Having a successful marketing campaign involves the coordination of many different departments. Marketing plans manage research, design and copywriting, digital and print production, plus so much more. These separate departments all have to work together, sticking to a shared schedule and budget.

Managing all those marketing assets is challenging. Get a headstart on your next marketing project by using these 10 free marketing templates for Excel and Word. They’ll help you from the planning stage and budgeting to tracking your campaign to ensure you stay on schedule and within your budget. We have dozens of free project management templates to choose from. Here’s a selection of marketing-related templates.

1. Marketing Plan Template

Organize the phases of your marketing plan by downloading our free marketing plan template for Word. Our free marketing plan template gives you a place to define your strategy and how you intend to implement it over the month, quarter or year.

You can use the marketing plan template to highlight your goals and current position in the market. Use it to schedule tasks over a timeline with start and end dates, track KPIs and much more. A marketing plan offers a high-level view of the marketing campaign and helps you market your brand, product or service more effectively.

Use our free template to build a framework for your marketing plan within the context of the potential customers you want to target. It helps you reduce risk and increase the chances that your marketing will be successful.

2. Marketing Campaign Template

Using our free marketing campaign template will help you plan how you introduce your product or service across multiple platforms. The template helps you use market research to better map out a product or service launch and communicate the plan to everyone on your marketing team.

You can use the template to organize everything you need for a successful marketing campaign including the goals of the marketing campaign, who you’re going to target, the media plan and how you’ll execute it. Not only that, but you have the tools to keep track of the marketing campaign, including collecting key performance indicators (KPIs).

Use our free marketing campaign template when the product or service you created is done but hasn’t launched. Our free marketing campaign template will help you successfully promote the product or service, connecting with your target audience. See your plan on our kanban board, which visualizes the workflow and gives marketing managers visibility into their team’s process. If they see issues, they can quickly reallocate resources to keep work moving forward uninterrupted. Teams can manage their backlog and collaboratively plan sprints.

3. Marketing Budget Template

Marketing costs money, but you don’t have unlimited funds. That’s why you need our free marketing budget template for Excel. It ensures you get a good return on your investment and don’t overspend on your marketing campaign.

The free marketing budget template outlines the financial investments related to your marketing project broken up by year or quarter. It helps you collect your costs, from paid advertising and sponsored web content to marketing personnel, software and more.

Using a marketing budget template goes hand-in-glove with the marketing plan, as it’s an integral part of the larger marketing plan. It helps you forecast what you need to spend to deliver a successful marketing campaign.

4. Marketing Calendar Template

Capture important dates in an easy-to-read format to make sure you don’t miss deadlines, meetings and more with our free marketing calendar template for Excel. Use the free template to view your marketing campaigns by the month, quarterly or over the course of a year.

Marketing calendars are essential pieces to a larger marketing plan. Marketing plans can be complicated, whereas a marketing calendar is easy to read at a glance to make sure you’re meeting the necessary milestones.

A marketing calendar template is also a great tool for communication with stakeholders. They don’t need to get into the weeds of your marketing campaign. They’re interested in your progress and your schedule, both of which can be tracked on a marketing calendar template.

5. Creative Brief Template

Marketing, advertising and design projects require project briefs just as construction, manufacturing or engineering projects do. Only they’re not called project briefs, they’re called creative briefs. If you’re managing one of these projects, then you need our free creative brief template for Word.

The creative brief is used to plan the project, define its objectives and keep everyone involved clear on what the project is about. It’s created at the beginning of the project but referred to throughout the project life cycle as a roadmap to keep everyone working together.

Our free creative brief template details the target audience, your competitors in the marketplace, what the key message is and how it should be delivered plus more. It’s the rule by which you measure the project requirements to ensure that you’re keeping to them.

6. Event Plan Template

Whether it’s a tradeshow, corporate retreat or networking party, events are projects and they need to be planned to be successful. Our free event plan template for Excel lays out everything you need to do and helps you avoid any glitches that will negatively impact your event.

You’ll find places to list the tasks you need to complete to have the event, including the resources you need to execute that work. Every task will have an owner, an estimated time it’ll take to complete and a checklist to mark if it’s been started and to note when completed.

This is your first step to scheduling your event and figuring out a feasible timetable to get everything ready. The more accurately you can forecast the amount of time it’ll take to prepare for the event, the less likely you’ll miss deadlines and threaten the success of the event.

7. Action Items Template

We’ve talked a lot about planning for campaigns or events, but we haven’t covered how you’ll go about accomplishing your goals. Our free action items template for Excel will help you outline the steps you have to take to successfully complete that marketing plan.

Action items are the steps you have to take to implement your marketing plan. In other words, they’re the activities or tasks that’ll carry the project over the finish line in time. This helps you figure out how you’re going to get the marketing project work done.

Once you have the action items laid out, you can then begin to assign them to the marketing team. Without first knowing what the action items for the marketing project are, it would be impossible to fully plan for either a small or larger project.

8. Project Timeline Template

All marketing initiatives have a deadline that you have to align with a product launch or campaign. Whatever the marketing project is, without a schedule you’ll never get it done in time. You can quickly schedule your marketing push with our free project timeline template for Excel.

A timeline is a visual tool to see your entire marketing campaign in one place. It helps you see when tasks need to be completed, which in turn can make you allocate resources more wisely. It’s also the backbone of any thorough marketing schedule.

When you’re done filling out our free project timeline template, you’ll see where your major deliverables and milestones are and have a better idea of how much the project will cost and the resources you’ll need to complete it.

9. Project Task Tracker Template

Of course, all of this planning and scheduling is for nothing if you’re unable to track the work as your marketing team is executing it. That’s why you need the free project task tracker template for Excel to know if your actual progress is keeping up with your planned progress.

Having a project task tracker template means you have the tools to see if you’re keeping to your schedule. If you’re not, then you have the opportunity to get back on track before it’s too late. Best of all, you can follow the task throughout the marketing project life cycle, from planning through execution.

Our free project task tracker lets you list all your tasks and describe them. You can add any dependent tasks that need to be done before, after or during. Plus, you can add the marketing team members assigned to that task. Then add priority, start and end dates, the actual end date and whether the status is opened or closed to keep track of your tasks.

10. Cost-Benefit Analysis Template

Not all marketing ideas are good ones. To know which to follow through on and which to skip you need to figure out if the benefit is greater than the cost of implementing the campaign. To do that, use our free cost-benefit analysis template for Excel.

Cost-benefit analysis works by comparing what you expect to pay against the benefits or opportunities you’ll get from the marketing project. It’s a way to determine if the investment is worth the return in terms of costs.

Using our free cost-benefit analysis template allows marketing executives to look at data when figuring out if the marketing push is worth the price they’ll be paying. Having this knowledge is a powerful tool for keeping your company financially viable.

Go Beyond Templates With ProjectManager

Download the above free marketing templates and you’ll be able to better manage your campaigns. However, templates can only take you so far. They are, after all, static documents. If you need to change anything, it’s time-consuming, and time shouldn’t be wasted in business. ProjectManager is online software that does what the free templates do and more, plus it does it in real time so you have more insight.

Use the Tools You Want to Collaborate

One thing templates can do is help you collaborate. You can’t have multiple marketing teams working on the same document or allow different versions to float around. Our software has multiple project views, all of which are updated in real time so you’re always working on the most current version. Managers can play on robust Gantt charts with timelines that can link dependencies, add milestones and set a baseline to track planned vs. actual effort in real time. Design teams can use kanban boards for a visual workflow and other teams can use task lists or calendars.

See How You’re Doing in Real Time

The task track template requires that you add to the document. Our real-time dashboard tracks the marketing project automatically. There’s no setup required as in competitors’ lightweight products. Our live dashboard collects data and displays it in colorful graphs giving you a high-level view of your costs, workload and more. We even have customizable reports for more detail, and they’re easy to share to update stakeholders.

Marketing teams, be they in copy, design or another department, need to collaborate across tools. Our collaborative platform allows them to comment at the task level, share files and tag anyone on the project team. Real-time communication is facilitated by email notifications and alerts in the tool so you don’t have to leave your work to stay in touch with team members in different departments or locations.

ProjectManager is award-winning software that empowers teams to work better together and gives managers the tools they need to plan, manage and track work in real time. Use task, resource and risk management features to further drive successful projects. Join teams at businesses as varied as Avis, Nestle and Siemens who use our software. Get started with ProjectManager today for free.