Whether you’re just dipping your toes into digital marketing or have been leading marketing initiatives for the longest time, using marketing roadmaps can contribute immensely to the success of your marketing efforts.
Not only does a marketing roadmap make it easier for you and your team to set your goals, organize your tasks, and finish your project on time, but it also helps you create a long-term plan of how you will make your product or service marketable and profitable.
In this article, you will find out what exactly is a marketing roadmap and how to use it to keep your focus and stay organized. You’ll also be introduced to different marketing roadmap templates and examples that you can easily customize using Venngage’s Roadmap Maker.
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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.
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:
- 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:
- 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:
- 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.
- Schedules
Your marketing roadmap should be able to communicate in chronological order what important events are happening and when they will happen.
- 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:
- 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:
- https://venngage.com/blog/inspiration-marketing-product-roadmap-templates/
- https://venngage.com/blog/product-roadmap/
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
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.
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.