3 Great, Free templates for Social Media Campaign Planning

“If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants”

- Isaac Newton in a letter to Robert Hooke

Good social media and marketing campaigns start with planning. The time spent researching the landscape, conceptualizing desired results, defining SMART goals, making decisions, and documenting your roadmap is invaluable. Before every project I take the time to create a marketing plan that everyone involved can use as a guide and reference through-out a campaign.

  But planning is time-consuming. Often repetitive. And occasionally, when you’ve done something many times (or at least feel like you have), planning feels unnecessary. This is one way errors happen - familiarity leads to complacency, complacency leads to laziness, and laziness leads to someone forgetting to regsister a domain name.

To help me with my projects, I have templatized the market and editorial planning process in a series of spreadsheets. These spreadsheets have been Frankensteined from other templates I have found on the web and then molted together to meet my individual needs. These temaplates act as a checklists to make sure I’ve taken care of all the major points of planning, ensuring consistent results. When completed they also become a valueable asset that communicates strategy and tactics in a clear, concise, and actionable manner.

Here are three great templates I have found that I use in my own social media & digital marketing planning.

Smart Insights’s Free digital marketing plan template

One of the best templates I’ve found so far is Smart Insights’s Free digital marketing plan template. The work book / checklist format makes it easy to create a best-practices marketing plan for your project. What’s important is to FILL OUT THE PLAN. Don’t worry if not everything in the document applies to your project - if it doesn’t fit just mark it “N/A” and keep going. Go through the document, thoughtfully consider each aspect of the plan, and FILL IN YOUR ANSWERS! Congratulations - you have a marketing plan!

The Army’s Five day social media strategy template

The Army has a great Five day social media strategy template. The Army sums it up in their typically consice, effective manner: “This document gives you and your social media team the opportunity to plan your social media coverage in advance. It also allows your team to evaluate the success of your social media campaign.” 

Google Doc’s Project Management Spreadsheet

I love 37 Signals’s Basecamp, but Google Doc’s Project Management Spreadsheet is free and covers all the basics of planning out a project, and running a campaign is a project. Again, this template is only useful if you FILL IT OUT and USE IT. 

If you have awesome templates you use, let me know in the comments.

Comments

[Web design Toronto]

An instructive post. People to really know who they want to reach and why or else, they'll have no way to know what they're trying to achieve. People need to hear this and have it drilled in their brains..
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