon or image, simply double click it and choose the alternative:
5. Save and share your work
Once you’re done with your design, you can download a high-definition image or PDF file of your roadmap or share it directly with your team using Venngage’s Team Sharing function for easy collaboration.
If you want to use your roadmap in your presentation, you can also download it as a PPTX file and add it directly to your PowerPoint/Google Slides deck. This feature is available to Business users only.
What are the elements of a marketing roadmap?
Marketing roadmaps are a visual representation of your marketing plans. And while most marketers use a calendar or checklist as their roadmap, the format you will use for your marketing roadmap doesn’t matter as long as it provides the best possible means for you to organize your workflow and incorporates the following key elements:
1. Timeframe
Your marketing roadmap should have specific dates that show when campaign activities will be completed. Depending on the duration of your campaign, it can display days, weeks, months, or quarters.
The marketing campaign roadmap above tracks results in quarters but if your marketing team tracks metrics in a different way, feel free to edit it. Or you can customize this other template which displays duration in months:
Or in years, for long-term marketing campaigns:
2. Goals
Of course, you need to define your objective(s) in your roadmap. Your marketing goals should be measurable and time-bound, which is why they are supported by a timeframe and success criteria.
This digital marketing roadmap example shows how you can state your business goals as well as your marketing objectives:
3. Initiatives
A marketing initiative can be a theme, like launching a Christmas-themed packaging design throughout the whole month of December. Initiatives are big efforts that address key focus areas required in the achievement of your goals, and they are a vital part of your marketing roadmap.
4. Schedules
Your marketing roadmap should be able to communicate in chronological order what important events are happening and when they will happen.
5. Activities
From major activities such as product launches, promos, or press releases, to small-time activities like plotting out social media posts, a marketing roadmap’s main purpose is to lay out all your marketing activities in a systematic order.
This is a good example of how you can incorporate that information into your marketing roadmaps:
6. Status
Lastly, your marketing roadmap should convey the status of your goals, initiatives, and activities to indicate the progress you have made since your starting point.
If necessary, you can convey that in a separate document:
What are some examples or business use cases of a marketing roadmap?
There is no one-size-fits-all template when it comes to building a marketing roadmap. There are many different types of marketing roadmaps that you can use and tailor to fit the message that you want to deliver to your target audience. A few examples are:
Project roadmaps
A project roadmap consists of different activities or steps needed to carry out a marketing project such as an event, newsletter, or new website content.
Here is a neatly structured template you can use to list all the things that your marketing project requires:
For more templates of this kind, check out these posts:
Campaign roadmaps
Campaign roadmaps are used to plan out all the projects involved in an integrated marketing campaign. They provide an in-depth view of each project or milestone in your campaign.
Aside from keeping your marketing team aligned, campaign roadmaps are intended to keep cross-functional teams such as IT and development teams, product and sales teams, and customer support informed and updated with project deliverables and dependencies on their end.
Check out this process-oriented marketing roadmap template that you can customize to accommodate the timelines, projects, and teams involved in your campaign:
Custom roadmaps
Marketing roadmaps can be tailored for a variety of use cases. For example, this corporate training roadmap template shows the assessment for each team member’s marketing skills:
Related: 21+ Engaging and Customizable PowerPoint Roadmap Templates
Types of marketing roadmap
Crafting a marketing plan often feels like navigating a dense jungle – exhilarating but potentially overwhelming. That’s where the trusty marketing roadmap comes in, serving as your compass to hack through the undergrowth and reach your marketing goals.
But wait, there’s not just one type of roadmap! Just like there are diverse paths through the jungle, there are distinct types of marketing roadmaps, each tailored to specific needs. Let’s explore some of the most common ones:
1. The strategic roadmap
Think of a strategic roadmap as your high-altitude view, outlining your overarching goals and objectives for the entire marketing landscape. It’s not about nitty-gritty tasks, but rather the big picture – like increasing brand awareness by 20% or boosting lead generation by 30%.
2. The campaign roadmap
Zoom in a bit, and you’ll find the campaign roadmap, which meticulously plans individual marketing campaigns within the broader strategic framework. It details everything from target audience to content strategy, timelines, and budget allocation for each campaign.
3. The project roadmap
Dive even deeper, and you’ll discover the project roadmap, the most granular level of planning. This focuses on specific tasks and deliverables within a single campaign, like creating social media posts, designing different landing pages, or launching email blasts.
4. The channel-specific roadmap
Whether it’s social media, email marketing, or content marketing, each channel deserves its own roadmap. This ensures you’re tailoring your approach and allocating resources effectively for each platform.
Remember, the perfect roadmap isn’t a rigid monolith. It’s a living document that needs to adapt and evolve as your marketing journey unfolds. So, choose the type that best suits your current needs, adapt it as you go, and enjoy the thrilling adventure of conquering your marketing goals!
FAQs about marketing roadmaps
What is a marketing strategy roadmap?
A marketing strategy roadmap is a visualization of strategic marketing initiatives that will help the company achieve its long-term goals for success. It shows your general marketing plan for the company that ties together all the individual plans for specific campaigns, events, and other activities.
This type of roadmap is what you present to key stakeholders or board members to demonstrate how your marketing initiatives and projects contribute to the company’s objectives.
Here is a template with elaborate information fields to help you illustrate your marketing strategy in a way that management teams will understand and be impressed with:
How do you present a marketing roadmap?
Presenting your marketing roadmap is the best way to guarantee its effectiveness. Here are some tips on how you can ace your marketing roadmap presentation:
- Know your audience. Your audience’s focus and interest will be influenced greatly by how your marketing plan will impact them. For marketing teams, their focus will be on collaborative efforts required to achieve your strategic goals, while executive teams will be more interested in how your marketing plan will drive company objectives.
- Prioritize clarity. Your roadmap should clearly visualize your strategy and make it simple and easily comprehensible to everyone in your organization. It should also be able to distinguish between initiatives that are already in the pipeline and those that are still subject to change.
- Go for an attractive design. Although the content of your roadmap is more important than how it looks, a good design can easily grab people’s attention and help you highlight key information to easily get your point across.
In conclusion: A marketing roadmap can help you build a foolproof marketing plan
Marketing roadmaps can help keep your team and the whole company stay in the direction that you want to go, and designing your own roadmap is the first step to solidify your plans and strategies.
Now you’re ready to create a marketing roadmap! Make one using Venngage’s roadmap maker or browse from different marketing roadmap templates here.
