Marketing Campaign Template
A single campaign's board (brief, production, review, live, wrap-up), built for one marketing team running one campaign end to end, not for coordinating multiple channels or departments.
One campaign, five stages, one owner per card, not a shared spreadsheet three people are editing at once.
Why campaign trackers turn into stale spreadsheets
Most marketing teams start a campaign with a clean spreadsheet or a fresh doc, and both are unreadable by the third week. The pattern repeats across teams because the underlying causes are structural, not a discipline problem.
The brief and the production work live in different places. The brief is a doc, the assets are in a drive folder, the approvals are in email threads. By the time the campaign is live, reconstructing what was actually agreed takes longer than it should.
Nothing marks when a piece is actually approved. A banner gets marked "done" by the designer and "not done" by the brand reviewer, and both are right by their own definition, because nobody wrote down what "done" means for this campaign.
The wrap-up never happens. The campaign goes live, everyone moves to the next thing, and the spend-versus-result comparison that would improve the next campaign doesn't get written because there's no column that asks for it.
The next campaign starts from a blank page. Without a record of what worked last time, which subject line, which offer, which channel, each new campaign re-learns the same lessons the previous one already paid for.
None of this means the team is disorganised. A campaign is genuinely five different kinds of work: briefing, producing, approving, running, and reviewing, and most trackers only handle one or two of those well. A board built around all five stages holds the campaign together end to end.
The structure, and why each part is there
Every asset traces back to a single brief card on the same board, so "why does this banner say that" has a two-click answer instead of a search through old emails.
A WIP limit on how many assets are in production at once. Campaigns with twelve half-finished assets ship weaker work than campaigns with four finished ones, and that's really the whole case for a WIP limit in one sentence: fewer things moving at once means each one actually gets finished.
A card only leaves review once whoever owns approval, brand, legal, the campaign lead, has actually moved it. No more "done" meaning three different things to three people.
Once an asset is live, the card says so and stays visible until wrap-up, rather than disappearing off the bottom of a spreadsheet nobody scrolls to.
A standing card for spend versus result, so the comparison gets written while the numbers are still fresh rather than being reconstructed for the next campaign kickoff.
A wiki page attached to the campaign records why the offer changed or the send date moved, with page history, so that reasoning outlives the person who made the call. It's a small habit, but it's the difference between a new hire asking "why does this campaign work this way" and actually getting an answer.
A request to add a banner or extend the offer by two days lands in triage rather than getting slotted straight into production, where it would jump the queue ahead of assets already in flight.
The production timeline is built against who's actually available on the design and copy side, leave included, rather than an idealised week where everyone has full days free for this campaign alone.
What counts as an approved asset, final copy signed off, legal cleared, brand-checked, gets written down once, before the first banner is drafted, rather than settled ad hoc for each asset as it moves through review.
How to use it
- 01Start a workspace. A sample campaign is already on the board when you open it, so you can see the five stages working before adding real assets. Free for up to five people, permanently.
- 02Write the brief as the first card, not as a separate document. Every asset card links back to it, so approvals reference a fixed target instead of a moving one.
- 03Cap the production column below what feels comfortable. Three or four assets in progress at once is usually enough for a small team; more than that and everything slows down together.
- 04Assign one approver per review card. A card with two approvers and no order between them is how "done" ends up meaning different things to different people.
- 05Put the wrap-up card on the board before the campaign goes live, not after. It's far more likely to get filled in if it's already sitting there waiting.
- 06Keep the wiki page open while you write the wrap-up. Recording what the team would do differently next time takes two extra minutes and saves the next campaign from re-learning the same thing.
- 07Reuse the brief format for the next campaign instead of starting fresh. A brief that names channel, offer, audience and success metric every time makes campaigns comparable to each other, which the wrap-up column depends on.
None of this requires a specialised tool. Five columns and a WIP limit will work anywhere. It's written down here because the wrap-up column is the one most campaigns skip, and it's usually the most useful column on the board. A campaign that ends without one is a campaign the next one can't learn from.
- A brief that lives on the board beats a brief in a doc nobody reopens
- One approver per card ends the argument about what "done" means
- A wrap-up column placed before launch is far more likely to get filled in than one added after
Common questions
One campaign per board is the intent: brief through wrap-up for a single push. Running several campaigns is just several boards; nothing about the structure changes, and the Free plan covers up to two projects at a time.
Yes. Columns, limits and approvers are all editable. Some teams add a "scheduling" column between production and live; others merge review into production. The five stages here are a starting point, not a rule.
It tracks hours logged against tasks, not activity. There are no screenshots, no keystroke logging and no activity tracking. Logging time takes about five seconds and produces a record of what was worked on, not how it was worked on.
Yes. Marketing gets its own set of templates, campaigns, content calendars and launch checklists among them, on the same subscription as engineering, HR and operations. A campaign board and a content calendar can run side by side without stepping on each other.
This template assumes one team running one push, whichever channels it touches. If the work is really about coordinating several channels as separate workstreams toward a shared goal, SEO, paid, social and content all at once, the digital marketing project template is the closer fit.
Related pages
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