Free Content Marketing Plan Templates, Examples, and Samples

Download Content Marketing Planning Template

Microsoft Excel | Microsoft Word | Google Sheets | Adobe PDF | Smartsheet

Use this content marketing planning template to define your marketing plan’s objectives. Enter the content theme, review information, mapping, workflow, and guidelines. You can also add campaign goals, so that it’s clear from the get-go what you hope to achieve with the content marketing plan. Plus, use the built-in editorial calendar feature to keep team members aware of key dates and details of your marketing campaign.

Find more tips and solutions for content marketing plans by reading “The 61 Best Free Content Marketing Templates to Drive Performance” and our content marketing project management toolkit.

Download Content Marketing Plan Example

Microsoft Excel | Microsoft Word | Google Sheets | Adobe PDF

Use this pre-filled content marketing plan example template to proactively track the content strategy of your marketing plan. We’ve provided sample text, but you can edit the document with the details for your specific content marketing plan. This all-in-one content marketing plan template will help keep stakeholders up-to-date on content status and enable team members to hit every milestone and deadline.

Download One-Page Content Marketing Plan

Microsoft Excel | Microsoft Word | Adobe PDF | Google Docs | Smartsheet

Use this single-page content marketing plan as a springboard to define content categories and develop an action plan for each campaign component. This brief template focuses on business objectives, the problem(s) and solution(s), as well as your competitive advantage, target market, marketing strategy, and objectives and financial requirements. Enter action plan details for specific channels, as well as for performance and results metrics to ensure your plan will be effective.

Download Content Marketing Creative Brief Checklist Template 

Microsoft Excel | Microsoft Word | Adobe PDF

Use this basic content marketing creative brief checklist to ensure that you account for all of the marketing content strategy steps. Describe the problem your marketing plan will solve, and how you will communicate the solution to your audience. This template is the perfect tool to maintain a continuous brand voice and content style that aligns with your content marketing campaign.

Download Social Media Content Marketing Plan Template

Microsoft Excel | Google Sheets | Adobe PDF

Plan your social media content marketing campaign goals, call to action (CTA), social media platforms, digital asset management, and promotional plan with this easy-to-use social media content marketing plan template. Enter campaign calendar details (start and end dates, pre-campaign promotional release dates, peak dates, and follow-up post dates), and keep tabs on progress with the metrics section (e.g., email addresses gathered, click-throughs, user-generated content subs, etc.). Cover every detail in your social media content marketing plan with this comprehensive, social media-specific content planning template.

Download Content Marketing Plan Inventory Template

Microsoft Excel | Google Sheets

This content marketing plan inventory template allows you to organize, plan, prioritize, and track key performance indicators (KPIs) for all online marketing content, so that you can easily leverage existing assets and resources. This template offers a streamlined tool to plan, implement, track, and measure the results of all facets of your marketing plan’s site-specific inventory. List site content, Google Analytics results, keyword and search data, and status (e.g., good, needs update, remove) to ensure that your web content is fresh, effective, and relevant.

Download Buyer Persona Marketing Content Template

Microsoft Word | Adobe PDF

Get to know how your ideal customer’s goals and motivations, values and work methods, and characteristics apply to your product with this target-rich buyer persona marketing content template. Add persona information (persona name, job title, fictional company, age, quotation) to better understand your ideal buyer, and add a photo to bring your ideal customers — and their spend habits — to life.

Download Content Marketing Mapping Template

Microsoft Excel | Microsoft Word | Adobe PDF  | Smartsheet

Use this content marketing mapping template to align your buyer personas’ needs with your marketing content creation. Perform this step to ensure that your deliverables are on-target and lead to increased sales. Define personas’ problems/pain points, questions, content ideas, and CTAs. Plus, map persona stages (awareness, interest, desire, and action) to needs in order to gauge the effectiveness of planned marketing content.

Download Blog Editorial Content Calendar Template

Microsoft Excel | Google Sheets | Smartsheet

Marketers and content managers can use this month-by-month blog editorial content calendar to track blog-specific content, such as each post’s date, topic, and related events. Add additional notes for planned posts to help produce and distribute content development to your organization’s key target market. 

For more on creating effective blog posts, see “Tools and Advice for Creating an Effective Blog Strategy and Plan.”

Download Email Content Marketing Planning Template

Microsoft Excel | Google Sheets

This email content marketing planning template is ideal for any organization, as it comprehensively captures your email marketing campaign planning and tracking details. Enter email-related information, including date sent, content topic, email title, subject line, content, images, link, days until subscription, and related comments to successfully plan and manage an email marketing campaign.

Download Content Marketing Distribution Plan Template

Microsoft Excel | Microsoft Word | Adobe PDF

Use this template to facilitate content distribution planning with an item-by-item checklist that accounts for everything in your content marketing plan. There are sections for social media, paid media, influencers, outreach in online communities, mobile messaging, and repurposed content.

Download Content Marketing Plan Strategy Template

Microsoft Excel | Microsoft Word | Adobe PDF

Accurately define and develop an effective marketing strategy with this easy-to-use, goal-defining and achieving content marketing plan strategy template. This template helps marketing team members assess the lifecycle stage (awareness, consideration, purchase, retention) of their ideal customer and compare it to a proposed content marketing plan. Use SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals to specify objectives, establish a strategy to meet them, and list the KPIs.

Download Marketing Content Plan Sample Template

Microsoft Excel | Google Sheets

Use this marketing content plan sample template with editable example text to organize and prioritize content by theme and necessary action. Enter the theme, summary information, unique angle, target audience, content type, and main goal of the content. This unique template offers columns to note benefit(s), cost, score, priority, and decision(s), which makes it easy to prioritize content.

Download Content Marketing Plan Outline Template

Microsoft Excel | Adobe PDF | Google Sheets

Use this pre-built content marketing plan outline template to clearly define your marketing campaign’s goals and initiatives by focusing on the service offerings it provides for your target audience. Enter your marketing plan’s individual services, price, place, promotion, process, people, and physical evidence details to help make your content marketing plan a reality.

The best marketing teams know the importance of effective campaign management, consistent creative operations, and powerful event logistics -- and Smartsheet helps you deliver on all three so you can be more effective and achieve more. 

The Smartsheet platform makes it easy to plan, capture, manage, and report on work from anywhere, helping your team be more effective and get more done. Report on key metrics and get real-time visibility into work as it happens with roll-up reports, dashboards, and automated workflows built to keep your team connected and informed.

When teams have clarity into the work getting done, there’s no telling how much more they can accomplish in the same amount of time. Try Smartsheet for free, today.