A marketing roadmap to a marketing manage r is like a recipe for a chef—undeniably essential for detailing the ingredients and steps required for success.
But what translates to marketing success?
Most companies define marketing success by looking at wildly different outcomes. Some may expect the marketing team to deliver revenue outcomes or assist sales to drive revenue or growth.
Meanwhile, another company may look at metrics such as website traffic, social media interactions, brand awareness, marketing qualified leads, etc.
A marketing roadmap dissolves the gap between ideation and action by helping marketers to track progress. It streamlines the way the marketing teams function. It helps team members to understand what they’re accountable for in the larger context.
Use this guide to leverage a marketing strategy roadmap that matches your organization’s annual strategy and business objectives.
What is a Marketing Roadmap?
A marketing roadmap is a document that visually demonstrates your marketing strategy—and how your marketing initiatives will evolve.
View it as a timeline for completing your marketing goals . Like any other roadmap, you include a starting point (start date), way-markers ( project milestones), and an endpoint (deadline).
In terms of the marketing process, you plot all your digital marketing efforts against a set timeframe.
Then, you share this marketing roadmap with your executive team, marketing team, and other key stakeholders to get feedback, buy-in, and guidance on your strategic marketing initiatives.
What Are the Benefits of a Marketing Roadmap?
Want to complete your project on spec, in time, and alignment with your company’s objectives?
Try to create a marketing roadmap, also known as a strategy roadmap.
A marketing roadmap—or, in layman’s terms, a marketing plan—makes it simpler for your marketing team to know:
- What marketing activities to do
- How to achieve marketing goals
- When to evaluate the progress of current tasks
And so on.
Other benefits of a marketing roadmap include:
- Visualizes how each marketing initiative contributes to broader company goals so that your efforts are focused on the right metrics
- Provides a clear overview of all planned marketing activities, such as campaigns, content creation, and events, and breaks down what needs to be done and when
- Helps set specific marketing goals and map out the steps to achieve them, allowing you to measure progress effectively and make adjustments
- Enables managers to allocate resources such as budget, time, and manpower so that it’s not too late to tackle bottlenecks or resource constraints
- Includes timelines and milestones for each activity to manage deadlines and keep the team on schedule
- Enables frictionless collaboration among team members and stakeholders and promotes a shared understanding of the marketing plan
Who Can Use a Marketing Roadmap?
Marketing roadmaps aren’t just for marketing managers or executives. The truth is, any professional who has a role in strategizing, planning, executing, or evaluating marketing campaigns can benefit from using a marketing roadmap. Here’s a closer look:
Marketing Managers: This is the most conventional user of a marketing roadmap. Managers can utilize the roadmap to set goals, track timelines, allocate resources and relay current progress to stakeholders.
Content Creators: Writers, graphic designers, videographers can use the marketing roadmap to align their work with the larger marketing plan, ensuring their creative efforts support identified goals.
Social Media Managers: The role involves coordinating several campaigns across multiple platforms. A marketing roadmap can help these professionals schedule content, track engagement, and measure the success of various campaigns.
SEO Specialists: They can use a roadmap to outline their keyword strategies, track SEO goals , and present the growth in site’s search rankings over time.
PR Professionals: A marketing roadmap can assist PR professionals in scheduling press releases and tracking media outreach.
Product Managers: For those about to launch a new product or feature, a marketing roadmap can be instrumental in aligning all the teams involved in the launch and tracking tasks leading up to it.
Sales Teams: Sales professionals can use marketing roadmaps to understand when new leads from marketing campaigns are expected, allowing better prospecting and lead follow-ups.
In essence, a well-structured marketing roadmap can streamline operational procedures and increase productivity for all roles linked to a company’s marketing efforts.
Components of a Marketing Roadmap
Every marketing roadmap looks different—depending on who makes it. The marketing manager uses components that best suit their working style to create a marketing template customized to their needs.
That said, successful marketing roadmaps share a few common components:
- Timeframe: Includes the start and end dates to demonstrate when marketing activities will be completed; use a time scale such as days, weeks, months, etc., to make your marketing roadmap more definite
- Goals: Indicates measurable and time-bound business objectives in the format of a marketing roadmap to highlight what to achieve along with the KPIs for success
- Initiatives: Provides strategic direction into project planning , a Kanban board, or a Gantt chart. Regardless of your chosen format, creating a marketing roadmaps follows a defined process.
Make one by following these steps:
Step 1: Assess at the basic level
Understand what you need to plan first. Ask:
- Am I using the roadmap for a project such as a single blog post, website launch, etc.?
- Will I use it for a full-fledged campaign comprising multiple tasks, activities, and sub-projects?
- Am I using it to organize my annual strategy?
Step 2: Start thinking about the steps involved
It’s time to brainstorm and break down the larger tasks into smaller, more achievable chunks. Ask:
- Which elements, principles, and tasks will I need to break into smaller parts?
- What steps are needed to complete the deliverables?
- Which benchmarks should I use to track progress?
- Which tasks demand more coordination for seamless execution?
Step 3: Get going on the timelines
The next step is to add a timeline to your initiatives.
Use any of the following metrics to add a realistic time component to your goals:
- Three-point estimating refers to the average of your best-case, average, and worst-case project time estimate
- Bottom-up estimating requires you to get time estimates from the involved teams and add them together
- Analogous estimating means estimating a project’s time depending on time taken during similar projects
- Parametric estimating refers to basing an estimate on internal or external reports as well as data
Step 4: Map your projects and tasks in your favorite project management software
If you haven’t yet zeroed in on a project management tool, the ClickUp is a worthy choice. ClickUp offers all the features needed to create robust marketing roadmaps for an integrated marketing campaign!
Here are a few ClickUp features that’ll enhance your marketing operations:
- ClickUp provides AI-powered assistance: Writing and crafting marketing strategies and tasks can be time-consuming. ClickUp Brain . Building a separate portfolio roadmap helps you keep tabs on the entire project.
If you are unsure how and where to get started, try ClickUp’s Free Marketing Plan Templates and optimize your marketing projects—from the get-go. A marketing initiative must leverage the strengths of cross-functional teams and achieve KPIs for marketing success— ClickUp helps you deliver on this promise for all the projects. Try a demo and see for yourself!