Marketing Checklists: How To Complete Work Right In The First Iteration (Examples & Templates)

Marketing checklist graphic - eggs, butter, flour, bowl and list

Why are marketing checklists important? The answer is simple: They work. Here’s Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto, explaining how effective checklists are for ensuring work gets completed right the first time, every time (using surgery as an example): If checklists are good enough for surgeons to prevent people from dying during operations, then checklists are good enough for marketers to do great work the first time around, too.

Marketing Checklists For Campaigns & Projects

What Is A Marketing Checklist?

A marketing checklist is a documented agenda of the projects or tasks that must be completed to ship high-quality, accurate marketing experiences.

Checklists ensure all requirements are met before calling the work complete.

Marketing Campaign Checklists

As Megan Jeromchek notes in her comprehensive piece covering marketing campaign management:

Marketing campaigns are a collection of activities, events, and content that unify brand experiences and messaging across multiple marketing programs over defined timelines to achieve a specific goal.

Webinar Marketing Campaign Checklist - Landing page (checked), presentation deck (checked), Social media posts, Facebook ads, Promotion email, confirmation email, reminder email, recording email

In short, a marketing campaign is made up of multiple marketing projects. For example, a webinar marketing campaign is often made up of projects like landing pages, presentation decks, emails, social media posts, advertisements, and more. A marketing campaign checklist documents all of these projects to help managers clearly monitor and control campaign progress. A marketing campaign checklist is the complete set of all projects within a single campaign that must be published over a specific period of time.

Marketing Project Checklists

As I wrote about in a complete guide to marketing project management:

Marketing projects are single pieces of work and deliverables that most effectively complement marketing campaigns and programs.

How To Create Your Own Marketing Checklists
  1. Break down your marketing campaign into a list of projects.
  2. List all of the tasks per project type.
  3. Estimate the level of effort you spend on each project task.
  4. Determine which project tasks are necessary (and which ones aren’t).
  5. Establish contributor roles and responsibilities.
  6. Set task due dates and deadlines.
  7. Organize tasks as marketing checklists.

Step 1: Break Down Your Marketing Campaign Into A List Of Projects

Marketing Campaign spreadsheet

The point of creating a marketing campaign checklist is to break down one campaign into all of the projects you’ll create. For example, if CoSchedule’s campaign is an educational course, our team may need to create the following content projects to make sure the campaign successfully influences our marketing goals:

In this example, you see how a large campaign breaks down into many pieces of content projects. You will do the same thing for your highest-priority campaign. Download the Marketing Campaign Checklist spreadsheet template (located after the introduction of this page): Column A already has some content ideas listed to help you kick-start your campaign planning process. Tweak as you see fit and add your own content ideas. You’ll note column A is split into four distinct sections: Project Prep, Pre-Promotion, Launch, and Post Launch. Often, this helps with campaign timeline management because you know which pieces need to be completed before others. Again, if you find these categories don’t apply to your campaign, tweak the template as you see fit. Add your project ideas to column A.

Step 2: List All Of The Tasks Per Project Type

Step 3: Estimate The Level Of Effort You Spend On Each Project Task

Marketing task checklist spreadsheet

When you’ve executed a checklist enough times (whether writing a blog post or something else), you start to roughly understand how long each task in that process takes. But accurately estimating time for marketing tasks can still be difficult. So, what’s the solution? Try tracking your time using a time-tracking app. Toggl and Harvest are two quality options. The way they work is simple: Press “start” to begin tracking time when you start a task, and then press pause when you take a break or wrap it up. Then, track your time for how long all those tasks take. You can do this with a simple spreadsheet that looks something like this: It doesn’t need to be anything complicated. Just list your projects and how much time you spent on each task. Two columns could be enough to serve this purpose (and the easier you make things, the more likely you are to actually stick with it). In the future, this will help you understand how long they take more accurately. I find it’s easiest to think of time spent in days. How many days does it take to complete each specific task? From there, you can determine how long it will actually take to complete the entire checklist from start to finish.

Step 4: Determine Which Project Tasks Are Necessary (& Which Ones Aren’t)

Step 5: Establish Contributor Roles & Responsibilities

Levels of marketing responsibility - management (top), strategy (middle), execution (bottom)

It’s time to understand who will help you complete the tasks in the content project checklist:

Here’s an example of what the blog post checklist mentioned earlier might look like with assignees added: In some cases, it might be obvious who in your marketing department is responsible for a specific task. But what do you do when it’s not clear, and what do you do about tasks that could be delegated? How you delegate tasks will depend on your marketing team’s structure, which roles you have on staff, and your number of marketing employees. While this makes it challenging to generalize who might do what at different levels of seniority, a basic hierarchy of responsibility might look like this: However, this simple, traditional breakdown of responsibility isn’t without problems. A better way to structure and delegate tasks is to align team members’ strengths and experiences with the most impactful tasks they can take on. Since this one project may not be the only thing each team member is working on, that doesn’t necessarily mean steps will be completed at the exact time the previous one is finished.

Step 6: Set Task Due Dates & Deadlines

2 ways to organize marketing task checklists - start with project start date, end with project ship date OR start project ship date, work backward to project start date

Use those time estimates to map out realistic deadlines for every task. That way, checklist contributors will know how much time in their day to allocate to the project and which day of the week their tasks are due.

Deadlines Relative To Project Publish Date

Deadlines Relative To Project Start Date

Step 7: Organize Tasks As Marketing Checklists

Once you have your tasks mapped out, it’s time to build them into actual checklists. There are a lot of different ways you can create marketing checklists. You can build checklists with Google Docs (which also integrates with CoSchedule Marketing Suite and Marketing Calendar). Marketing checklist outline on Google DocsYou can build your marketing checklists with the spreadsheet-based checklist template you can download in the introduction of this article. Marketing checklistsYou can also build marketing checklists for your projects with Task Templates in CoSchedule Marketing Suite or Marketing Calendar. This feature is designed specifically for marketing use cases, making building marketing checklists and automating workflows easy. Task template - blog post checklist

How To Create Marketing Checklists In CoSchedule Marketing Suite

With Task Templates in CoSchedule Marketing Suite, you can create easy checklist templates to set up and manage your marketing workflows within one marketing software suite. When you create a new Task Template, you’ll be given the option to create a Task Template with dates relative to the project start date or the project ship date: Task template window - how would you like to build your workflow?Give your Task Template a name and add tasks. This will create a simple marketing checklist. Blog post checklistYou can also schedule due dates and add assignees to each task in your checklist: Blog post checklist with due dates for each taskContinue until you’ve created a checklist with every task, deadline, and assignee in the process. Then, when you add projects to CoSchedule Marketing Suite, you can apply the appropriate Task Template to keep your checklist management consistent.

6 Examples Of Marketing Checklists

A checklist is a power move – it guarantees every project is done correctly the first time, every time. Below are a series of checklists in a variety of marketing areas. So, whether you’re a writer, designer, or project manager, there’s something useful for you here. Remember, these are just a starting point, so add, delete, or edit any task to make it work for you.

1. Marketing Plan Checklist

Recommended Reading: Who Is Responsible For Marketing Strategy? Roles & Skills Overview

2. Content Marketing Checklist

3. Social Media Checklist

4. Blog Post Checklist

Core keyword highlighted in yellow with secondary keywords highlighted in red

Writing a blog post and looking for a place to start? Check off the following tasks to lay the foundation for an awesome blog post:

Pro tip: Use AnswerThePublic or Ahrefs to visualize search questions and find trending keywords.

5. On-Page SEO Checklist

Use Headline Studio from CoSchedule to create SEO-boosted headlines for free.

Sections organized by header tags

  1. Compress an image using Compressor.io
  2. Rename the image file name to include core or secondary keywords
  3. Add a keyword-focused Alt Text
  4. Write a detailed description for the image caption

6. Proofreading & Editing Checklist